The telephone was an invention that revolutionized human communication. No more did you have to physically courier a letter from one place to another, or send a telegram, or have a runner carry the message for you. Instead, you could have a direct conversation with another person a great distance away. All well and good […]
If you read a headline that signs of intelligent life were found on the moon, you might suspect a hoax. But they are there! Humans have dumped a lot of stuff on the moon, both in person and via uncrewed rockets. So after the apocalypse, what strange things will some alien exo-archaeologist find on our […]
Once the microcomputer era got going in earnest, the floppy disk quickly supplanted the tape as the portable storage method of choice. They were never particularly large, but they were fine for the average user to get by. At the same time, it wasn’t long before heavier-duty removable storage solutions hit the market for power […]
Although modern-day silvered glass mirrors have pretty much destroyed the market for bronze mirrors, these highly polished pieces of metal once were the pinnacle of mirror technology. Due to the laborious process required these mirrors saw use essentially only by the affluent. That said, how hard would it be to make a bronze mirror today […]
Over two decades after it was last deflated, detached from its gondola, and crated up at Lakehurst, the gas bag of an N-class ZPG-2W blimp was broken out and dusted off for what might have been the most bizarre afterlife in aviation history: as a key building block for the U.S. Forest Service’s Piasecki PA-97 […]
A crew lives on a station in a hostile environment. Leaving that environment requires oxygen tanks and specialized gear to deal with pressure differentials. A space station? Nah. A base built on the ocean floor. The US Navy was interested in such a base in the 1960s, and bases like this are a staple of […]
Recently the Practical Engineering YouTube channel featured a functional recreation of a pump design that is presumed by some to have been used to pump water up to the medieval Alhambra palace and its fortress, located in what is today Spain. This so-called pulser pump design is notable for not featuring any moving parts, but […]
Until the fall of the Soviet Union around 1990 you’d be forgiven as a proud Soviet citizen for thinking that the USSR’s technology was on par with the decadent West. After the Iron Curtain lifted it became however quite clear how outdated especially consumer electronics were in the USSR, with technologies like digital audio CDs […]