The Man Who Codified Modern Computing
He was so offended by the ugly typography in his own book that he put his life's work on hold and invented an entirely new software system to fix the fonts, a system the scientific world still uses de...
10 Jun 20min
The man who built the jet engine
In a freezing English foundry, a 126-pound man covered in stress eczema, surviving on stimulants by day and tranquilizers by night, secretly built the engine that would shrink the globe. Frank Whittle...
10 Jun 22min
The man who broke Barings Bank
A 28-year-old with no university degree, whose first banking job was sorting paper checks, single-handedly bankrupted the United Kingdom's oldest merchant bank, a 233-year-old institution that managed...
10 Jun 22min
The Man Isaac Newton Erased From History
He coined the word "cell," helped rebuild London after the Great Fire, deduced fundamental gravitational principles before Newton, and has been called England's Leonardo da Vinci. Yet we do not know w...
10 Jun 23min
The Magnificent Disasters of Isambard Kingdom Brunel
His creations laid the structural groundwork for the modern industrial world, and almost every one of them ended in financial ruin, engineering disaster, or literal explosion. Isambard Kingdom Brunel'...
10 Jun 26min
The Low Frequency Hum Only You Hear
The neighborhood is silent, yet you hear it: a persistent low-frequency throb, like a diesel truck idling outside your bedroom window. Your partner hears nothing. Thousands of people worldwide experie...
10 Jun 22min
The Lost Jewish Empire of Khazaria
An empire with no ruins to visit: the Khazar Khaganate was the medieval world's ultimate toll booth, a steppe superpower that halted the Arab conquest's advance into Eastern Europe, ritually strangled...
10 Jun 22min
The Lost Gnostic Gospels of Nag Hammadi
In late 1945, a teenage Egyptian farmer digging for fertilizer near Nag Hammadi struck a sealed clay jar and froze, terrified a djinn waited inside. Greed beat fear; he smashed it open and found not g...
10 Jun 22min
