An unfinished chronicle of the history of things.
Short essays on single milestones across seventeen categories — one new post per category per week. Written, researched, and illustrated end to end, then read aloud.
01
Shoes
Ten thousand years of footwear, from Fort Rock sagebrush sandals to carbon-plate supershoes.
9 posts · 8500 BCE — 1340
Latest The poulaine, or how a pointed toe became a matter for Parliament
02
Timepieces
From shadow on sand to atomic clocks — humanity's chase of ever-more-precise time.
7 posts · 3500 BCE — 1386
Latest The Salisbury clock, or the machine that forgot to have a face
03
Bridges
Civil engineering's most dramatic form — log across a stream to mile-long cable-stayed mega-structures, with a spectacular collapse or two along the way.
4 posts · 2900 BCE — 105 CE
Latest Trajan's Bridge, or how to cross a river by moving it first
04
Locks & Keys
Six thousand years of mechanisms for excluding people, with one of history's best rivalries at its centre.
5 posts · 4000 BCE — 1778
Latest The precise lift, or how a Hoxton locksmith beat the pick
05
Maps
Ten thousand years of humans drawing the world — from Babylonian clay tablets to satellite imagery.
5 posts · 11660 BCE — 150 CE
06
Phones
A 150-year story: from Bell shouting at Watson to foldable AI-powered supercomputers in a pocket.
6 posts · 1876 — 1946
Latest The car phone, or how eighty pounds of vacuum tubes first put a telephone on the road
07
Money
From cowrie shells to Bitcoin — every century has a moment it redefined what money is.
5 posts · 3000 BCE — 211 BCE
08
Writing Systems
Every way humans have figured out how to freeze speech onto a surface — cuneiform to Unicode.
5 posts · 3500 BCE — 1200 BCE
Latest Oracle bone script, or how the Shang talked to their ancestors
09
Video Games
Arcade, console, PC, handheld, mobile — all one medium, from OXO on the EDSAC to the handheld revival.
6 posts · 1952 — 1977
Latest The Atari 2600, or the machine Bushnell sold Atari to build
10
Computing
From pebbles in sand trays to the machines that now hold the world together — told one milestone at a time.
12 posts · 2300 BCE — 1911
11
AI
The long road to machines that reason — from Aristotle's syllogisms to today's frontier models.
8 posts · 350 BCE — 1943
12
Cryptography
The long argument between hiding things and finding things — Caesar cipher to post-quantum standards.
5 posts · 404 BCE — 1467
Latest Alberti's cipher disk: the wheel that broke frequency analysis
13
Code Editors
Every program that other programs are written in — TECO to Cursor.
5 posts · 1962 — 1976
14
Software Architecture
The evolving answer to 'how do we organize code at scale?' — structured programming to LLM orchestration.
6 posts · 1967 — 1975
15
Programming Languages
How humans learned to talk to machines — starting with Ada Lovelace writing instructions for a machine that didn't exist yet.
5 posts · 1843 — 1957
16
Cars
From Cugnot's steam fardier to self-driving electric vehicles — two and a half centuries of the machine that reshaped how humans live, work, and move.
1 post · 1769
Latest Cugnot's fardier: the first machine to move under its own power
17
Coffee
From wild Ethiopian berries to Yemeni qahveh khanehs to the espresso machine — six centuries of the drink that wired the modern world.
1 post · 1454