Earlier this year, a California city removed an unauthorized sign, presumably designed to help delivery drivers or partiers find “Bob’s House.” After noticing the sign, Rancho Santa Margarita officials took it down, brought it to city hall and offered to give it back to its maker … | Continue reading
In the Czech Republic, Elbe river water levels have fallen to reveal submerged “hunger stones” dating back hundreds of years. These boulders record past droughts and resulting famines, and caution citizens — one etched warning reads: “If you see me, weep.” ‘Hunger Stones’ with om … | Continue reading
Following the 1941 aerial attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Navy Bureau of Aeronautics put out a call to action, aimed not at recruiting adult volunteers or teen enlistees but schoolchildren. Across the country, kids were asked to create 500,000 scale aircraft models to help milli … | Continue reading
Shaped like a small tunnel (with an arched top and flat front, back and bottom), the now-classic metal mailbox with a red flag on the side was designed by United States Post Office employee Roy Joroleman in 1915. Left unpatented, the box has become a universal symbol of postal de … | Continue reading
The Santa Ana winds of Southern California are sometimes called the “Devil Winds.” They pick up in the late summer and early fall, sweeping down from the mountains and across the coast. They’re hot and dry, and known for creating dangerous fire conditions. In late November of 198 … | Continue reading
Four times every day, on radios all across the British Isles, a BBC announcer begins reading from a seemingly indecipherable script. “And now the Shipping Forecast issued by the Met Office on behalf of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency,” says the voice over the wire. “Viking, No … | Continue reading
Standing over 150 feet tall, the so-called Tower of Hope on the campus of the Beverly Hills High School started as a bland concrete spire, and was later covered with colorful art. To a casual observer, its purpose is shrouded in mystery — why build such a thing in the first place … | Continue reading
At a glance, the overall pattern formed by these first 25 polar histograms (or: rose diagrams) is clear: orthogonal grids, mostly aligned with cardinal directions in orientation, dominate American cities. There are exceptions, but most streets run north, south, east and west. Geo … | Continue reading
An angry mob hurls bricks and molotov cocktails at riot-geared officers against a backdrop of burned-out cars and fire-scorched buildings on a street strewn with broken glass. The fire is real, as are the uniformed police. Zooming out, though, the reality of the scene begins to c … | Continue reading
In the beginning was the word, and the word was … well, actually, there was just one word … one long, endless word. For thousands of years, in some written languages, there was no space between words. People were expected figure out sentences and clauses while reading aloud. Scri … | Continue reading
Coins, bones, toys and weapons are among the hundreds of thousands of artifacts recently surfaced from the canals of Amsterdam. Meticulously catalogued by location and organized by age, these finds span the Dutch capital’s 800-year history. Their rediscovery and display was made … | Continue reading
From the friendly smiling startup icon to the dreaded bomb icon (signalling a fatal system error), it was the graphics that brought early Macintosh computers to life and set them apart from text-based PCs. But few Mac users computing in the 1980s knew at the time how much of thei … | Continue reading
Between bouts of intense action, World War II soldiers spent a lot time craving ways to occupy themselves and books were a welcome relief during the ongoing conflict. The U.S. Council on Books in Wartime (motto: “weapons in the war of ideas”) saw these as critical, too. They ende … | Continue reading
The announcement by Ford that the iconic, long-abandoned Michigan Central Station in Detroit would be revived brought a wave of press coverage, but something else as well: a series of offers to return artifacts taken from the structure during its decades of disuse. It all started … | Continue reading
When 99% Invisible producer Katie Mingle’s father Jim Mingle retired, he began walking —a lot. He’d always been a walker, but with more time, he took up long-distance, multi-day trips. And even though he’s an American, he mostly preferred to walk in the UK. In fact, over the cour … | Continue reading
Aside from the humans for whom cities are designed, few mammals can rival the raccoon when it comes to thriving in urban environments. Earlier this week, one particularly audacious “trash panda” showed off her tenacity on an building epic climb in the heart of St. Paul, Minnesota … | Continue reading
According to British railway lore, the “slip coach” was born when a rail official was riding in a train car that came an unexpected stop. The rest of the express train kept going while his carriage glided to a gentle halt in front of a midway station. As the story goes, the coupl … | Continue reading
As the U.S. war effort ramped up in the early 1940s, the Navy put out a request for chair design submissions. They needed a chair that was fireproof, waterproof, lightweight and strong enough to survive a torpedo blast. In response, engineer named Wilton C. Dinges designed a chai … | Continue reading
Flag semaphore tends to conjure images of modern-day military messaging — Navy personnel, for instance, waving bright squares of signal fabric on ships at sea. Historically, semaphore gained particular wartime prominence during the French Revolution, when it facilitated fast offi … | Continue reading
Svalbard is a remote Norwegian archipelago with reindeer, Arctic foxes and only around 2,500 humans — but it is also home to a vault containing seeds for virtually every edible plant one can imagine. The mountainside Crop Trust facility has thousands of varieties of corn, rice an … | Continue reading
Dotting the hillsides of Europe, the remnants of a vast long-distance communications network look a bit like anachronistic cell towers. Some of these infrastructural remains date all the way back to the French Revolution, a period of regional turmoil during which a novel approach … | Continue reading
If you live in an American city and you don’t personally use a wheelchair, it’s easy to overlook the small ramp at most intersections, between the sidewalk and the street. Today, these curb cuts are everywhere, but fifty years ago — when an activist named Ed Roberts was young — m … | Continue reading
In Robert Charles Wilson’s science fiction work The Chronoliths, huge monuments begin appearing around the world — but they aren’t built in the present, rather: they are being sent from the future. It is a novel premise, but also reminiscent of a series of monuments to anti-gravi … | Continue reading
The state of Utah has about three million people, and a third of them live in one valley—surrounded on three sides by 7,000 foot mountains, and to the north by a great big salty lake. The valley is home to the state capital, Salt Lake City, and a bunch of other small cities and t … | Continue reading
In an era when two thirds of American residences were home to poisonous wallpapers, an awareness-raising book was published. But the ominously titled Shadows from the Walls of Death did more than warn consumers of health risks — it collected and bound together actual samples of … | Continue reading
The urban environment can look very different depending on the lens we use to examine its contents. “My approach was to observe the stray cart in the way that a naturalist might observe an animal,” explains Julian Montague of his Stray Shopping Cart Project. He notes that he “nev … | Continue reading