The Steampunk Clocks of 19th-Century Paris: Discover the Ingenious System That Revolutionized Timekeeping in the 1880s

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A mid­dle-class Parisian liv­ing around the turn of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry would have to bud­get for ser­vices like not just water or gas, but also time. Though elec­tric clocks had been demon­strat­ed, they were still a high-tech rar­i­ty; installing one in the home would have been com­plete­ly out of the ques­tion. If you want­ed to…

Keith Moon, Drummer of The Who, Passes Out at 1973 Concert; 19-Year-Old Fan Takes Over

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In Novem­ber 1973, Scot Halpin, a 19-year-old kid, scalped tick­ets to The Who con­cert in San Fran­cis­co, Cal­i­for­nia. Lit­tle did he know that he’d wind up play­ing drums for the band that night — that his name would end up etched in the annals of rock ’n’ roll.

The Who came to Cal­i­for­nia with its album

Public.Work: A Smoothly Searchable Archive of 100,000+ “Copyright-Free” Images

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We live in an age, we’re often told, when our abil­i­ty to con­jure up an image is lim­it­ed only by our imag­i­na­tion. These days, this notion tends to refer to arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence-pow­ered sys­tems that gen­er­ate visu­al mate­r­i­al from text prompts, like DALL‑E and the many oth­ers that have pro­lif­er­at­ed in its wake.…

Buckminster Fuller’s Map of the World: The Innovation That Revolutionized Map Design (1943)

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In 2017, we brought you news of a world map pur­port­ed­ly more accu­rate than any to date, designed by Japan­ese archi­tect and artist Hajime Narukawa. The map, called the Autha­Graph, updates a cen­turies-old method of turn­ing the globe into a flat sur­face by first con­vert­ing it to a cylin­der. Win­ner of…

Ancient Egyptian Pyramids May Have Been Built with Water: A New Study Explore the Use of Hydraulic Lifts

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Image by Charles Sharp, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

The com­pelling but less-than-straight­for­ward ques­tion of how the ancient Egyp­tians built the pyra­mids has inspired all man­ner of the­o­ry and spec­u­la­tion, ground­ed to vary­ing degrees in phys­i­cal real­i­ty. Sheer man­pow­er must have played a large part, and it’s cer­tain­ly not beyond the realm of pos­si­bil­i­ty…