From the earliest cave paintings to Egyptian hieroglyphics to Michelangelo’s The Creation of Man on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, art has told stories in narrative form. Swiss writer Rodolphe Töpffer created the first narrative tabloid in 1833, Histoire de M. Jabot, by combining pictures and text in …
Pop-up books are synonymous with early childhood, giving young minds a chance to explore a story through moving parts and artful paper construction. But the history of the pop-up book begins with philosophy and spirituality. The first known examples of the books date back to the 14th century, when a …
Pac-Man creator Toru Iwatani was 27 years old and working for the Japanese video game company Namco when one day he took a hard look at the pizza he was eating. With two slices missing, the pizza resembled a mouth. According to Iwatani, that was the inspiration for the game …
The first pinball machines encouraged tilting. The original version of the game, named Whiffle Board, took its inspiration from a French diversion called bagatelle, which was similar to billiards. Whiffle Board and other games that followed had flat surfaces balanced on four wooden legs. With no flippers to keep the …
Jute has long played its humble part as familiar twine in kitchen drawers, but it’s also been influential in trade, war, and the textile industry. It’s native to the Bengal region of India and to Bangladesh, where it’s still one of that country’s most important exports. It grows in …
Many different explanations have been offered for the origins of April Fool’s Day, some as fanciful as April Fool jokes themselves. One popular though unlikely explanation focuses on the fool that Christ’s foes intended to make of him, sending him on a meaningless round of visits to Roman officials …
Ancient peoples must have needed glasses to aid their vision at some point in life, but the invention did not appear until the close of the thirteenth century. Until that time, those unfortunate people born with defective eyesight, and the aged, had no hope of being able to read …
The birth of geometry (literally “land measurement”) can be traced to ancient Babylon and Egypt around 3000 B.C., as well as other cultures around the globe. But what we think of as geometry today, Euclidian geometry, began around 300 B.C. when Greek mathematician Euclid began accumulating theorems and formulating his …
Only within the last century were chocolate eggs exchanged as Easter gifts. But the springtime exchanging of real eggs—white, coloured, and gold-leafed—is an ancient custom, predating Easter by many centuries. From earliest times, and in most cultures, the egg signified birth and resurrection. The Egyptians buried eggs in their tombs. …
Leonardo da Vinci is often credited—for once, incorrectly—with inventing scissors. The real inventors were the ancient Egyptians, sometime around 1500 B.C. The earliest known scissors were bronze spring cutting devices—a C-shaped handle with two blades on either end. When the ends were squeezed together, the blades cut whatever was placed …
