Technology: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 6

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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

DriveTechnology

A Passive House is a building designed like a thermos: carefully sealed, insulated and ventilated so it wastes very little energy.

Passive House is a performance standard, not an architectural style: any building that meets its measured limits can qualify. The idea grew from a 1988 conversation between Bo Adamson of Lund University in Sweden and the German physicist Wolfgang Feist. Four terraced houses built in Darmstadt-Kranichstein, Germany, in 1990–91 are usually cited as the first examples. Feist founded the Passivhaus Institut in Darmstadt in 1996 to certify buildings. The best-known limits are a yearly heating demand of no more than 15 kilowatt-hours per square metre of floor, and an airtightness test in which a fan pressurises the building and no more than 0.6 of its volume of air may leak out in an hour. Fresh air comes in through a ventilation unit that warms it with the heat of the stale air going out.

Passive House InstituteRead card

DriveTechnology

Mumbai's dabbawalas carry home-cooked lunches to offices by suburban train every working day and bring the empty boxes back, guided by codes painted on each box instead of addresses.

A dabba is a lunchbox, and a dabbawala is 'one who carries a box'. The service began in 1890, when Mahadeo Havaji Bachche started delivering lunches in Bombay with about a hundred men, for office workers who had long journeys and wanted food from home. Today 4,500 to 5,000 dabbawalas move between 175,000 and 200,000 lunchboxes a day. Each box passes through several hands: it is collected from a kitchen, sorted at a station, carried by train, sorted again and delivered, using letters, numbers and colours painted on the lid. A famous claim says they make one mistake in six or eight million deliveries, but it came from a Forbes journalist's extrapolation from the association president's estimate of 'maybe once every two months', not from any audit.

Harvard Business School / RICSRead card

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.

Science Museum / SmithsonianRead card

WonderTechnology

A hyperlink lets one document open into another, turning web reading into a network of chosen paths.

In 1945 the American engineer Vannevar Bush imagined a desk-sized machine he called the Memex, which would let a reader join pages of microfilm into personal 'trails', long before computers could do anything like it. Ted Nelson, who read Bush's essay, is credited with coining the term 'link' in the mid-1960s at the start of his Project Xanadu, and in 1968 Douglas Engelbart's team showed working links between pieces of text on a real computer in a famous live demonstration. Tim Berners-Lee, working at the CERN physics laboratory near Geneva, joined the idea to the internet: he proposed the World Wide Web in 1989, and in 1991 pages written in his HTML language began linking to one another, so a decades-old idea became something anyone with a browser could click.

CERN / Web historyRead card

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

WonderTechnology

OpenStreetMap is a free map of the world built by volunteers since 2004. Anyone can add or correct a road, path or building, and anyone can use the data, from phone apps to aid agencies.

Steve Coast started OpenStreetMap in 2004 while studying at University College London. Britain's national mapping agency, the Ordnance Survey, did not release its data freely, so he cycled round Regent's Park with a GPS tracker and entered the first street himself that December. Volunteers around the world followed, walking and cycling streets or tracing satellite photos. The project proved its worth after the 2010 Haiti earthquake, when volunteers mapped the roads, buildings and camps of Port-au-Prince in about two days, giving aid groups one of the most detailed maps of the city then available. Humanitarian mappers have done the same after many disasters since.

OpenStreetMap FoundationRead 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

WonderScience

eBird is an online database where birdwatchers log which birds they saw, where and when. Together, their checklists form a worldwide record that scientists use to track migration and rising or falling bird numbers.

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the National Audubon Society launched eBird in 2002, when most birdwatchers still kept notes on paper. Use grew fast once sightings could be entered on a phone in the field, and in May 2021 the database passed one billion bird observations. Because each checklist also records how long the observer looked, researchers can turn millions of casual outings into maps showing where each species is found in every week of the year. These maps are used to study how climate change and habitat loss are shifting migration timing and ranges, and to plan conservation.

Cornell Lab of OrnithologyRead 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

WonderTechnology

Almost everything sent over the internet travels by packet switching: data is cut into small packets, each carrying its address, which can take different routes across the network and are put back together at the destination.

Older telephone networks reserved a whole line from one end to the other for the length of a call, even during silences. With packet switching, many users share the same links, and if one route fails, packets go another way. The idea came independently from two people in the 1960s. At the RAND Corporation in the United States, Paul Baran designed it in the early 1960s for a network that could survive damage in a war. From 1965, Donald Davies at Britain's National Physical Laboratory reached a similar design to let many computer users share lines efficiently, and coined the term packet switching. His laboratory's network ran from 1970, and his ideas helped shape ARPANET, the forerunner of the internet.

