Drive: Ideas for sustained work. - Page 21

Editor’s note

Drive

Selected for practical perspectives on effort, recovery and sustained work.

Q1947

WonderArt

Asante and Ewe weavers create distinct kente traditions by weaving narrow silk or cotton strips, cutting and arranging them, then sewing the lengths into expansive cloths.

The scale of a finished kente wrapper can hide its modular construction. Long, narrow bands emerge from the loom carrying complex warp and weft designs; joining them demands decisions about rhythm, interruption and alignment across the whole cloth. Asante and Ewe makers have related but different histories, techniques and visual vocabularies, so kente should not be flattened into one code of colour meanings. Its later association with Kwame Nkrumah and Pan-African identity added global political resonance to already specific local arts.

Kente clothRead card

Q1948

WonderArt

Cochineal dye is made by extracting carminic acid from dried female scale insects raised on prickly pear cactus, then using mordants and acidity to create reds from pink to crimson.

Indigenous dyers in the Americas cultivated cochineal and mastered the salts, acids and alkaline additions that make one source yield remarkably different colours. After the Spanish conquest, the concentrated dye became a guarded imperial commodity shipped into European textiles and paintings and onward through global trade. Its brilliance crossed borders; the wealth and power around it did not cross evenly. To find cochineal in an artwork is to find chemistry, skilled cultivation and colonial extraction compressed into colour.

CochinealRead card

Q1949

DriveArt

Faith Ringgold joined painted cloth, quilting and written narrative in story quilts that placed Black family life, history and imagined freedom inside the language of major art.

Ringgold moved beyond the prestige rules of oil painting by working with fabric, sewing, borders and text—forms long diminished as women's work or craft. In Tar Beach, a child flies above a Harlem rooftop and the George Washington Bridge, claiming the city through imagination when social reality withholds control. The written voice around the image does not explain the art; it enlarges who gets to narrate it. Ringgold made the soft edge of a quilt carry arguments sturdy enough for a museum wall.

Faith RinggoldRead card

Q1955

StillnessArt

In the 1920s, Yanagi Sōetsu, Kawai Kanjirō and Hamada Shōji coined mingei for everyday folk craft, arguing that useful objects made outside elite art could possess profound beauty.

Mingei redirected attention from the signed masterpiece towards pottery, baskets, textiles, woodwork and tools shaped by repetition and use. Yanagi founded the Japan Folk Crafts Museum in 1936 and collected not only Japanese work but Korean, Ainu and Taiwanese objects, placing the movement inside Japan's complicated imperial century as well as its design history. Its central question remains fertile and contested: who gets to name the beauty of another person's ordinary object? Looking carefully is valuable; so is examining the power carried by the gaze.

MingeiRead card

Q1958

DriveArt

Semiha Berksoy built a seventy-year practice across opera, theatre, cinema, literature and painting, turning self-portraits, stage roles and personal memory into one dramatic visual world.

Berksoy trained in music and visual art, became Türkiye's first woman opera artist and performed in Europe, yet she never treated painting as a secondary career. Her figures arrive frontally and theatrically on canvas, cardboard and bedsheets, surrounded by written names, dates, curtains and memories that make biography part of the set. She painted herself, loved ones and roles she had inhabited until private room and public stage overlapped. The result is not a portfolio of disciplines; it is a life refusing to be divided into departments.

Semiha BerksoyRead card

Q1959

DriveArt

Füreya Koral helped establish modern studio ceramics in Türkiye while creating vessels, sculptures and large architectural panels that made clay part of everyday public space.

Koral began sustained work in ceramics in the late 1940s, learning in Switzerland and Paris before establishing a studio in Istanbul that became an important meeting and teaching space. She drew on Anatolian ceramic histories without treating tradition as a pattern book, testing how glaze, modular form and abstraction could inhabit modern life. Her panels entered markets, hotels and public buildings, places where art meets people not arriving as an audience. Clay ceased to be only an object in a room; it helped make the room.

Füreya KoralRead card

Q1960

StillnessArt

Ara Güler's photojournalism followed workers, fishers, children, ferries, alleys and changing neighbourhoods, preserving twentieth-century Istanbul as lived history rather than scenery.

Güler called himself a photojournalist and visual historian, a useful distinction from the myth of the photographer waiting only for beauty. His Istanbul is full of labour and weather: nets drying by the water, faces lit through smoke, streets altered by industry and migration, grand architecture sharing the frame with precarious lives. He also photographed artists and archaeological sites across the world, building an archive of extraordinary scale. Yet his deepest method remained intimate—history is convincing when someone can still be seen inside it.

