The Tomb That Gave Its Name to Every Tomb
King Mausolus died in 353 BC. His widow built him a tomb so spectacular that for two thousand years every grand tomb in Europe was called by his name.
Read the story →A theme
Invention
Things made, often by accident, that changed how the world worked.
8 stories in this theme.
The Town Where the Boss Owned the Houses
George Pullman built a model factory town south of Chicago in 1880. He ran it like a benevolent autocracy until 1894, when his workers stopped accepting the rent.
Read the story →The Statue That Was Sold for Camel Loads
The Colossus of Rhodes stood for fifty-four years and lay in ruins for nearly nine hundred. A Jewish merchant from Edessa bought the bronze.
Read the story →What Archimedes Did Two Thousand Years Before Newton
He used balance points to discover the volumes of curved solids, then proved them with strict geometry. The Greeks called it forbidden. He called it the Method.
Read the story →The Decade Chicago Lifted Itself Out of the Mud
In the 1850s the central business district of Chicago was raised four to fourteen feet on jackscrews while continuing to operate. People kept eating at the hotels.
Read the story →The Greek Computer at the Bottom of the Sea
Sponge divers found a corroded lump of bronze in 1901. It took a hundred and twenty years to admit what it actually was.
Read the story →The Smell That Built a City
London's sewer system was funded in eighteen days. It took a heatwave, a river of feces, and a Parliament that could not breathe.
Read the story →The Lighthouse That Outlived Its Own Civilization
For sixteen hundred years the Pharos of Alexandria threw light over a sea. Three earthquakes finished what nothing else could.
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