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DriveTechnology

Kerb cuts, the small ramps where a pavement meets the road, were won by disabled campaigners for wheelchair users. They now help anyone pushing a pram, pulling a suitcase or wheeling a trolley.

Kalamazoo, Michigan, installed some of the first kerb cuts in the 1940s, in a pilot scheme proposed by the lawyer and war veteran Jack H. Fischer to help disabled veterans get to work. In the 1970s the Center for Independent Living in Berkeley, California, a group run by disabled people and co-founded by Ed Roberts, pushed for cuts along Telegraph and Shattuck Avenues, creating one of the first continuous step-free routes through an American city. The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 later made kerb ramps a legal requirement on new and altered streets across the United States. In 2017 the policy advocate Angela Glover Blackwell named the wider pattern the 'curb-cut effect': a change made for one group often ends up helping almost everyone.

Smithsonian / Stanford Social Innovation ReviewRead card

DriveHealth

OXO Good Grips kitchen tools, launched in 1990, were designed with thick, soft handles for people whose hands hurt or grip weakly, and proved easier for everyone to use.

Sam Farber, a housewares entrepreneur who had retired, noticed that his wife Betsey, who had arthritis in her hands, struggled to hold an ordinary metal vegetable peeler. He worked with the New York design firm Smart Design, and the first 15 OXO Good Grips tools, including a swivel peeler, were introduced at the Gourmet Products Show in San Francisco in 1990. Their handles were made of soft, non-slip synthetic rubber, wide and oval so they would not twist in a wet or weak hand. The line sold far beyond people with arthritis and became a textbook example of universal design: making everyday things usable by as many people as possible without special adaptation.

Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design MuseumRead card

DriveTechnology

A QR code, the black-and-white square your phone scans, was invented in Japan in 1994 to track car parts in factories.

Masahiro Hara led the small team at the Japanese car-parts company Denso Wave that created the QR code. An ordinary barcode held only about 20 characters, and workers had to scan several of them on each box of parts, so the team wanted a code that held far more and could be read quickly from any angle. Hara has said the grid of black and white squares was inspired by the stones on a Go board. The three large squares in the corners use a pattern of black and white bands chosen because it almost never appears in print, so a scanner can find the code instantly and tell which way up it is. Denso Wave chose not to enforce its patent for standard codes, so anyone could use them, and phone cameras later carried them onto menus, tickets and payment screens.

DENSO WAVERead card

DriveLanguage

Braille is a writing system read with the fingertips: each letter is a pattern of raised dots within a small cell of six.

The system takes its name from Louis Braille, a blind French student who published it in 1829. Each cell has two columns of three dot positions, which gives 63 possible patterns in a space small enough to be felt with one touch of a fingertip. Besides letters, braille has contractions, short patterns for common words that make reading faster, and separate codes for mathematics, science and music. Today there are braille codes for more than 133 languages, including Turkish, which has its own signs for letters such as ç, ğ and ş. Many blind readers also use refreshable braille displays, devices whose small pins rise and fall to show text from a computer or phone. Since 2019 the United Nations has marked 4 January, Louis Braille's birthday, as World Braille Day.

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DriveHealth

The Jaipur Foot, a low-cost artificial foot of rubber and wood made in India since 1968, lets people who have lost a leg walk barefoot, squat and sit cross-legged.

It was designed in 1968 in Jaipur by P. K. Sethi, head of orthopaedics at Sawai Man Singh Medical College, and Ram Chandra Sharma, a local craftsman. Imported artificial feet were expensive and made for people who wore shoes and sat on chairs; they did not let wearers go barefoot, squat, sit cross-legged or work in muddy fields, all part of daily life for many poorer Indians. The Jaipur Foot has a wooden ankle and a rubber core under a vulcanised rubber skin shaped like a real foot. It costs about 45 US dollars to make and lasts roughly two to five years. The charity Bhagwan Mahaveer Viklang Sahayata Samiti (BMVSS) fits it free of charge, with financial help from the Indian government.