Ara GülerRead card

Q1962

WonderHistory

Al-Idrisi completed the Tabula Rogeriana for Roger II in 1154 after years of comparing written geography with reports gathered from travellers.

At the Norman court in Sicily, al-Idrisi worked across languages, trade routes and rival geographic traditions. The resulting book paired regional maps with descriptions of roads, ports, distances and economies; like much Islamic cartography of its era, its world map placed south at the top. Orientation was a convention, while verification was the ambition.

Tabula RogerianaRead card

Q1964

WonderHistory

The Kangnido combined Chinese, Korean and Islamicate geographic knowledge into one of East Asia's earliest surviving maps to depict Africa and Europe.

Made in early Joseon Korea, the Kangnido enlarged East Asia while compressing lands farther west—a map of relevance as much as scale. Yet its Africa, Arabia and Europe reveal information travelling through Mongol-era connections and Chinese access to Islamic cartography. Long before satellites, a world picture could be collaborative across centuries and continents.

KangnidoRead card

Q1966

WonderScience

Between 1816 and 1855, the Struve Geodetic Arc linked survey stations across 2,820 kilometres to measure a long meridian segment and refine Earth's dimensions.

Friedrich Georg Wilhelm Struve's triangulation chain ran from the Black Sea towards the Arctic Ocean, across territory now divided among ten countries. Observers climbed hills and towers to sight distant points, extending one carefully measured baseline through hundreds of triangles. The planet's curve emerged from patience, geometry and a continental relay of clear views.

Struve Geodetic ArcRead card

Q1968

WonderDesign

A cartogram deliberately distorts geographic area or distance so a variable such as population, travel time or emissions becomes the map's scale.

Conventional maps give visual power to physical size: large territories dominate before the data is read. A cartogram changes the contract. It may swell a small, crowded region or shrink an enormous, sparsely populated one, trading recognisable outlines for proportional evidence. The unfamiliar geography asks a useful question: what, exactly, deserves to occupy the page?

CartogramRead card

Q1970

WonderScience

The Great Trigonometrical Survey used baselines and triangulation across India, producing geodetic measurements that identified Peak XV as the world's highest known summit.

Beginning in 1802, survey teams carried precision instruments through heat, monsoon and mountain terrain. Peak XV was observed from distant stations on the northern plains, then its height was corrected for Earth's curvature, atmospheric refraction and the instruments themselves. The calculations identified the highest known summit without an ascent. The same survey also served the East India Company's colonial administration, turning terrain into both knowledge and control.

Great Trigonometrical SurveyRead card

Q1971

WonderScience

Marie Tharp transformed shipboard depth soundings into seafloor profiles, revealing the Mid-Atlantic Ridge's central rift valley and powerful evidence for plate tectonics.

Because women were barred from many research cruises, Tharp worked ashore with rows of echo-sounding numbers collected at sea. Her profiles exposed a rift through the Atlantic ridge; Bruce Heezen initially dismissed the tectonic implication, then the earthquake evidence confirmed it. By turning scattered measurements into landscape, she helped a moving planet become impossible to ignore.

Marie TharpRead card

Q1973

WonderClimate

In 1856, Eunice Newton Foote reported that a cylinder rich in carbon dioxide heated more strongly in sunlight and stayed warm longer than ordinary air.

Foote compared gases in paired cylinders fitted with thermometers, set them in sunlight and recorded their temperatures. She reasoned that an atmosphere with more carbon dioxide would give Earth a higher temperature. Joseph Henry presented her paper at a scientific meeting rather than Foote herself. Her apparatus did not isolate the infrared mechanism later measured by John Tyndall, but her conclusion that more atmospheric carbon dioxide could mean a warmer Earth was strikingly prescient.

Eunice Newton FooteRead card

Q1974

DriveSpace

As NASA's first Chief of Astronomy, Nancy Grace Roman built the agency's space-astronomy programme and became a decisive advocate for the telescope later named Hubble.

Roman entered NASA in 1959, when astronomy above the atmosphere was still an institutional possibility rather than a mature programme. She coordinated researchers, priorities and funding for orbital observatories, and steadily advanced the case for a large space telescope. Discovery depends on optics and equations, but also on the person who can keep an audacious instrument alive through years of meetings.

Nancy RomanRead card

Q1976

WonderScience

Chien-Shiung Wu's cobalt-60 experiment showed that weak nuclear interactions violate parity: nature can distinguish a process from its mirror image.

