Curated playlist
Chinese inventions
- PaperPaper got its name from papyrus, but the two share no real ancestry. Papyrus is laminated plant fiber.
- GunpowderGunpowder began as a quest for immortality, not a weapon. Chinese alchemists mixing it burned their faces and a house.
- Natural gasNatural gas was once mostly an unwanted by-product of pumping oil, burned off as waste. That burning is called flaring.
- Blast furnaceIn 1709, Abraham Darby began fueling a blast furnace with coke instead of charcoal. Coke cost less to produce.
- SilkSilk from a ship sunk in 1782 came up undamaged in 1840. No wool clothing from the wreck was ever recovered.
- KeroseneKerosene lamp oil pushed American whaling ships out of business. The fleet fell from 199 ships in 1858 to 39 in 1876.
- Oil refineryGasoline was once dumped into rivers as waste at oil refineries. Refiners in the 19th century wanted kerosene for lamps.
- Puddling (metallurgy)Puddlers stirred 800 to 900 pounds of molten iron by hand. Their work made wrought iron without charcoal.
- ExplosiveWhether an explosive detonates or burns depends on the speed of sound. Reactions faster than sound are high explosives.
- Land mineLand mines do not go inert after a few years. They can stay dangerous for decades after a war ends.
- PorcelainPorcelain is named after a cowrie shell. Early Europeans thought its smooth surface looked like one.
- PrintingPrinting in Muslim Spain began with street magicians selling amulets. They hid the process to seem handwritten.
- AcupunctureIn trials, sham acupuncture generally works as well as the real thing. Sometimes it does better.
- ArtilleryAt Constantinople in 1453, Ottoman guns fired an estimated 19,320 times in forty days.
- CannonIn 1453, sixty-eight huge cannon pounded Constantinople for fifty-five days.
- Cast ironA cast-iron railway bridge collapsed under a train in May 1847, killing five people.
- HandgunBefore Samuel Colt, a well-made handgun ranked closer to a ceremonial sword than a tool.
- Lock (water navigation)Soldiers wrecked grain barges on a Chinese river, and the fix in 984 was a new kind of lock.
- Movable typeBi Sheng built the first known movable type from ceramic around 1040 AD.
- FirearmSong dynasty soldiers once lashed gunpowder-filled bamboo tubes to their spears.
- CompassThe oldest ancestor of the compass was a fortune-telling spoon. Chinese geomancers used it in the second century BC.
- RamenRamen, the Japanese noodle soup, is sold in more than 24,000 shops across Japan. Around 5,000 of them are in Tokyo alone. In December 2015, a shop called Tsuta, in Tokyo's Sugamo district, earned a Michelin star. Yet for a long time the…
- Armillary sphereThe armillary sphere on Portugal's flag began as one prince's personal badge.
- RocketA rocket works better in the vacuum of space than in air. It carries everything it burns, so it needs no oxygen.