When Isaac Newton’s Principia was published in 1687, every copy was made by hand. Not written by hand (that era had ended with Gutenberg), but assembled, inked, pressed, folded, gathered, and bound by workers whose skills had been refined over two centuries of printing practice. The text was set letter…

In 1948, the same year that Claude Shannon published his theory of information, an MIT mathematician named Norbert Wiener published a book called Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. The title was new (Wiener coined “cybernetics” from the Greek kybernetes, meaning helmsman or governor), and…

Twelve human beings have walked on the Moon. They traveled a quarter of a million miles, descended to a world with no air, no water, no life, and no sound, and then came home. They spent a combined total of about eighty hours on the lunar surface. They took photographs,…

Christiaan Huygens built the first accurate clock. He discovered the largest moon of Saturn. He developed the wave theory of light. He derived the mathematics of centripetal force, the physics of elastic collisions, and the theory of the compound pendulum. Any one of these achievements would have earned him a…

The numerals you are reading right now (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9) originated in India. The decimal place-value system that makes modern arithmetic possible was developed by Indian mathematicians over a period of several centuries, beginning around the fifth century CE. The concept of zero…

In 1674, a cloth merchant in the Dutch city of Delft peered through a tiny glass bead mounted in a brass plate and saw something that no human being had ever seen before: living creatures too small for the naked eye. He saw them swimming in lake water, wriggling in…

Every modern computer stores information in silicon chips, microscopic transistors etched onto wafers of crystalline material. The process is so refined, so miniaturized, that a chip the size of a fingernail can hold billions of bits. But the first electronic computers had no silicon. They had no transistors. When the…

For centuries, the greatest unsolved problem in science and technology was not about stars or atoms or the nature of matter. It was about knowing where you are. Specifically: knowing your longitude at sea. Latitude (your north-south position) is relatively easy to determine. Measure the angle of the Sun above…

In the year 1267, a Franciscan friar in Oxford sent a massive manuscript to Pope Clement IV. The manuscript, called the Opus Majus (Greater Work), argued that the Catholic Church should embrace the study of mathematics, optics, languages, and experimental science. It contained discussions of lenses, mirrors, the nature of…

We know what Isaac Newton looked like. We know the shape of Euler’s face, the set of Darwin’s jaw, the intensity of Marie Curie’s gaze. We know these things because artists recorded them, using techniques that ranged from oil painting to copperplate engraving, from chalk drawing to the subtle tonal…