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WonderTechnology

Unicode is the shared standard that gives every letter, symbol and emoji its own fixed number, so text written on one device reads the same on another.

Before Unicode, computers used hundreds of separate encodings, so the same number could stand for different letters on different systems, and text in another language often turned into strings of nonsense symbols. In 1987 Joe Becker of Xerox and Lee Collins and Mark Davis of Apple began planning a single universal character set. The Unicode Consortium was incorporated in California in January 1991, and the first volume of the standard appeared that October. Unicode 2.0, in 1996, broke the original 16-bit limit and made room for over a million code points, as the numbers are called, so that historic scripts such as Egyptian hieroglyphs could be added. Today it covers more than 170,000 characters in 175 scripts, though each one still needs a font that can draw it.

Unicode ConsortiumRead card

DriveTechnology

A Repair Café is a free neighbourhood event where volunteers help people mend broken lamps, kettles, clothes and bikes. Things are fixed instead of thrown away, and owners learn repair skills along the way.

The first Repair Café was held in Amsterdam on 18 October 2009, organised by the Dutch journalist Martine Postma as a local sustainability project. It drew so many people that she set up a foundation to help others copy the idea, and there are now more than 2,500 Repair Cafés worldwide, from village halls to city libraries. Visitors bring a broken item and sit with a volunteer, such as an electrician, tailor or bike mechanic, to fix it together; the repair is free, though donations are welcome. Many cafés also record what came in and whether it could be fixed, building evidence about which products are hard to repair.

Repair Cafe movementRead card

DriveArt

In 1931 Harry Beck, a draughtsman who had worked for the London Underground, redrew the Tube map as a diagram: straight lines, fixed angles and evenly spaced stations, ignoring real distances. Passengers found it far easier to read, and most metro maps today follow his idea.

Beck had worked as an engineering draughtsman in the Underground's signals office, drawing electrical circuit diagrams, and he designed the map in 1931 while laid off from that job. The Underground's managers were at first sceptical of an uncommissioned design that did not show real distances, and tried it only in a small pamphlet in 1933. Passengers liked it at once. Beck was paid ten guineas for the artwork and five more for the poster version (a guinea was one pound and one shilling), and he went on revising the map until 1960. Every Tube map now carries a line crediting his original 1931 design.

London Transport Museum / TfLRead card

DriveTechnology

Tactile paving, the raised studs and bars set into pavements and station platforms, lets blind and partially sighted people feel their way. Underfoot or through a cane, the pattern warns of a crossing or platform edge, or shows the way ahead.

Tactile paving was invented in Japan in 1965 by Seiichi Miyake, who was inspired by braille. The first blocks were laid in 1967 on a street in Okayama, near a school for the blind, and they spread across Japan's streets and stations. Other countries followed; Australia fitted them at every venue of the 2000 Sydney Olympics. In the most common system, rows of rounded studs mean 'stop and take care', while long parallel bars mean 'walk this way'. Countries use their own variations, so consistent layout matters: tiles in the wrong place can mislead the people they are meant to guide.

UK Department for TransportRead card

WonderMind

A desire path is the unofficial track people wear into grass or soil by taking the same shortcut again and again. It often shows where planners put a path in the wrong place.

A worn path is evidence that the official route is too long, too roundabout or pointing the wrong way. Some planners use that on purpose. In Finland, park planners are said to visit parks just after the first snowfall, when the existing paths are hidden, to see where people's footprints go. Some desire paths have become major streets: part of Broadway in New York is thought to follow a trail used by the Wecquaesgeek, a Native American people, long before European colonists arrived. Universities and parks sometimes wait to see which tracks appear before deciding where to pave.

Urban design researchRead card

StillnessArt

Kintsugi is the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with lacquer dusted with gold, silver or platinum, so the repaired cracks shine instead of being hidden and become part of the object's history.

