Topic

Technology

54 formulae on file

Hindenburg: The Gas Nobody Would Sell

In 1937 the largest aircraft ever to fly, with its sister ship, crossed the Atlantic with a dining room, a promenade, and a smoking lounge. It had been planned around helium, the gas that lifts and cannot burn. It flew on hydrogen.

Nuvistor 555 Timer

Glorious, and absurd... I'm saying that as a compliment. Eric Schlaepfer, who posts as TubeTimeUS, built a 555 timer out of eight tetrode nuvistors, and Hackaday covered it this month…

The Careful Mistake

In November 1988 a graduate student wrote a program to answer a simple question: how big is this internet we have built? It stole nothing. It deleted nothing. Its entire purpose was to exist, spread, and count.

The Computer That Fits In A Mint Tin

Salim Benbouziyane crammed a working computer into an Altoids tin, keyboard included. Comfortable? He says no, the keys barely travel. I'll take a cramped keyboard I can carry in a…

Rogue Makers and Air Pirates

Now that's a theme name with some swagger to it. Clockwork Alchemy runs Rogue Makers and Air Pirates for three days in Redwood City, October 16 to 18, and I'd…

The Two Languages That Lost a Mars Probe

On 23 September 1999, a NASA orbiter arrived at Mars after nine months and 400 million miles. Nothing aboard it was broken. Everything worked. It fired its engine on schedule, behaved impeccably — and passed behind the planet forty-nine seconds early.

The Tower That Told No One

In the summer of 1978, the engineer who designed a brand-new Manhattan skyscraper sat down to do a piece of arithmetic nobody had asked him to do. The building was finished. It was occupied. And the answer said it could be brought down by a storm New York could expect roughly every sixteen years.