Browsing: History

A Renaissance alchemist pioneers feedback control.

His curious discovery, 200 years ago, foresaw our expanding universe.

Humans have long had a desire to capture the now—to freeze the current moment to look back on after it has left us. We painted, wrote things down, developed photography and storage systems, and built vast libraries of books and images. In 1939, during the New York World’s Fair, Westinghouse introduced the first-ever “time capsule” […]

It’s 2014: Sixty-one years since the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA. Four hundred seventy one years since Copernicus published the heliocentric model of the universe. And one year since the Higgs Boson was discovered. In 100 years, how will we look back on today’s science? We’re building a scientific time capsule—a collection of […]

What disdain and devotion have to do with the dawn of photography, evolution, and Lewis Carroll.

What Virginia Woolf’s writing table has to do with Darwin’s countryside cottage and Freud’s final couch.

The much-awaited monograph of the greatest graphic designer of all time.

A peek inside the creative process of modern animation’s greatest gems, from sketchbook to screen.

From book-burning to the iPad, or what Pompeii has to do with Gutenberg’s printing press.

Watching the master at work from the other side of the glass.