The lacquer is urushi, the sap of the Japanese lacquer tree, which hardens slowly in humid conditions; a single repair can take weeks of gluing, filling and polishing before the metal powder is applied. An often-told but unproven story traces the craft to the late fifteenth century, when the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa sent a cracked Chinese tea bowl to China for repair and it came back held together with plain metal staples, prompting Japanese craftsmen to find a more beautiful method. Kintsugi grew up alongside the tea ceremony and wabi-sabi, an aesthetic that values simplicity, age and imperfection. Some repaired bowls came to be prized more than unbroken ones.

Smithsonian Institution / New Orleans Museum of ArtRead card

WonderScience

The 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to three chemists who developed metal-organic frameworks: crystals full of tiny pores that can be designed to trap chosen gases or molecules, such as water vapour or carbon dioxide.

The prize was shared by Richard Robson, Susumu Kitagawa and Omar Yaghi. In 1989 Robson showed that copper ions and a four-armed organic molecule could link into a roomy, diamond-like crystal. In 1997 Kitagawa made frameworks that stayed stable while gases flowed in and out, and he later showed they could flex. Yaghi built very sturdy frameworks and showed they could be designed to order; his team introduced the name 'metal-organic framework' in 1995. The pores give them a huge inner surface: a few grams of some MOFs hold as much surface as a football pitch. They are being used to pull drinking water from desert air, store gases and capture carbon dioxide.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2025Read card

WonderTechnology

Laminated safety glass began with an accident in 1903, when the French chemist Édouard Bénédictus knocked a glass flask off a shelf. It cracked but kept its shape, because a dried film of plastic inside held the pieces together. Car windscreens use the same idea today.

The flask had held cellulose nitrate, an early plastic, which had dried and left a clear film on the inside. Bénédictus thought little of it until he heard about a car accident in which two women were badly hurt by flying glass. He patented glass sandwiched with plastic in 1909 and in 1911 founded the Société du Verre Triplex to make it. It was slow and costly to produce, so carmakers were slow to take it up; one of its first large uses was in the eyepieces of gas masks in the First World War. In the 1930s a clearer, tougher plastic called PVB replaced the old layer, which discoloured with age, and PVB is still used in windscreens today.

Invention historyRead card

WonderScience

In 1965 the DuPont chemist Stephanie Kwolek discovered Kevlar, the fibre now used in bulletproof vests, by insisting on testing a cloudy, runny liquid that a technician did not want to spin. Weight for weight, the fibre that came out was five times stronger than steel.

DuPont was looking for a light but strong fibre to replace the steel in car tyres, expecting a fuel shortage. Kwolek's polymer solution came out thin and cloudy, when such solutions were normally clear and thick, and most chemists would have thrown it away. The technician, Charles Smullen, feared it would clog the spinneret, the nozzle that draws liquid into fibre, but she persuaded him. Kevlar reached the market in the early 1970s and is now used in more than 200 products, from body armour and helmets to cables, tennis rackets and aircraft parts. Kwolek assigned her patents to DuPont, as employees did, and in 1995 became the fourth woman in the US National Inventors Hall of Fame. In retirement she tutored students and encouraged young women into science.

Invention historyRead card

WonderTechnology

The Slinky began in 1943, when naval engineer Richard James, designing springs to steady ship instruments in rough seas, knocked one off a shelf and watched it walk end over end across the floor. His wife, Betty, found its name in a dictionary.

James saw that the spring tumbled gracefully instead of clattering, and he and Betty spent two years turning it into a toy. Betty chose 'slinky', meaning sleek and graceful. Toy shops were unsure, but at a demonstration at Gimbels department store in Philadelphia in November 1945 the first 400 sold in 90 minutes. In 1960 Richard left the business and the family to become a missionary in Bolivia. Betty stayed with their six children, took over the company and ran it for decades. About 300 million Slinkys were sold in the toy's first 60 years, and in 1985 astronauts on the Space Shuttle Discovery filmed one to show how toys behave in space.

