Menu
Idea

technological innovation

388
Filter by:

Filter by published date

Viewing 121–150 of 388 results. Go to first page
Children wiping away sweat

8 Creative Ways People Kept Cool Before Air Conditioning

People have come up with a range of ingenious, harebrained, and sometimes grim but often remarkable ways to stay cool during a summer scorcher.
by Keith Johnston via Mental Floss on July 12, 2021
Collection of photographs ranging including shareholders' meeting protests, the city of Rochester, and Kodak founder George Eastman.

The Rise and Fall of an American Tech Giant

Kodak changed the way Americans saw themselves and their country. But it struggled to reinvent itself for the digital age.
by Kaitlyn Tiffany via The Atlantic on June 16, 2021
Animated scene from One Hundred and One Dalmatians

How 'One Hundred and One Dalmatians' Saved Disney

Sixty years ago, the company modernized animation when it used Xerox technology on the classic film.
by Gia Yetikyel via Smithsonian on June 2, 2021
Model posing with the original Motorola cellphone

The First Cellphone: Discover Motorola’s DynaTAC 8000X, a 2-Pound Brick Priced at $3,995

We get the culture our technology permits, and in the 21st century no technological development has changed culture like that of the smartphone.
by Colin Marshall via Open Culture on May 20, 2021
The cover of Black Software by Charlton D. McIlwain, depicting a raised fist against a green background.

Alternative Internets and Their Lost Histories

What has been gained and lost from overlooking histories about the wild heterogeneity of networks that existed for well over a century?
by Lori Emerson via Los Angeles Review of Books on April 12, 2021
Thomas Edison exhibiting the phonograph to visitors at his laboratory

Bottled Authors

The predigital dream of the audiobook.
by Matthew Rubery via Cabinet on March 16, 2021
Cartoon of babies in petrie dishes.

A Long Incubation

It took hundreds of years of research to develop in-vitro fertilization or IVF.
by Eleri Harris via The Nib on March 15, 2021
Jose Altuve of the Houston Astros

What Counts, These Days, in Baseball?

As technologies of quantification and video capture grow more sophisticated, is baseball changing? Do those changes have moral implications?
by David Hinkin via Public Books on February 24, 2021
Illustration of a Lancasterian school building

A History of Technological Hype

When it comes to education technology, school leaders have often leaped before they looked.
by Adam Laats, Victoria E. M. Cain via Phi Delta Kappan on February 22, 2021
Two women sitting on a rocking chair in a nineteenth century photograph

Postures of Transport: Sex, God, and Rocking Chairs

What if chairs could shift our state of consciousness, transporting the imagination into distant landscapes and ecstatic experiences, both religious and erotic?
by Hunter Dukes via The Public Domain Review on February 3, 2021

The Library of Possible Futures

Since the release of "Future Shock" 50 years ago, the allure of speculative nonfiction has remained the same: We all want to know what’s coming next.
by Samantha Culp via The Atlantic on February 1, 2021
An old concrete arrow for the airway

How the First Airmail Pilots Learned to Fly in the Dark

Almost a century ago, a network of signals guided airmail pilots across the country. A photographer documents the remnants of this transcontinental system.
by Chris Forsyth, Daegan Miller via Places Journal on February 1, 2021
An illustration of a skeleton apparition.

A History of Presence

The aesthetics of virtual reality, and its promise of “magical” embodied experience, can be found in older experiments with immersive media.
by Brooke Belisle via Art In America on January 25, 2021
Abstract illustration of life working remotely.

The Perpetual Disappointment of Remote Work

What the troubled history of telecommuting tells us about its future.
by Richard Cooke via The New Republic on January 4, 2021
Horses standing next to a car.

What Extremely Muscular Horses Teach Us About Climate Change

You can’t understand the history of American energy use without them. A new visual history puts them in context.
by Robinson Meyer via The Atlantic on December 8, 2020
An illustration of a kid imagining going to space.

Selling the American Space Dream

The cosmic delusions of Elon Musk and Wernher von Braun.
by David Beers via The New Republic on December 7, 2020
Jill Lepore and the cover of her Book "If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future"

“We Don’t Want the Program”: On How Tech Can’t Fix Democracy

“Start-ups: they need philosophers, political theorists, historians, poets. Critics.”
by Jill Lepore, Danah Boyd via Public Books on November 2, 2020
A pen drawing an eye.

The Cheap Pen That Changed Writing Forever

The replacement of fountain pens was a stroke of design genius perfectly in time for the era of mass production.
by Stephen Dowling via BBC News on October 28, 2020

Built to Last

When overwhelmed unemployment insurance systems malfunctioned, governments blamed the 60-year-old programming language COBOL. But what really failed?
by Mar Hicks via Logic on August 31, 2020
partner

The Racist Roots of the Dog Whistle

Here’s how we came to label the coded language.
by Adam R. Shapiro via Made By History on August 21, 2020

The 100-Year History of Self-Driving Vehicles

What the long history of the autonomous vehicle reveals about its fast-approaching future.
by Anthony Townsend via OneZero on August 3, 2020
A walkman and a headphone set

The Walkman, Forty Years On

The gadget that taught the world to socially distance.
by Matt Alt via The New Yorker on June 29, 2020
Broadway New York 1893

Perilous Proceedings

Documenting the New York City construction boom at the turn of the 20th century.
by David Gibson via Library of Congress on June 29, 2020

Vibrators Had a Long History as Medical Quackery

Before feminists rebranded them as sex toys, vibrators were just another medical device.
by Kim Adams via The Conversation on June 8, 2020
Diagram and article about Dunlap Creek Bridge

Tom Paine’s Bridge

We do not often think of Paine as a revolutionary inventor. But in a very real sense, that is what he believed himself to be.
by Edward G. Gray via Commonplace on April 16, 2020
N95 mask

The Untold Origin Story of the N95 Mask

The most important design object of our time was more than a century in the making.
by Mark R. Wilson via Fast Company on March 24, 2020
Eight daguerreotype portraits.

Samuel Morse and the Quest for the Daguerreotype Portrait

When a remarkable new invention by Louis Daguerre was announced by the French, it was American inventor Samuel Morse who sensed its commercial potential.
by Sarah Kate Gillespie via The MIT Press Reader on March 16, 2020
Superman comic illustration

Why Superheroes Are the Shape of Tech Things to Come

Superman et al were invented amid feverish eugenic speculation: what does the superhero craze say about our own times?
by Iwan Rhys Morus via Aeon on March 5, 2020

The Intelligence Coup of the Century

For decades, the CIA read the encrypted communications of allies and adversaries.
by Greg Miller via Washington Post on February 11, 2020
The armored gunboat USS Cairo with its crew standing on deck, 1862.

Union Gunboats Didn't Just Attack Rebel Military Sites – They Went After Civilian Property, too

A new look at detailed data about Civil War skirmishes along the Mississippi River reveals another key to the Union's victory.
by Robert Gudmestad via The Conversation on January 30, 2020
View More
30 of
388

Filter Results:

Suggested Filters:

Idea

Person

brought to you by
© Bunk History