Dent's Modern Tribes: The Secret Languages of Britain
Why some countries ended up driving on the right, and others on the left, is the subject of much speculation. But it seems that for much of the medieval period there was no hard-and-fast rule: vehicles generally tried to stay in the middle of the road, and their main concern was avoiding hazards such as ditches and potholes. The rules for passing o
... See moreTom Standage • A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next
In that respect, the American consumer boom represented the final flowering of the Connecticut Valley machine tradition of Thomas Blanchard, John Hall, and the great superintendents at the Springfield Armory. The woman who breaks the bobbin on her sewing machine while running up curtains at home and the soldier in the field with a broken gunlock pr
... See moreCharles R. Morris • The Tycoons: How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J. P. Morgan Invented the American Supereconomy
The first traffic light was installed on Westminster Bridge in London in 1868, to improve the safety of pedestrians. John Peake Knight, a railway engineer, invented a set of semaphore arms, mounted on a tall post on the bridge, that could be raised and lowered manually by a policeman. Raised arms meant vehicles and horses had to stop “to allow the
... See moreTom Standage • A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next
Since the Protestant Reformation these systems of pre-publication inspection of copy (more theoretical than practical) had been reinforced by brutal penalties for any who challenged the local orthodoxy. Printers knew they had to tread carefully. But it would be wrong to ascribe the overwhelmingly loyalist tone of the news pamphlets primarily to cen
... See more