Wu's team aligned radioactive cobalt nuclei at extremely low temperature and counted the electrons emitted during beta decay. They emerged preferentially opposite the nuclear spin, not symmetrically as parity conservation required. The 1957 result confirmed a radical proposal by Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang. That year's Nobel Prize recognised their theoretical breakthrough but did not include Wu or her experimental collaborators.

Chien-Shiung WuRead card

Q1978

DriveScience

Excluded from formal study, Sophie Germain used the name Monsieur LeBlanc to exchange mathematics with leading scholars and later won the Paris Academy's elasticity prize.

Germain obtained lecture notes from the École Polytechnique although women could not enrol, submitting work under a former male student's name. Lagrange sought out the anonymous talent and became an ally. Her number theory advanced a major case of Fermat's Last Theorem; her work on vibrating plates survived repeated rejection to win the Academy's 1816 prize.

Sophie GermainRead card

Q1980

WonderScience

Mary Somerville's 1834 synthesis On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences linked astronomy, physics, chemistry and geology for a broad reading public.

Somerville did not dilute difficult knowledge; she revealed its connections. Her book moved from celestial mechanics to light, electricity, magnetism and the Earth, showing how discoveries in one domain changed questions in another. In reviewing it, William Whewell coined the word scientist. The new noun followed a book that had already demonstrated the unity it needed to name.

Mary SomervilleRead card

Q1982

WonderSpace

Qing-era scholar Wang Zhenyi used a round table, crystal lamp and mirror to demonstrate how the Sun, Earth and Moon align during eclipses.

Wang lived only twenty-nine years, yet wrote on astronomy, mathematics and the education of women. To explain lunar eclipses, she used a round table as Earth, hung a crystal lamp as the Sun and placed a round mirror as the Moon. By arranging the three according to astronomical principles, she turned celestial geometry into a demonstration another observer could reproduce with ordinary things.

Wang Zhenyi (astronomer)Read card

Q1983

WonderBiology

Janaki Ammal used cytogenetics and hybridization to help breed sugarcane suited to Indian conditions, while advancing the study of chromosome numbers in cultivated plants.

India once relied heavily on imported sugar despite growing extensive cane, because many local plants had lower sugar content. At Coimbatore, Ammal studied wild and cultivated relatives and used their chromosome patterns to guide crosses adapted to the climate. Her later atlas with C. D. Darlington turned chromosome counts into a reference map for plant breeding around the world.

Janaki AmmalRead card

Q1984

DriveHealth

Alice Ball isolated injectable ethyl esters from chaulmoogra oil, creating the most effective treatment available for Hansen's disease before antibiotics.

Chaulmoogra oil had long been used against leprosy, but swallowed doses caused nausea and raw injections were poorly absorbed. Working at the University of Hawaiʻi, Ball separated and modified its fatty acids into a form doctors could inject. She died at twenty-four before publishing; the method was promoted under another man's name until her authorship was recovered.

Alice BallRead card

Q1985

WonderScience

Gladys West's satellite-data calculations refined mathematical models of Earth's shape, work that became foundational to the accuracy of GPS.

At the U.S. Navy's Dahlgren laboratory, West programmed computers to process satellite observations and helped refine the geoid, reference ellipsoid and satellite-orbit models. The geoid follows a gravity-shaped mean sea level; the ellipsoid supplies a clean mathematical reference; orbit calculations locate spacecraft relative to Earth. Together, those geodetic frameworks helped make satellite positioning accurate. Decades before a phone could locate itself, her calculations gave satellites a more exact planet to work from.

Gladys WestRead card

Q1986

DriveSpace

Dorothy Vaughan led NACA's segregated West Area Computers, then mastered FORTRAN and prepared her colleagues for NASA's shift from human to electronic computing.

In 1949 Vaughan became NACA's first Black supervisor, managing mathematicians whose hand calculations supported aeronautical research. As electronic computers arrived, she learned FORTRAN and built programming expertise across the group, helping colleagues prepare for new roles as NASA integrated its computing divisions. She later contributed to the Scout launch vehicle. Her distinction was not personal adaptability alone; she turned foresight into collective preparation.

Dorothy VaughanRead card

Q1987

DriveBiography

Mary Jackson petitioned the City of Hampton to attend graduate courses held at a segregated white school, then became NASA's first Black woman engineer in 1958.

Jackson entered Langley's segregated West Area Computing unit in 1951, then moved into experiments in a supersonic pressure tunnel. Her training route required after-hours mathematics and physics classes in a school she was legally barred from attending without special approval. She went on to publish research on airflow and boundary layers at supersonic speeds. Later, she accepted a lower grade to manage equal-opportunity programmes, trading personal rank for the power to widen other people's routes upward.

Mary JacksonRead card

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