Long Reads

Longer explainers,
fewer dead ends.

Deeper how-tos, history, and tech explainers from the Make Tech Easier editorial team. Pieces here get extra research and review.

Tech Explained

In 1985, a 14-year-old in Britain could legally drive a Sinclair C5 down a dual carriageway at 15 miles per hour with lorries thundering past at chest height, because the Department of Transport had quietly classified the battery trike as an electrically assisted pedal cycle rather than a motor vehicle.

Sir Clive Sinclair launched the C5 at Alexandra Palace on 10 January 1985, promising a £399 electric machine that could move through British streets at 15 miles per hour while its driver sat lower than the bonnet line of many cars.

Tech Explained

In 1962, the US detonated a 1.4 megaton nuclear bomb 250 miles above the Pacific in a test called Starfish Prime, and the electromagnetic pulse knocked out streetlights, burglar alarms, and a telephone company microwave link in Honolulu nearly 900 miles away, on an island most engineers had assumed was safely out of range

On July 9, 1962, a Thor rocket carrying a W49 thermonuclear warhead detonated roughly 250 miles above Johnston Atoll in the central Pacific.

Tech Explained

When General James Mattis joined the Theranos board in 2013, he had already spent a year pushing Elizabeth Holmes's fingerprick blood analyser toward soldiers in Afghanistan, and the only reason it never reached the battlefield was an Army regulatory officer named David Shoemaker who kept warning the FDA the device was not approved.

General James Mattis joined the Theranos board of directors in July 2013, a few months after retiring as head of US Central…