Invention historyRead card

WonderTechnology

Play-Doh began as a putty for cleaning coal soot off wallpaper, made by Kutol Products of Cincinnati. When homes switched from coal to gas heating, sales collapsed, until a nursery teacher found that children loved modelling with it.

By the 1950s Kutol was close to bankruptcy, and Joe McVicker had joined to try to save it. His sister-in-law Kay Zufall, a nursery school teacher, read a newspaper article about using wallpaper cleaner for children's art, tried it with her pupils and saw how much they enjoyed it. She persuaded McVicker and his uncle Noah to sell it as a toy, and she and her husband came up with the name Play-Doh. The cleaning detergent was left out, and colours and a new scent were added. In 1956 the McVickers set up the Rainbow Crafts Company to make it. The brand passed through several owners before Hasbro bought it in 1991, and more than two billion cans were sold in its first 50 years.

Invention historyRead card

WonderTechnology

Teflon was discovered by accident in 1938, when the DuPont chemist Roy Plunkett opened a cylinder of gas that weighed full but released nothing. Sawing it open, he found the gas had turned into a white, slippery powder that almost nothing would stick to.

Plunkett was working on new refrigerant gases at DuPont's Jackson Laboratory and had stored tetrafluoroethylene gas as a starting material. Inside the cylinder its small molecules had joined into long chains, a process called polymerisation, forming polytetrafluoroethylene, or PTFE. PTFE resists almost every chemical and is one of the most slippery solids known. Its first important use was in the Manhattan Project, the wartime atomic bomb programme, where it sealed equipment against highly corrosive uranium compounds. DuPont registered the Teflon name in 1945. Non-stick pans came later: in the 1950s the French engineer Marc Grégoire, urged by his wife Colette, coated cookware with it and founded Tefal in 1956.

Invention historyRead card

WonderLanguage

In 1999 Shigetaka Kurita, part of the team behind NTT DoCoMo's i-mode mobile internet service in Japan, drew 176 emoji, each on a grid of just 12 by 12 pixels. It is the best-known early emoji set, and New York's Museum of Modern Art added it to its collection in 2016.

i-mode, launched in February 1999, let people in Japan send email and open simple web pages on their phones, but the screens were tiny and messages were short. Kurita wanted small symbols that could carry information such as the weather, a mood or a place in a single character, and his set covered weather, transport, hearts, faces and everyday objects. He is often called the father of emoji, but his set was not the first: in 1997 a phone from the rival carrier J-Phone already offered 90 small symbols, though it sold poorly. Emoji spread worldwide from 2010, when Unicode, the international standard that gives every character a fixed code so it appears on any device, added them.

Shigetaka KuritaRead card

WonderLanguage

Morse code gives the shortest signals to the letters used most: E, the commonest letter in English, is a single dot and T a single dash, while a rare letter such as Q takes four signals. That made everyday messages quicker to send by telegraph.

Alfred Vail, Samuel Morse's partner, is usually credited with fitting the code to letter frequency. He estimated how often each letter is used by counting the metal type in the cases of a newspaper printer in Morristown, New Jersey, reasoning that printers keep most of the letters they need most. The American version had dashes of different lengths and gaps inside some letters. In 1848 Friedrich Gerke simplified it in Germany, and his version, made an international standard in 1865, is the Morse code still used. Long before anyone spoke of data compression, the code already followed its main idea: spend the fewest signals on what people say most. Radio amateurs still learn it for pleasure.

Morse codeRead card

WonderBiology

The yellow slime mould Physarum polycephalum, a single-celled organism with no brain, can grow a network of tubes between scattered pieces of food that balances short routes, backup links and low cost, much as engineers try to do.

