Deeper how-tos, history, and tech explainers from the Make Tech Easier editorial team. Pieces here get extra research and review.
Cingular signed on to sell the original iPhone before its executives had seen a working prototype, then gave Apple the kind of control American wireless carriers had spent years refusing to handset makers.
Christopher Latham Sholes patented the layout that now sits under the thumbs of nearly every smartphone owner on Earth in 1878…
Tristan Harris sat in front of the US Senate Commerce Committee and told a room of senators that the small downward tug people make on Instagram, Twitter, and Gmail every few minutes was not an accident of interface design.
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, and the age written into the system was older still: 70. That number was not a warm Victorian gesture toward rest.
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov climbed out of his Soyuz capsule on the Kazakh steppe in March 1995, after more than a year aboard the Mir space station, he did something the recovery crew did not expect.
In the summer of 1932, a radio engineer named Karl Jansky was standing in a field in New Jersey, next to a contraption his…
Stare at a rainbow and try to find magenta. It will not be there. The visible spectrum runs from roughly 700 nanometre red at one…
In 1925, a British graduate student at Harvard named Cecilia Payne handed in a doctoral thesis that quietly upended astronomy.
Edme Mariotte made a spot disappear on a wall in the 1660s, not by tricking the wall, but by finding the place where the human eye has no light detectors at all.
