September 29, 2026
The Barcode: How a Pattern of Lines Changed Everyday Commerce
The humble barcode turned a checkout problem into a worldwide information system, linking ordinary products to prices, inventories, recalls, and…
EXPLORE THE COLLECTION
Technology
September 28, 2026
The Pacemaker: How a Pocket-Sized Pulse Keeper Changed Modern Medicine
From a failed heart-rhythm recorder to today’s programmable and sometimes leadless devices, the pacemaker turned electrical engineering into a quiet,…
September 26, 2026
The Emergency Alert System: How Radio and Television Became America’s Public Warning Network
From Cold War sirens to today’s television crawls and radio interruptions, the Emergency Alert System has turned local broadcasters into…
September 23, 2026
X-59: How NASA Is Trying to Make Supersonic Flight Neighbors Can Live With
NASA’s experimental X-59 aircraft is designed to replace the explosive sonic boom with a quieter thump—an engineering test that could…
September 23, 2026
The Apollo Guidance Computer: How a Tiny Machine Helped Make the Moon Reachable
Long before smartphones put powerful computers in every pocket, a compact machine with just a few kilobytes of memory helped…
September 21, 2026
The Integrated Circuit: How Silicon Put a Computer on a Chip
Before the integrated circuit, computers were built from rooms of separate components. By placing electronic functions onto a single piece…
September 21, 2026
BASIC: How a Beginner’s Language Put Computing Within Reach
Created at Dartmouth in the 1960s, BASIC gave students an approachable way to write, run, and understand their own computer…
September 21, 2026
ENIAC: How a Room-Sized Machine Started the Computer Age
Built for wartime calculation, ENIAC filled a room with vacuum tubes—and revealed that electronic computers could transform work far beyond…
September 21, 2026
Ethernet: How a Xerox Experiment Became Computing’s Wired Backbone
Long before home Wi-Fi, a small team at Xerox PARC imagined computers sharing information over a common cable. Ethernet’s simple…
September 21, 2026
The CAPTCHA: How a Tiny Test Became a Battleground Between Humans and Bots
From distorted letters to invisible risk scores, the CAPTCHA has spent more than two decades asking one deceptively difficult question:…
September 21, 2026
The Spreadsheet: How VisiCalc Turned the Personal Computer Into a Workplace
Before spreadsheets lived in the cloud, one simple program showed ordinary people that a personal computer could calculate, revise, and…
September 21, 2026
The Computer Mouse: How a Wooden Pointing Device Made Computers Human
Before the mouse, working with a computer often meant typing commands. The small pointing device changed that relationship, helping turn…