Browsing: Saving Tips

When the SS Great Eastern laid the first working transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, a message that had taken ten days by steamship suddenly crossed the ocean in minutes, and the financial markets of London and New York were forced, within a single trading week, to invent the modern concept of synchronised global price.

Saving Tips

On the morning of July 27, 1866, the SS Great Eastern dropped anchor in Heart’s Content, Newfoundland, with 1,686 nautical…

Every year, roughly two billion new smartphones, laptops, and tablets ship with a key arrangement designed in the 1870s to prevent slender metal arms from colliding inside a machine that has been obsolete for decades, a piece of 19th-century mechanical engineering quietly embedded in the muscle memory of about five billion people.

Saving Tips

Christopher Latham Sholes patented the layout that now sits under the thumbs of nearly every smartphone owner on Earth in…

When Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne submitted her 1925 doctoral thesis arguing that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen, the field’s senior figure Henry Norris Russell talked her into adding a line calling the result ‘almost certainly not real,’ and then published the same conclusion himself four years later to widespread acclaim.

Saving Tips

In 1925, a British graduate student at Harvard named Cecilia Payne handed in a doctoral thesis that quietly upended astronomy.…