History of Science

The history of refrigeration before Freon is full of leaks, explosions, and near-misses that most people today have never heard of — and it opens, oddly enough, with Albert Einstein reading his morning paper in 1926. A family in Berlin had died in their sleep after a seal failed on their refrigerator, filling the apartment … Read more

In 1934, a German chemist sat down with a copy of Enrico Fermi’s latest paper and found something wrong with it. Ida Noddack predicted nuclear fission in the short rebuttal she wrote that year — a single paragraph, really, buried in a paper mostly about chemistry — and it turned out to be one of … Read more

Every October, I do the same small ritual. I check the Nobel Prize news the morning it’s announced, usually with coffee, usually before I’ve opened my work laptop. It’s a habit I picked up years ago, and I never questioned why until I started digging into the names that don’t show up on that list. … Read more

Josephine Cochrane dishwasher invention started, as far as anyone can tell, with a woman standing in her kitchen watching a servant chip yet another piece of her good china, and deciding she’d simply had enough. Not enough of dishwashing generally. Enough of watching things she valued get damaged by a process that, in her specific … Read more

Henrietta Lacks HeLa cells are, by any reasonable measure, one of the most important tools in the entire history of medicine. They helped develop the polio vaccine. They’ve been used in cancer research, in vitro fertilization, gene mapping, radiation studies, and — seventy years after they were first taken — COVID-19 vaccine development. Scientists have … Read more

Alan Turing father of computer science is a title that took his own country roughly sixty years to say out loud in public. Not because his work was in question. Because for most of that sixty years, the government he’d helped save from military defeat was simultaneously the government that had prosecuted him, chemically castrated … Read more

Nikola Tesla vs Edison gets framed, almost universally, as a story with a winner. Tesla’s alternating current beat Edison’s direct current. History vindicated the underdog. It’s the version of the story that shows up in internet quizzes and inspirational posts, the one where the humble immigrant genius triumphs over the ruthless American businessman, and everyone … Read more

Grace Hopper computer bug 1947 is a story I’ve heard told, retold, and half-jokingly referenced in code comments for basically my entire career. Find a defect, call it a “bug,” someone in the room makes the moth joke, everyone nods, we move on. It’s the founding myth of my entire profession, told so casually and … Read more

Stephen Hawking black hole paradox has been running, unresolved, for exactly fifty years now, and the strangest part of researching this piece wasn’t the physics. It was discovering that the man who created the paradox eventually conceded he’d been wrong about it — publicly, in front of an audience, with a baseball encyclopedia changing hands … Read more

Columbus map error New World stories usually get compressed into a single fact — he thought the world was smaller than it was — but thetruth is three separate mistakes, not one. I wrote about Eratosthenes a while back on this blog — the Greek librarian who, in 240 BCE, used a stick, a shadow, … Read more