🧭 Guided journeys
Stories that link inventions and discoveries across time and the map: each step made the next one possible.
- From spark to chip13 steps · 1663 – 1971
Three and a half centuries from rubbing a ball of sulphur to packing thousands of transistors onto a grain of silicon: how electricity stopped being a parlour curiosity and ended up thinking.
- The race for the atom14 steps · 1808 – 2012
In little more than a century the atom went from hypothesis to being split in two. From the relative weight of the elements to the Higgs boson, by way of the bomb and nuclear power.
- How we know the age of the Earth10 steps · 1669 – 2001
From reading layers of rock to counting lead atoms: three centuries of clues, mistakes and disputes on the way to 4.55 billion years.
- From the printing press to the internet17 steps · 3200 BCE – 2007
Five thousand years of making ideas travel further and faster: from marks in clay to the phone in your pocket, by way of paper, movable type, wires and waves.
- The war on microbes14 steps · 1570 – 2020
For millennia epidemics were punishment or miasma. In four centuries we learned to see the enemy, understand how it spreads and beat it with vaccines and antibiotics.
- Finding the way at sea15 steps · 63,000 BCE – 1978
Setting out to sea is easy; coming back is not. Stars, magnets, maps, clocks and satellites: how we learned to know where we are when the coast is out of sight.