Internet Society / National Physical LaboratoryRead card

WonderLanguage

Morse code spells each letter as a pattern of short and long signals, so a message can travel as clicks, tones, flashes of light or electrical pulses. From the 1840s it let the electric telegraph carry messages over long distances.

Samuel Morse's first telegraph code, around 1837, used only numbers, which stood for words in a codebook. His collaborator Alfred Vail expanded it in 1840 to letters, giving the most common letters the shortest signals; he judged which were most common by counting the metal type in a local newspaper's print shop. In 1848 the German telegraph pioneer Friedrich Gerke simplified the code, and his version became the basis of the International Morse code agreed in Paris in 1865. Ships sent distress calls, including the famous SOS, in Morse until satellite-based systems replaced it in 1999, but radio amateurs still use it and navigation beacons still identify themselves in Morse.

Library of Congress / Smithsonian InstitutionRead card

WonderTechnology

The Eiffel Tower can stand up to about 15 centimetres taller in summer than in winter, because its iron expands in the heat.

Iron expands as it warms and shrinks as it cools, and the tower's frame contains 7,300 tonnes of it, 18,038 pieces joined with 2.5 million rivets. Sunlight rarely heats it evenly: on a clear day the side facing the sun expands more than the shaded side, so the top can lean up to 18 centimetres away from the sun, returning as the air cools. Wind moves it too, swaying the top by up to 9 centimetres. Gustave Eiffel's company built the tower for the 1889 World's Fair in Paris. To keep the iron from rusting, it is repainted every seven years with about 60 tonnes of paint, and it has been completely repainted at least 19 times.

Structural engineering (thermal expansion)Read card

WonderTechnology

IBM's 3380 disk drive, launched in 1980, was among the first to store more than a gigabyte: 2.52 gigabytes in a cabinet about the size of a refrigerator.

IBM called machines like the 3380 direct access storage devices: disk units that let a mainframe, the large central computer of a bank, airline or government office, jump straight to any record instead of winding through a tape. Each 3380 held two sealed disk assemblies with four independent read-write arms, and prices at launch ran from $81,000 to $142,200, depending on the model. It stayed in production for more than 15 years and became one of the most successful products in IBM's history. Today a microSD card about the size of a fingernail can hold a terabyte, roughly 400 times as much, for a tiny fraction of the price.

Computing history (IBM storage)Read card

WonderTechnology

Some Roman concrete has stood in seawater for nearly 2,000 years, and recent research suggests certain Roman mixes could seal their own small cracks.

Roman builders mixed lime with rubble and volcanic ash, often from around Pozzuoli near Naples. In 2017 a team led by the geologist Marie Jackson showed that seawater seeping through Roman harbour walls slowly grows new minerals inside them, binding the concrete more tightly over time. A 2023 study led by Admir Masic at MIT examined the small white lumps of lime in Roman concrete, long dismissed as a sign of careless mixing, and concluded that they come from mixing with quicklime while hot. When water later seeps into a crack, it dissolves some of this lime, which crystallises again and can fill the gap. Having no steel bars to rust, Roman concrete also escapes a main cause of decay in modern concrete. The Pantheon's dome in Rome, nearly 1,900 years old, is still the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world.

Materials science (Roman concrete)Read card

WonderArt

The Statue of Liberty was the shiny reddish-brown of new copper when it was unveiled in 1886. Its famous green is a patina, a thin crust that formed over about thirty years as the copper reacted with air and moisture.

The statue was designed by the French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi as a gift from the people of France to the United States, and it stands on an iron framework designed by Gustave Eiffel. Its skin is made of copper sheets only about 2.4 millimetres thick, roughly two pennies placed together, hammered into shape by hand. As the copper reacted with rain, sea air and city smoke, it grew a green layer of copper salts. According to the US National Park Service, it took about thirty years for the whole statue to turn green. The patina is not damage: it seals the surface and protects the copper beneath from further corrosion.

Metallurgy (Statue of Liberty)Read card

WonderArt

Chinese porcelain was prized in Europe for centuries before anyone there could make it, which is why English still calls fine tableware 'china'. The secret was cracked in Saxony in 1708 by Johann Friedrich Böttger, a young alchemist held captive to make gold, working with the scientist Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus.

