I was out shopping Saturday night and I heard a cashier marvel about receiving a $100 bill. Is that the largest bill in circulation? That piqued my curiosity, and I got on my smart phone. According to the official website of the U.S. Department of the Treasury (http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/faqs/Currency/Pages/denominations.aspx), the denominations of currency now in production are
Mention the steam engine, and most people think of James Watt. Actually, the steam engine goes back to the 1st century AD — the earliest known design, the aeolipile, was described by the Greek mathematician and engineer Hero of Alexandria, as recorded in his manuscript Spiritalia seu Pneumatica. On July 2, 1698, British engineer Thomas Savery was
From The Writer’s Almanac, June 23, 2015: “The typewriter was patented on this date in 1868, by Christopher Latham Sholes of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Sholes was a newspaperman, and he was driven to invention out of necessity: His printers went on strike. He and two colleagues set out to invent a machine to print letters on
We as a species don’t like mysteries. We’re always trying to explain what we see, even when we don’t have enough information to understand. For example, have you ever seen an elephant skull? An elephant doesn’t have a bone between its eyes; there’s just one huge hole in the upper middle of the skull where
I thought this would be a fun subject to investigate, espceially since the Federal Reserve is considering raising interest rates. Our dollar sign most likely dates back to 15-century Spain. When King Ferdinand II of Aragon took Spain from the Moors in 1492, he added two ornate columns to his coat of arms because he
Paris had the Eiffel Tower, the U.S. had… Well, there were some outlandish proposals, like a tower with cars attached to thick rubber bands, a forerunner of bungee jumping. Gustave Eiffel himself proposed an even bigger tower. The World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago was being planned without a central landmark. The architect in charge, Daniel
I used to work for a publishing company, Tomart Corporation (www.tomart.com), that specialized in books and magazines on “contemporary collectibles” — items from the past 50 or so years. If that sounds different to you, you’re not alone. When most people think of collectibles, they think of antiques, coins, stamps, and other traditional categories. But
I have always been fascinated by astronomy. I had a modest telescope in high school, but all I could find in it was the Moon. As an adult, I tried again, buying a simple instrument for about $100. I think I saw Venus this time. I’ve investigated the more expensive telescopes that find celestial bodies
It’s a common story in history — how the Indians sold Manhattan island for a few dollars worth of trinkets. As a history nerd who has done some traveling, I know that history is never as simple as recounted in standard history books. Therefore, a segment of the May 24, 2015 edition of The Writer’s
You have heard of the Smithsonian Institution? The man who provided the money for this famous organization was one James Smithson. He is described on page 4 of the June 2014 issue of Smithsonian magazine — He studied coffeemaking, human tears and snake venom, and published 27 scientific papers. His brain, a friend said, was “fruitful