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The Ideas We Left Behind – But Still Use Every Day
Imagine you are in an old library on a rainy evening.
The main aisles are full of famous names: Newton, Einstein, Darwin, Curie. Their books are bright, clean and frequently borrowed. But then you turn into a quiet corner, where dusty volumes rest on high shelves. The names on their spines are unfamiliar. The pages are yellowed. The ink is fading.
Inside those forgotten books live ideas, experiments and breakthroughs that once excited the brightest minds of their time – and then quietly disappeared from the public story of science.
The Secret Life of Everyday Objects: How Ordinary Things Quietly Shape Your Life
The moment you wake up, a whole cast of everyday objects quietly steps onto the stage.
Your hand reaches for your phone before your eyes are fully open. In the bathroom, the toothbrush waits in exactly the same place. The coffee mug that you always choose – not because it’s the biggest, but because it feels right in your hand – is already telling your brain, “This is your morning.”
None of these things speak. They do not move by themselves. And yet, they guide your habits, influence your mood, and even change how you think.
Phlogiston: The Beautifully Wrong Theory of Fire
• Phlogiston (17th–18th c.) posited a fire‑like essence released in burning/roasting.
• Collapsed under mass gain in calcination and oxygen’s discovery; replaced by oxidation.
• Left durable assets: quantitative balances, gas studies, and a caution about metaphors that feel right. 🔥 (more…)
Blameless Postmortems: Shipping that Learns
• Blameless postmortems shift focus from who failed to what the system allowed.
• Roots in aviation and safety science (Reason, Dekker); tech popularized via Google SRE.
• Value: faster recovery, better design, higher trust; risks: performative rituals without follow‑through.
• Add action tracking, owner, due dates, and review loops. (more…)
Goodbye, Leaded Gas: A Public‑Health Turning Point
• Tetraethyllead (TEL) added in 1920s to stop engine knock; mass neurotoxin.
• Catalytic converters (1970s) and regulation drove phase‑outs; U.S. ban for on‑road gas by 1996; global near‑elimination by 2021.
• Outcomes: lower blood lead, crime‑rate correlations, cleaner air; future focuses on legacy soils, aviation gas, and battery recycling. 🌍 (more…)
The Optical Telegraph: France’s 18th‑Century Internet
• Claude Chappe launched a tower network in 1790s France; messages hopped 30 km at a time.
• Mechanized shutters/arms encoded alphabetic codes; operators relayed in minutes.
• Killed by electric telegraph (wires, all‑weather) and labor cost; lives on as naval semaphore and in HCI metaphors. 🏰📡 (more…)
Morse Code: The First Global Digital Language
• Morse mapped letters to short/long pulses—a human‑parseable binary.
• Born in the 1830s–40s with Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail, optimized by letter frequency.
• Powered news, finance, railways, and distress signaling (⚠️ SOS).
• Lives on in amateur radio, assistive tech, and aviation IDs; teaches compression & latency thinking.
Caloric Theory: The Useful Wrong Turn in Heat
The Caloric That Melted Away: How a Fictional Fluid Heated the 18th Century
Before energy and entropy reigned, scientists pictured heat as a fluid—caloric—that flowed from hot bodies to cold, conserved like water in pipes (see Caloric theory). The model was wrong; it was also productive. It guided apparatus design, inspired Sadi Carnot’s engine insights (1824), and set the stage for thermodynamics. 🔥 (more…)
Phrenology: The Beautiful Wrong Map of the Mind
Phrenology: The Map That Never Was
In the early 1800s, Franz Joseph Gall and Johann Spurzheim popularized phrenology—the idea that mental faculties live in discrete brain “organs” whose development bulges the skull. Practitioners palpated heads, read bumps, and claimed to diagnose character, talent, even criminality (see Phrenology). 🧠🪨 (more…)
Feature Flags: The Safety Switch of Modern Software
Feature Flags: Shipping Without Fear
Feature flags let teams deploy code dark and turn it on later for chosen users. That simple ability—decouple deploy from release—changed how software moves. Done well, flags are safety rails for experiments and rollouts; done poorly, they’re a tangle that slows everything (see Feature toggle). 🚦 (more…)