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.
Latest The Dassler brothers' shoe factory, and the feud that split a town
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 The Garabit Viaduct, or the bridge that proved the Tower
04
Locks & Keys
Six thousand years of mechanisms for excluding people, with one of history's best rivalries at its centre.
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 There's an app for that: Apple's App Store and the invention of the platform economy
07
Money
From cowrie shells to Bitcoin — every century has a moment it redefined what money is.
Latest Newton's guinea, or how a mathematician's arithmetic error invented the gold standard
08
Writing Systems
Every way humans have figured out how to freeze speech onto a surface — cuneiform to Unicode.
09
Video Games
Arcade, console, PC, handheld, mobile — all one medium, from OXO on the EDSAC to the handheld revival.
Latest The PlayStation: how humiliation in Chicago gave Sony its most profitable product
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 SHRDLU, 1970: the blocks world where a machine first appeared to understand
12
Cryptography
The long argument between hiding things and finding things — Caesar cipher to post-quantum standards.
Latest Colossus, and the operator who handed Bletchley Park a crowbar
13
Code Editors
Every program that other programs are written in — TECO to Cursor.
Latest Sublime Text, or the text editor that left Google to reinvent itself
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.
Latest SQL, or the language that outlived one of its authors
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.
Latest The Curved Dash Oldsmobile: America's first mass-produced car
17
Coffee
From wild Ethiopian berries to Yemeni qahveh khanehs to the espresso machine — six centuries of the drink that wired the modern world.
18
Sports
From Neolithic wrestling pits to the modern Olympic stadium — how humans turned play into organised competition, and competition into civilisation.
Latest The pentathlon at Olympia, and a jump no one has explained
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 Hildebrand & Wolfmüller: the first motorcycle you could buy