Theo Marlow
Writes for the wisst team about history, money, society and technology.
- The first webcam watched a coffee pot in CambridgeIn 1991, researchers at Cambridge's Computer Laboratory were tired of walking to an empty coffee pot. The camera they set up to check it became a landmark of the early web.
- Why the week has seven daysDays, months and years follow the Earth, the Moon and the Sun. The week does not. Its seven days come from several ancient traditions that happened to agree.
- Each US penny cost the Mint about three cents to makeFor 20 years in a row, the US Mint spent more than a cent to produce a one-cent coin. Where the money went, and why the US stopped making pennies for circulation in 2025.
- Cleopatra lived closer to the Moon landing than to the Great PyramidPyramids and Cleopatra share one picture of ancient Egypt in our heads. Do the sums and the Great Pyramid was already about 2,500 years old when she was born.
- 1816 had no summer because a volcano erupted the year beforeIn June 1816, snow fell in New England and Europe's harvests failed. The cause was an eruption on an Indonesian island a year earlier, on the other side of the world.
- GPS satellites run their clocks slow on purposeThe atomic clocks on GPS satellites would gain 38 microseconds a day on clocks on the ground. Left alone, that tiny slip would push positions off by around ten kilometres a day.
- Why some countries drive on the left and others on the rightAbout a third of the world's people keep left on the road. Nobody can say for sure how the split began, but the map it left was drawn by empires, neighbours and the price of cars.
- What the price of a Big Mac says about currenciesSince 1986 The Economist has compared what a Big Mac costs around the world. The joke turns out to be a neat lesson in purchasing power parity, and in where it stops working.
- Napoleon was not short: he was measured in French inchesThe legend of a tiny emperor comes from an old French unit of length, a crowd of very tall guardsmen, and British cartoonists who drew him the size of a child.
- The summer the Thames stank so badly that Parliament built sewersIn the hot June of 1858, the smell of London's river drove MPs out of their committee rooms. Within seven weeks they had passed the law that gave the city the sewers it still uses.
- The fax machine is older than the telephoneA Scottish clockmaker patented a way to send images down a wire in 1843, and a commercial service sent handwriting between Paris and Lyon a decade before the first phone call.
- How Saturday became a day offFor most of the industrial age, people worked six days a week. The second day of rest arrived in pieces: half a Saturday in British mills, a Sabbath in an American one, and a car factory.
- The dollar is named after a silver valley in BohemiaDollar began as the name of a coin from a mining town in what is now the Czech Republic. A Spanish coin carried the name around the world, and into the United States.
- Britain's clocks were set to London by the railwaysUntil the 1840s, each British town kept its own time by the sun. Train timetables made that impossible to live with, and the law followed decades later.
- Why the British tax year starts on 6 AprilIt looks like an odd day to start a year. It is the old new year, moved twice: once by a calendar change, once by a leap day the Treasury would not give up.