Despite its name, a slime mould is not a fungus: Physarum lives as one giant cell with many nuclei that creeps over damp logs, feeding on bacteria and fungal spores. In a 2010 study in the journal Science, a team led by Atsushi Tero of Hokkaido University placed oat flakes in the pattern of 36 cities around Tokyo and set the slime mould on the spot marking Tokyo. Bright light, which it avoids, stood in for mountains and sea. Within about a day it had linked the oats with a network that closely matched the real Tokyo rail system in efficiency, cost and resistance to breaks. The team then turned the organism's simple local rules into a mathematical model for designing networks.

Physarum polycephalumRead card

WonderEvolution

Convergent evolution happens when unrelated organisms independently evolve similar traits, such as streamlined bodies in sharks, dolphins and extinct ichthyosaurs.

Sharks are fish, dolphins are mammals and ichthyosaurs were marine reptiles, yet all three evolved a similar streamlined, fin-driven body built for fast swimming. The same pattern shows up elsewhere: camera-like eyes, with a lens that focuses light onto a retina, evolved independently in both vertebrates and octopuses, and the extinct Australian thylacine looked strikingly like a wolf despite being a marsupial with no close relation to dogs. Convergent evolution does not mean life is aiming for a fixed set of designs. Natural selection simply favours whatever body plan works best under a given set of physical pressures, so unrelated lineages can arrive at strikingly similar answers.

Convergent evolutionRead card

DriveBiography

Fazlur Rahman Khan, a Bangladeshi-American structural engineer, made very tall buildings cheaper to build with his 'tube' systems, in which a tower's outer walls work together to resist the wind. They shaped Chicago's John Hancock Center and the Sears Tower, now Willis Tower.

Before Khan, most skyscrapers relied on a rigid internal frame of steel columns and beams, and the taller they went, the more steel they needed to keep them from swaying in the wind. In Khan's framed tube, columns are set close together around the outside of the building and tied by deep beams called spandrels, so the whole outer wall acts like one stiff, hollow tube anchored in the ground. Working at the Chicago firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, he developed variations: the John Hancock Center (1969) braces its tube with giant diagonal X-shapes, and the Sears Tower (1973) bundles nine tubes together. Khan was born in Dhaka in 1929 and died in 1982.

Fazlur Rahman KhanRead card

WonderBiography

Zaha Hadid, the Baghdad-born British architect, became in 2004 the first woman to win the Pritzker Prize, architecture's most prestigious award. Her sharply angled and flowing forms, first explored in paintings, widened what contemporary buildings could look like.

For years Hadid was called a 'paper architect': her competition entries, such as The Peak, a club planned for a Hong Kong hillside that she won in 1983, drew wide praise but were not built. She worked out her ideas in large paintings that bent perspective on purpose, treating a building less as a fixed box than as a set of forces in motion. Her first completed building, a fire station for the Vitra furniture company in Weil am Rhein, Germany, opened in 1993. As computer modelling caught up with her drawings, projects such as the Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku (2012) and the London Aquatics Centre, built for the 2012 Olympics, showed her flowing forms at full scale. She died in 2016.

Zaha HadidRead card

WonderArchitecture

The Sagrada Família in Barcelona is the basilica Antoni Gaudí worked on from 1883 until his death in 1926, and it is still being built. Its tree-like columns and forms taken from nature are his, and the Nativity façade and crypt completed in his lifetime are on UNESCO's World Heritage List.

Gaudí took over the project in 1883 from the architect Francisco de Paula del Villar and turned a conventional neo-Gothic church into something new. For an earlier church he had studied arches with hanging chains: a chain hung from two points sags into a natural curve, and turned upside down that curve gives the shape in which a stone arch carries its load purely by compression. He also used ruled surfaces, curved shapes such as hyperboloids that can be built entirely from straight lines, which made complex stonework easier to cut. As an 'expiatory' church, built as an act of atonement, it is paid for by donations and today largely by visitors' tickets, one reason it has taken so long. Pope Benedict XVI consecrated it as a basilica in 2010. Gaudí is buried in its crypt.

Sagrada FamiliaRead card