Engines of Our Ingenuity

Episode: 2955 The Friendship Paradox: Why Your Friends Are More Popular Than You Are.  Today, let's talk about your friends.

Episode: 3408 When Molecules Bump.  Today, a historical injustice.

Episode: 3407 In which we forget that John Jacob Niles gave us some of our best-loved music. Today, who wrote the song?

Episode: 1629 An old book tells about textile engineering and conservatism.  Today, we resist change.

Episode: 1628 The first red cross ambulance.  Today, we care for wounded soldiers.

Episode: 1627 A shocking look at medications in 1892 shows us how far we've come.  Today, we measure how far we've come.

Episode: 2639 The Seattle World's Fair and the Space Needle.  Today, a landmark in the clouds.

Episode: 2927 Dual Inheritance Theory: How our Genes and our Culture are co-evolving.  Today, let's talk about cultural complexity.

Episode: 2999 Hannibal's Grand Strategy: Genius or Failure?  Today, Hannibal at the gates.

Episode: 3406 About the Short Subjects that we see, and that we once saw, before the movie we came to see.  Today, short subjects.

Episode: 1626 Using China's Yellow River to contemplate a flood.  Today, a look at flooding.

Episode: 1625 Telephone inventor Elisha Gray talks about miracles.  Today, a telephone inventor talks about miracles.

Episode: 1624 Garrett A. Morgan: Black American inventor.  Today, thoughts about traffic lights, gas masks, and hair straighteners.

Episode: 2636 Admiral Michael Mullen and Mathematics.  Today, leading the charge.

Episode: 2851 The Lake Breeze Fan: Unplanned Obsolescence.  Today, invention and obsolescence.

Episode: 3404 The rise and fall of ICS, The International Correspondence School.  Today, International Correspondence Schools.

Episode: 1623 The textbooks of J. Dorman and Esther Steele.  Today, we meet two very special teachers.

Episode: 1622 Fingerprints, crime detection, and identification.  Today, I ask, "Who are you?"

Episode: 1621 Motherland: The Stalingrad Memorial.  Today, we visit a really big statue

Episode: 2753 Henry Laurence Gantt.  Today, we chart new territory.

Episode: 2641 Niagara Falls and the development of hydroelectric power.  Today, ghosts of Niagara.

Episode: 2977 Thomas Jefferson, the Maison Carrée, and the Virginia State Capitol.  Today, Thomas Jefferson in love.

Episode: 3403 An old book about telephones reminds of a time before our technologies were not “black boxed.”  Today, we look under the hood.

Episode: 1620 The Indian canoe -- another perfected technology.  Today, birch-bark canoes.

Episode: 1619 Theatre of Machines -- forerunners of engineering handbooks.  Today, the first handbooks.

Episode: 1618 Today we wonder whether something other than one solution exists.  Today, the forgotten lecture in your math course.

Episode: 2631 The Double Slit Experiment.  Today, a mysterious experiment.

Episode: 3402  Absolute Zero: The hunt for the lowest possible temperature.  Today, absolute zero.

Episode: 3401 Samuel Smiles and James Nasmyth: Strange bedfellows.  Today, two views of a polymath.

Episode: 3400 In which we cause water to, like a Hell-broth boil and bubble within a nuclear reactor.  Today, For a charm of powerful trouble ...

Episode: 1617 Reflections on the dicey question of cause and effect in history.  Today, the connections problem.

Episode: 1616 Ivan Polzunov and early Russian steam engines.  Today, the steam engine comes to Russia.

Episode: 1615 On learning to use coal.  Today, we learn why we shouldn't bring coals to Newcastle.

Episode: 2630 Determinism and the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.  Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.

Episode: 3399  In which we see fog dressed in fancy clothes.  Today, we sing the merits of fancy fogs.

Episode: 3398 In which a remarkable engineer, Jerome Hunsaker, begins a career that will help to define American air power.  Today, an engineer and an airplane.

Episode: 3397 In which old magazines returns us to a time when our reading was not limited by what we chose to read.  Today, what is a magazine?

Episode: 1614 Advice on how live our lives from 1836.  Today, we learn how to live our lives -- in 1836.

Episode: 1613 In which Michael Faraday helps us to parse the word, Genius.  Today, we watch genius at work.

Episode: 1612 Trying to tell the story of the worst battle.  Today, we wonder how to tell of history.

Episode: 2627 Clash of the Titans: The Bohr-Einstein Debates.  Today, a clash of titans.

Episode: 3396 How we live with two competing vocabularies – technical and commonplace.  Today, treacherous words.

Episode: 3395 Century Magazine reveals how scientists were viewing the new X-Rays in the year after their discovery.  Today, X-Rays one year old.

Episode: 3394 An old book of WW-I aeroplanes reveals something about technological change in wartime.  Today, an old book with an unintended message.

Episode: 1611 Benjamin Franklin and Cotton Mather: ideologies diverge and converge.  Today, Benjamin Franklin and Cotton Mather.

Episode: 1610 Thoughts on the nature and purpose of experiments.  Today, we wonder why people do experiments.

Episode: 1609 Benjamin Franklin's experiments in thermal radiation.  Today, Benjamin Franklin thinks about theoretical and applied science.

Episode: 2623 Thomas Carlyle and the Working of Free Markets.  Today, economic salvation.

Episode: 3393 In which the 1928 Curtiss Robin airplane was far more than it seemed to be.  Today, a ride in a bland airplane.

Episode: 3392  The Rise of Orientalism and its crescendo in the Roaring ‘20s.  Today, strange happenings in the 1920s.