Technology episodes
19 episodes so far
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18 min
Playing with Fire: How Mastering Heat Created Possibilities
Why what a civilization could build was set by how hot it could make a fire, from the first kilns to fusion reactors
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15 min
Learning from Disaster: How the Science of Material Failure Keeps Us Safe
What collapsing bridges, cracking ships and falling jets taught engineers about why things break
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21 min
Written Down: How Humans Learned to Store Knowledge Outside the Brain
From clay tablets to the cloud, the epic story of humanity's war against forgetting
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26 min
Taming Lightning: How Electricity Became Central to Our Existence
How a party trick with amber became the force everything now depends on, and why the grid is changing again
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21 min
Spun and Woven: The Long History of Cloth, from Flax to Factories
From the first twisted fiber to global supply chains, cloth is the hidden thread running through all of human history
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18 min
The History of Stuff: The Emergence and Impact of Material Science
From bronze and iron to silicon and graphene, the hidden story of the substances vital to us
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16 min
The Wired Battlefield: The Telegraph and the First Information War
A president reading battlefield dispatches at midnight, a chancellor who edited a telegram into a war, and an empire that wired itself around the globe
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19 min
Why the Ship Held Its Breath: The Strange Science of Tuned Mass Dampers and Structures That Fight Vibration
From swaying skyscrapers to the Millennium Bridge wobble, the engineering of taming motion we were never meant to feel
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20 min
The Alchemy of Code: Secret Writing from Caesar to Quantum Computers
A Roman general's shifted alphabet, the machine Germany believed no one could break, and the quantum computers that could unlock today's secrets
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22 min
The Empire of Cold: Ice Kings, Refrigerators and the Cold Chain
A Bostonian mocked for shipping ice to the tropics, a doctor who built a cold machine for his fever patients, and the hidden cost of keeping the world chilled
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20 min
The Myth of the Lone Genius: Rivals, Accidents and the Real Story of Invention
Two telephone patents filed on the same day, a rubber recipe found on a hot stove, and a garage club where personal computers were born
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20 min
The Wilderness of Data: Why Information Has Always Meant Power
A clay receipt, a king's survey that left nothing out, and a business model that knows what you worry about at two in the morning
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14 min
The Internet's Address Book: Who Runs the Domain Name System
One text file at Stanford grew into the system behind every web address, and a fight over who controls it
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16 min
The Clockwork Universe: Learning to Measure the Hours, and Then to Live by Them
Monks who needed a bell, railroads that reset the clocks of a continent, and a cesium atom that keeps your phone on time
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18 min
Concrete Dreams: How Liquid Stone Became the World's Most-Used Material
From Roman self-healing domes to a cement industry that emits 8% of global CO2, the story of the planet's most-used building material.
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17 min
Thirteen Thousand Miles of Wire: The Hidden Lives of Undersea Cables
Beneath the waves, fragile lines no thicker than a garden hose carry nearly all of the world's internet traffic.
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14 min
From Clay to Silicon: The Evolution of Writing Technologies
Tracing humanity’s journey from ancient tablets to today’s digital text.
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16 min
From Morse to 5G: The Hidden Networks That Connect Our World
Picture this: You're standing in a field in rural Australia in 1872, watching workers string a thin wire across the v...
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23 min
The Power and Peril of Artificial Intelligence in Everyday Life
This morning, you woke up to an alarm set by your smartphone—a device that learned your sleep patterns and gently rou...
Hear any of them in full
Every episode is in the Compound app; Compound+ opens the whole library.