#history
11 articles tagged “history”.
Who Invented the Résumé? Leonardo da Vinci — and 500 Years of Strange History
The first résumé was a 1482 sales letter from Leonardo da Vinci that barely mentioned painting. From resumes that listed your weight to the 7.4-second recruiter scan and software that reads before humans do — how a five-century-old document became the strangest thing we write.
Ten Days in May: How the World's Most Used Language Was Born in a Week and a Half
Brendan Eich had about ten days in 1995 to invent JavaScript from scratch. The result became the most widely used language on Earth — and almost every one of its famous quirks, from typeof null to ==,
Everything Outside the Frame: The Quiet Art of Deciding What You Don't Show
A frame is defined less by what's in it than by what you left out. From the 1797 origin of the rule of thirds to the close-ups that once terrified audiences and the 'pan and scan' butchery of widescre
The Great Orientation War: Why Video Still Can't Decide If It's Tall or Wide
Cinema spent a century teaching us video is wide. Then a few billion people put a camera in their pocket and held it upright. The story of 'Vertical Video Syndrome', the ergonomics that beat aesthetic
The Space Between Two Shots: Why Joining Clips Is Where Movies Are Really Made
In 1918 Lev Kuleshov joined one blank shot of an actor's face to three different images, and audiences swore they saw hunger, grief and desire. Nothing changed on the face — everything happened in the
How Humans Learned to Bend Time on Film — From a Galloping Horse to the Slider on Your Screen
In 1878 Eadweard Muybridge slowed time down to win a bet about whether a galloping horse could fly. Everything since — slow-motion replays, time-lapse blooms, the speed slider in your browser — descen
The 256-Colour Survivor: Why the GIF Refuses to Die (and Why It's So Big)
It shows 256 colours, barely compresses, and a five-second clip can be ten times bigger than the same MP4 — yet the GIF is everywhere. Inside the dithering, the patent war that created PNG, the 'JIF'
The Cutting-Room Floor: How Video Editing Went From Razor Blades to Your Browser
Dragging two handles to cut a clip feels like nothing — but it's the oldest, most powerful move in filmmaking. From slicing celluloid with a blade to non-linear editing and a browser tab, and why your
The Year 2038 Problem: How a Single Number Could Break Computers (and Why Time Starts in 1970)
Most computers track time as one ever-growing number of seconds since 1970 — an almost accidental choice that powers the internet and hides a built-in expiry date in 2038. Inside the Epochalypse, leap
Why Is a Text Message 160 Characters? The Strange History of Length Limits
From a German engineer counting sentences on a typewriter to Twitter's 140 and the telegraph's per-word fees — the surprising stories behind the character limits that quietly shape how we write.
Your BMI Was Invented by an Astronomer Who Never Meant It for Your Body
Body Mass Index runs modern medicine — but it began as a 19th-century population statistic by a Belgian stargazer, was renamed by a heart researcher in 1972, and reclassified millions overnight in 199