Böttger had boasted that he could turn base metal into gold, so Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, kept him under guard from 1701 and set him to work. The breakthrough was shared. Tschirnhaus had long experimented with local clays and minerals, including kaolin, the white clay that is the key to true hard porcelain, but he died suddenly in October 1708. Böttger, apparently working from his notes, told the king within a week that he could make porcelain. Production began at the Albrechtsburg castle in Meissen in 1710, where the secret of this 'white gold' could be guarded from rival courts.

History of ceramics (porcelain)Read card

WonderArt

The oldest surviving photograph taken with a camera is a blurry view of rooftops from an upstairs window at Le Gras, Nicéphore Niépce's country house in France. It was made in 1826 or 1827, and the exposure lasted many hours, perhaps days.

Niépce called his process heliography, 'sun writing'. He coated a pewter plate with bitumen of Judea, a natural asphalt that hardens in light, and placed it in a camera obscura, a simple box camera, pointed out of the window. Where light fell, the bitumen hardened; the rest was washed away with a mixture of lavender oil and white petroleum, leaving the image. Sunlight falls on both sides of the buildings, so the exposure was long: traditionally put at about eight hours, though a modern researcher who recreated the process concluded it must have lasted several days. The plate is kept at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, in a sealed, oxygen-free case.

History of photography (Niépce)Read card

WonderSpace

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, a new telescope in Chile, released its first images in June 2025. In about ten hours of test observations it found 2,104 asteroids no one had seen before, and its first wide views captured some 10 million galaxies.

Rubin stands on Cerro Pachón in the Chilean Andes. It pairs an 8.4-metre mirror with the largest digital camera ever built, a 3,200-megapixel instrument about the size of a small car. It is named after the American astronomer Vera Rubin, whose studies of how galaxies spin gave key evidence for dark matter. In 2026 it began its ten-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time, photographing the whole southern sky every few nights to catch anything that moves, brightens or fades. For scale, all other observatories together discover about 20,000 new asteroids a year; Rubin found 2,104 in its first ten hours, seven of them near-Earth asteroids.

NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin ObservatoryRead card

WonderTechnology

In 2025 an AI model designed complete genomes for bacteriophages, viruses that kill bacteria, and 16 of the designs worked as real viruses in the lab. The team described them as the first viable phage genomes written by AI.

The team, led by Brian Hie and Samuel King, used Evo, an AI model trained on millions of DNA sequences from bacteria and phages, much as chatbots learn from text. They trained it further on about 14,500 genomes from one family of small phages and asked it to write new versions of phiX174, a well-studied phage whose genome is only about 5,400 DNA letters long. Of 302 designs they built, 16 infected and killed E. coli bacteria, and some multiplied faster than the natural phage. A mixture of the AI-designed phages also overcame bacteria that had become resistant to phiX174. The results were first shared as a preprint, a paper not yet reviewed by other scientists. Phage therapy is one hoped-for answer to antibiotic-resistant infections.

Arc Institute / Stanford (2025)Read card

WonderHistory

The Ghost Army was a secret US Army unit of artists, designers and sound engineers that fooled German forces in 1944 and 1945 with inflatable tanks, recorded battle sounds and fake radio traffic. It staged more than twenty deceptions and is thought to have saved thousands of lives.

Officially the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, the unit had about 1,100 men, many recruited from art schools and advertising agencies, and could pose as forces of up to 30,000. They inflated rubber tanks, trucks and artillery, played recordings of armoured columns through huge loudspeakers that carried for kilometres, and sent fake radio messages for the enemy to intercept. The fashion designer Bill Blass and the painter Ellsworth Kelly were among them. Their work stayed secret until 1996. In 2022 Congress awarded the unit the Congressional Gold Medal, one of the highest civilian honours in the United States, and it was presented at a ceremony on 21 March 2024, when only a handful of veterans were still alive.

Military historyRead card

WonderTechnology

In 1983 an Air Canada Boeing 767 ran out of fuel at 12,500 metres because its fuel had been worked out in pounds instead of kilograms. The pilots glided it down and landed on a disused runway that had become a racetrack.

Canada was switching to metric units, and the new 767 was among the first Air Canada planes to measure fuel in kilograms. The ground crew used the conversion factor for pounds, so the plane took off with less than half the fuel it needed, and both engines stopped over Manitoba. Captain Bob Pearson happened to be an experienced glider pilot, and first officer Maurice Quintal remembered a former air force base at Gimli where he had once served. One of its runways was now a drag-racing strip, with a race day under way. The nose wheel collapsed on landing and the plane stopped before reaching the people there. Nobody was seriously hurt, and the aircraft, nicknamed the Gimli Glider, flew for Air Canada until 2008.

Aviation historyRead card