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In 1863, a young Army engineer named Henry Martyn Robert was stationed in New Bedford, Massachusetts, getting over a fever he had caught in Panama. Someone asked him to chair a public meeting at the First Baptist Church about defending the harbor. He didn’t know how to run a meeting, and this one …
Most short biographies of Ola Mildred Rexroat open with the same fact: she was the only Native American woman among the 1,074 Women Airforce Service Pilots of the Second World War. It is a good fact and it is true. My argument today is that it has become the wrong headline, or at least an incomplete …
The little plastic square on a bag of bread has a famous origin story. In 1952 an engineer from Yakima, Washington named Floyd Paxton was on a flight and couldn’t close an opened bag of peanuts. He took an expired credit card from his wallet and used a penknife to carve a notch just wide enough for …
In 1579 a London printer named John Charlewood published a book by Thomas Lupton called A Thousand Notable Things of Sundry Sorts. The title page promised that some of its contents were “wonderful, some strange, some pleasant, divers necessary, a great sort profitable, and many very precious.” It …
Double-entry bookkeeping is the strongest claim I can think of for something being boring and important in almost perfect proportion to each other. Nobody chooses it as a hobby. Nobody reads about it for pleasure except, apparently, me, this week. And yet it is one of the genuinely load-bearing …