Browsing: decades

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.

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

In 1992, a container ship leaving Hong Kong lost 28,800 plastic bath toys overboard in the North Pacific, and oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer spent the next two decades tracking yellow ducks and blue turtles as they washed up in Alaska, Maine, and eventually the coast of Scotland, quietly rewriting the textbook map of ocean currents.

Saving Tips

On January 10, 1992, a container ship hit a violent storm somewhere near the International Date Line on its way…