Quotes

Which brings us at last to the niche in the wall and the world-changing object it contained: the telephone. When Alexander Graham Bell invented

when Joseph Aspdin, a humble bricklayer in Leeds, in the north of England, invented portland cement, so called to suggest that it was as

They were, for one thing, so smitten with the idea of progress that they invented things without having any idea whether or not those

The important thought to hold on to is that for the first 99 percent of our history as beings we didn’t do much of

The short answer is that no one knows why agriculture developed as it did. Making food out of plants is hard work. The conversion

Out of the thirty thousand types of edible plants thought to exist on Earth, just eleven—corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, cassava, sorghum, millet, beans, barley,

The worry is that as crops are engineered to a state of uniform genetic perfection, they will lose their protective variability. When you drive

Chicago got its first lobster in 1842, brought in from the East Coast in a refrigerated railway car. Chicagoans came to stare at it

In the autumn of 1850, in Hyde Park in London, there arose a most extraordinary structure: a giant iron-and-glass greenhouse covering nineteen acres of

the Reverend Thomas Bayes, from Tunbridge Wells in Kent, who lived from about 1701 to 1761. Bayes was by all accounts a shy and