How The Ruins Of Europe Built A Major Road In America

How The Ruins Of Europe Built A Major Road In America

To say Europe was in ruins after World War II would be using understatement. Cities were destroyed. Villages were obliterated. Societies themselves would take decades of rebuilding. Out of all that rubble, though, emerged one road in New York that’s often overlooked: the arterial FDR Drive.

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You Can Actually Browse the Web on a 27-Year-Old Mac Plus

You Can Actually Browse the Web on a 27-Year-Old Mac Plus

Jeff Keacher wanted to get his Mac Plus, now well into its third decade, online. It had been on BBSes and text-only Lynx via dial-up back in the day, but Keacher wanted to go full TCP/IP. And it worked. He even loaded Gizmodo for us!

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Bell Labs’ 202 Hack: The First Great Jailbreak?

Before laser-printers were even dreamt of, large companies had to use typesetters to render text if it were to look any good—but they were expensive and tightly controlled. Then, in the summer of 1979, engineers at Bell Labs changed all that.

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This Amiga 500 Emulator Is So Awesome

This Amiga 500 Emulator Is So Awesome

If you’re tired of modern computing this morning, how about starting your day using an Amiga 500? Thanks to Google developer Christian Stefansen you can do just that, and it’s awesome.

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The First Watch to Climb Mount Everest

The First Watch to Climb Mount Everest

As a watch is handed down from generation to generation, the stories behind its life make it more and more valuable. And as far as past lives go, this Rolex, currently on display at the Beyer Watch and Clock Museum in Zürich, Switzerland, could top them all. It accompanied Sir Edmund Hillary on one of the most famous expeditions of all time—to the top of the world.

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The First Artificial Hearts Were the Size of a Hot Dog Stand

The First Artificial Hearts Were the Size of a Hot Dog Stand

It might look more like something a street vendor would serve up food from, but, believe it or not, this is one of the first ever artificial hearts.

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How We Barely Beat Soviet Russia to Inventing the Laser

How We Barely Beat Soviet Russia to Inventing the LaserRussians were pioneers in the development of lasers, today a multi-billion dollar industry. Two of them, Alexander Prokhorov and Nikolai Basov, won the Nobel Prize in 1964, along with the American Charles Townes, for the invention of lasers and masers. Even much earlier, in the nineteen thirties and forties the Russian scientist Valentin Fabrikant laid the foundations of physical optics and gas discharges that led to the development of lasers.

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Glass Blowing Set to Jazz Is Absolutely Mesmerizing

Glass Blowing Set to Jazz Is Absolutely Mesmerizing

Videos of glass blowing may be a dime a dozen, but there’s something different about the 1959 Academy Award-winning documentary, Glas. The entire 10-minute short is set to an occasionally eerie mixture of jazz, bebop, and the metallic punctuations of industry at work.

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10 Cold War Weapons That Terrified U.S. Military Intelligence

10 Cold War Weapons That Terrified U.S. Military Intelligence

When US-Soviet relationships were at their frostiest in the 1980s, there was no telling what sort of exotic threat was about to come roaring through Russia’s Iron Curtain. That’s where the Defense Intelligence Agency came in.

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This Aluminum Mecha Taught Apollo Astronauts How to Land on the Moon

This Aluminum Mecha Taught Apollo Astronauts How to Land on the Moon

In the early 1960s, when the Apollo missions were underway and America was hellbent on reaching the moon, NASA researchers faced a nearly endless litany of technical hurdles and engineering obstacles nobody had even dreamed of up to that point. Chief among them: Once you shoot three guys across 238,900 miles across space at an orbiting body with just a fraction of the mass of Earth, how do you put them safely on the surface? That answer: lots and lots of practice in this gangly hardware simulator.

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