Curated playlist
English inventions
- Incandescent light bulbThe incandescent light bulb is an electric light that produces illumination by Joule heating a filament until it glows. For well over a century, that simple idea - sending current through a wire until it shines - lit homes, streets,…
- Steam turbineThe steam turbine quietly powers the modern world. In 2022, about 42% of all electricity generated in the United States came from machines built on the same fundamental principle: pressurized steam spinning a shaft. At the outermost edge…
- Stainless steelStainless steel is the material that lets surgeons cut, chefs cook, and skyscrapers stand without rusting away. Walk into any kitchen, hospital, or chemical plant and you are surrounded by it. Yet for most of its existence, people could…
- SubmarineThe submarine has carried human beings into a realm that, for most of history, was completely out of reach. In 1960, Jacques Piccard and Lieutenant Don Walsh of the US Navy descended in the vessel Trieste to the floor of the Challenger…
- ZX SpectrumThe ZX Spectrum went on sale in Britain on the 23rd of April 1982 for £125, a price that undercut the leading rival by a significant margin. Within its first year, over 300,000 units had found homes. By the time it was discontinued in…
- Self-propelled artillerySelf-propelled artillery is one of those weapons categories that quietly reshaped how armies fight, not by replacing the cannon, but by giving it legs. The idea seems straightforward enough: put the gun on a vehicle so it can drive itself…
- Newcomen atmospheric engineIn 1712, Thomas Newcomen built a machine that had never existed before: a device that turned steam into useful mechanical work. He erected it at the Conygree Coalworks in Bloomfield Road, Tipton, in the Black Country, and it pumped water…
- Puddling (metallurgy)Puddling is the process that gave the Industrial Revolution its iron backbone. In coal-fired reverberatory furnaces across England, workers stirred molten pig iron with long hooked bars until the carbon burned away and something more…
- Colossus computerColossus was a machine built to win a war that its operators were forbidden to admit existed. Developed by British codebreakers between 1943 and 1945, it worked on one of the most closely guarded problems of the Second World War: breaking…
- Cast ironCast iron snapped in May 1847, and five people died. A bridge carrying the Chester and Holyhead Railway across the River Dee in Chester collapsed under a passing train, less than a year after it opened. The metal at the heart of the wreck…
- InductorAn inductor is a passive two-terminal electrical component that stores energy in a magnetic field when an electric current flows through it. It is also called a coil, a choke, or a reactor. In its simplest form it is nothing more than an…
- Bessemer processThe Bessemer process changed the price of steel from forty pounds per long ton to six or seven pounds - in a single generation. Before Henry Bessemer filed his patent in 1856, steel was a precious material. It made cutlery and tools, but…
- Plate glassPlate glass sits in nearly every window you have ever looked through, yet the story behind that flat, transparent sheet spans nearly eight centuries of human ingenuity. Known interchangeably as flat glass or sheet glass, it begins as a…
- Rapid transitRapid transit moves more people through a city than almost any other machine on earth, and yet most riders never see how strange its engineering really is. In Hong Kong, MTR Corporation's urban lines carry between 75,000 and 85,000 people…
- Steam engineThe steam engine is a heat engine that turns the force of pressurized steam into mechanical work. Inside a cylinder, that pressure pushes a piston back and forth. A connecting rod and crank then convert the motion into rotational force.…
- BombeGroup Captain Winterbotham called the Bombe a "Bronze Goddess," a name that came from its colour. The operators who fed it menus and listened for its stops used a more grounded description: "great big metal bookcases." The Bombe was the…
- Vacuum tubeVacuum tubes were the engine of the twentieth century's electronic revolution, and almost nobody can describe what one actually is. Picture a glass bottle the size of your thumb, with all the air pumped out. Inside, a heated wire releases…
- Web browserA web browser is the window through which roughly 5.4 billion people access the internet, yet most users have never thought twice about how one actually works. Type an address into a bar at the top of the screen, and within seconds a page…
- Association footballAssociation football draws an estimated 250 million players across more than 200 countries and territories, which makes it the most popular sport on the planet. Two teams of 11 face each other on a pitch, and almost everything they do,…