The Orange Pot, the Solvent Bath, and the Tree That Did It Naturally A Color With a Backstory Almost every diner in America keeps two coffee carafes: one with a dark handle, one with an orange one. The orange means decaf. Few people question it, and almost no one knows where the convention came from. … Read more
The Story Everyone Repeats The popular version goes like this. Victorian physicians regularly diagnosed women with “hysteria,” a vague catch-all for almost any troubling behavior. To treat it, doctors performed pelvic massages until patients reached a clinical “paroxysm.” The physical labor eventually grew exhausting, so a doctor invented the electric vibrator to automate the procedure. … Read more
The Product That Defined “Cheap” Started Out Expensive Few things signal a tight budget quite like a packet of instant ramen. Students stack them like bricks. Disaster relief organizations ship them by the pallet. So it sits oddly on the shelf of history that when Chikin Ramen first appeared in Japanese stores on August 25, … Read more
The Nazis Who Rescued a Rabbi In the winter of 1939, a German military officer escorted a Jewish spiritual leader, his family, and a small group of followers onto a train in Warsaw. They traveled in a first-class cabin. The officer’s orders came from the chief of German military intelligence, a man who spent years … Read more
The Plane That Forgot Its Wings Look at any aircraft and your eye goes straight to the wings. The Northrop M2-F2 had a different idea. Shaped more like a bathtub than a conventional plane, it had no long wings at all, just a carefully sculpted fuselage designed to generate lift through the geometry of the … Read more
The Buzzing That Meant Danger Londoners who survived the summer of 1944 described it consistently: a mechanical drone overhead, like an enormous angry insect, audible long before anything appeared in the sky. That sound came from one of the strangest weapons of the Second World War, the V-1 flying bomb, officially the Vergeltungswaffe-1, or Vengeance … Read more
The Egyptian Walk Was Invented on a Ferry In September 1986, The Bangles released a song that would spend four consecutive weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100, by Billboard’s own ranking, the number one song of all of 1987. You almost certainly know the chorus, and the move: arms bent at the … Read more
The Army That Wasn’t There Picture the German advance through France in 1940: columns of tanks, armored half-tracks, mechanized infantry rolling across the countryside. There’s one problem with that image: most of the German army was walking. Only about one in five soldiers belonged to a motorized or mechanized division. The rest moved on foot, … Read more
The World’s Most Famous Wartime Poster Was Almost Never Seen Pick up a mug, a tote bag, or a greeting card in any English-speaking country, and there’s a reasonable chance it reads “Keep Calm and Carry On.” The phrase feels historical, like something Churchill said, or something every Londoner passed on the way to the … Read more
The Shoe That Was “Too Good for the NBA” (And Why That’s Not Quite True) The story goes like this: Nike designed a basketball shoe so revolutionary that the NBA had to ban it. Michael Jordan kept wearing it anyway. The league fined him $5,000 every game. Nike paid every fine without blinking. And from … Read more