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 Apple Watch, 2015: the wristwatch that became a medical device
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.
04
Locks & Keys
Six thousand years of mechanisms for excluding people, with one of history's best rivalries at its centre.
Latest SPG Keyless, or the hotel room that opened without a card
05
Maps
Ten thousand years of humans drawing the world — from Babylonian clay tablets to satellite imagery.
06
Phones
A 150-year story: from Bell shouting at Watson to foldable AI-powered supercomputers in a pocket.
Latest The Nokia 2110, or how a dead guitarist's exercise became a ringtone
08
Writing Systems
Every way humans have figured out how to freeze speech onto a surface — cuneiform to Unicode.
Latest ASCII: the seven-bit truce that taught computers to speak
09
Video Games
Arcade, console, PC, handheld, mobile — all one medium, from OXO on the EDSAC to the handheld revival.
10
Computing
From pebbles in sand trays to the machines that now hold the world together — told one milestone at a time.
11
AI
The long road to machines that reason — from Aristotle's syllogisms to today's frontier models.
Latest Deep Blue beats Kasparov: the night the clock ran out on chess as a hard problem
12
Cryptography
The long argument between hiding things and finding things — Caesar cipher to post-quantum standards.
13
Code Editors
Every program that other programs are written in — TECO to Cursor.
Latest Cursor, 2023: the editor that already read the whole codebase
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 The brass pot and the blotting paper: Melitta Bentz's 1908 coffee filter
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.
Latest Isle of Man TT 1907: the race that Britain couldn't hold