A striking technology described in Strand, April 1899: The speck is a bundle of hay descending along a wire over a lake in Western Norway.

The Norwegians, who live for weeks and months in the summer on the great heights on either side of their beautiful valleys, send down milk, cheese, hay, etc. to the farms below by suspending them on inclined wires fastened at one end firmly to the ground and at the other to some point on the rocks above.

The snap-shot shows a bundle of hay on its way from a great height on one side of the lake to the farm on the other side. It sped along, the friction causing it to shed sparks in all directions, and was timed to take forty-four seconds.

The editors add: “If the bundle be closely examined the constriction caused by the cord holding it together is distinctly visible.”

Conventional stairs are somewhat extravagant: Because users alternate their steps (1), half of each tread goes unused. In close quarters, floor space can be conserved by omitting these unused portions (3), permitting a slope as high as 65 degrees without sacrificing the depth of the treads (2).

Because each tread “overlaps” those that precede and follow it, an alternating staircase might require only half the horizontal space of conventional stairs, and users can face forward when descending, where a ladder would require them to turn. The disadvantage is that they’re steep, and users must take care to begin each traverse with the correct foot. For that reason these stairs may not be safe for children or the elderly.

Below: In the Orange Tower, built in Carpentras at the start of the 14th century, builders set alternate risers at a diagonal to achieve an ascending slope of 45 degrees. “We will recognize that it is never subtlety that our medieval architects lack. But these latter examples only provide service stairs.”

(Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, Dictionary of French Architecture from 11th to 16th Century, 1856.)

In a 1958 essay, economist Leonard Read argued that no one knows how to make a pencil. In a complex economy, the components of this simple implement — cedar, lacquer, graphite, ferrule, factice, pumice, wax, and glue — are contributed by a network of specialists who never meet. “There isn’t a single person … including the president of the pencil company, who contributes more than a tiny, infinitesimal bit of know-how.”

As if to disprove this idea, student Thomas Thwaites set out in 2009 to build a toaster from scratch. He bought a £3.94 consumer unit and reverse-engineered it, hoping to assemble his own model using original sources of steel, mica, plastic, copper, and nickel. He describes the project here:

After watching Inuit drag a heavy boat out of the water on “rollers” of inflated seal hides, California inventor William Albee devised a baglike tire 5 to 9 feet long and 2.5 feet in diameter. Tires that size can gain traction on almost any terrain, and when inflated to a low pressure they’ll envelop large obstacles without suffering damage.

Strikingly, Life noted, “They will also envelop a man without damaging him, spreading the 3,000 pounds of weight over such an area that the running over gives him about the same sensation as a vigorous massage.”

The Navy and Army experimented with the tires in 1951; eventually they were adopted by the oil industry, which uses them to traverse the tundra of Canada and Alaska without getting stuck or damaging vulnerable plants.

When Qantas’ last Boeing 747 departed Australia to retire in the United States, it drew a kangaroo with its flight path.

The River Welland used to split into two channels in the heart of Crowland, Lincolnshire, and in 1360 the townspeople arranged to bridge it with this unique triple arch, which elegantly spanned the streams at the point of their divergence, allowing pedestrians to reach any of the three shores by a single structure. The alternative would have been to build three separate bridges.

The rivers were re-routed in the 1600s, so now the bridge stands in the center of town as a monument to the ingenuity of its inhabitants. It’s known as Trinity Bridge.

From the ArtefactPorn subreddit.

An intriguing photo caption from A Mind at Play, Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman’s 2017 biography of AI pioneer Claude Shannon:

Shannon set four goals for artificial intelligence to achieve by 2001: a chess-playing program that was crowned world champion, a poetry program that had a piece accepted by the New Yorker, a mathematical program that proved the elusive Riemann hypothesis, and, ‘most important,’ a stock-picking program that outperformed the prime rate by 50 percent. ‘These goals,’ he said only half-jokingly, ‘could mark the beginning of a phase-out of the stupid, entropy-increasing, and militant human race in favor of a more logical, energy conserving, and friendly species — the computer.’

Shannon wrote that in 1984. He died in 2001.

heuretic
adj. of or relating to discovery or invention

Sea travel is not kind to teapots, which tend to drip when pouring, tip over on tables, and chip in storage. Entrepreneur Robert Crawford Johnson solved all these problems by designing a pot in the shape of a cube, with the spout tucked into a corner. His invention, patented in 1917, was quickly adopted by Cunard, and it was still in use on the Queen Elizabeth 2 as late as 1968.