An unfinished chronicle of the history of things.
Short essays on single milestones across nineteen categories — one new post per category per week. Written, researched, and illustrated end to end, then read aloud.
01
Shoes
Ten thousand years of footwear, from Fort Rock sagebrush sandals to carbon-plate supershoes.
02
Timepieces
From shadow on sand to atomic clocks — humanity's chase of ever-more-precise time.
Latest GPS time: the satellite clock that runs wrong on purpose
03
Bridges
Civil engineering's most dramatic form — log across a stream to mile-long cable-stayed mega-structures, with a spectacular collapse or two along the way.
Latest Galloping Gertie, or what the wind does to an airfoil
04
Locks & Keys
Six thousand years of mechanisms for excluding people, with one of history's best rivalries at its centre.
Latest The hands-free deadbolt, or what ultra-wideband did to the front door
05
Maps
Ten thousand years of humans drawing the world — from Babylonian clay tablets to satellite imagery.
Latest MapQuest, then Google Maps: the web learns where it is
06
Phones
A 150-year story: from Bell shouting at Watson to foldable AI-powered supercomputers in a pocket.
07
Money
From cowrie shells to Bitcoin — every century has a moment it redefined what money is.
Latest One card, many places, pay later: the Diners Club, 1950
08
Writing Systems
Every way humans have figured out how to freeze speech onto a surface — cuneiform to Unicode.
Latest Sholes's typewriter: the machine that froze the alphabet
09
Video Games
Arcade, console, PC, handheld, mobile — all one medium, from OXO on the EDSAC to the handheld revival.
Latest The original Xbox, or how Microsoft lost four billion dollars and still won
10
Computing
From pebbles in sand trays to the machines that now hold the world together — told one milestone at a time.
Latest Intel 4004: the calculator deal that built the first microprocessor
11
AI
The long road to machines that reason — from Aristotle's syllogisms to today's frontier models.
Latest Hidden Markov models, 1989: probability beats the rule books
12
Cryptography
The long argument between hiding things and finding things — Caesar cipher to post-quantum standards.
Latest Elliptic curve cryptography, or how a factoring attack became the internet's key
13
Code Editors
Every program that other programs are written in — TECO to Cursor.
Latest The Language Server Protocol, or how Microsoft solved an infinite grid
14
Software Architecture
The evolving answer to 'how do we organize code at scale?' — structured programming to LLM orchestration.
15
Programming Languages
How humans learned to talk to machines — starting with Ada Lovelace writing instructions for a machine that didn't exist yet.
16
Cars
From Cugnot's steam fardier to self-driving electric vehicles — two and a half centuries of the machine that reshaped how humans live, work, and move.
17
Coffee
From wild Ethiopian berries to Yemeni qahveh khanehs to the espresso machine — six centuries of the drink that wired the modern world.
Latest Bezzera's portafilter and the machine that gave espresso its name
18
Sports
From Neolithic wrestling pits to the modern Olympic stadium — how humans turned play into organised competition, and competition into civilisation.
Latest The last joust: how a broken lance ended a king and a sport
19
Motorcycles
From Roper's steam velocipede to the Honda CB750 superbike — the machine that stayed upright through physics and rewired the freedom of the open road.