Science & Technology

John Herschel Glenn Jr was the first American to orbit the Earth on February 20th 1962.

The designer of the Colt revolver, the most celebrated killing machine in the history of the Wild West, died on January 10th 1862, aged 47.

Jean-Andre Prager demonstrates the wide-ranging impact of Darwinism. This essay was the winner of the Julia Wood Prize for 2011.

Jad Adams looks back to a time when, wracked by industrial decline, a nation embraced the world’s first supersonic airliner.

The Apple founder, who died on 5th October, attributed much of his success to a historically-based course he took in calligraphy.

Lauren Kassell reveals how the casebooks, diaries and diagrams of the late-16th-century astrologer Simon Forman provide a unique perspective on a period when the study of the stars began to embrace modern science.

‘Have the authors of a two-penny weekly journal, a right to make a national inquiry'? 18th-century governments thought not and neither did the newspapers’ readers of the time.

Richard Cavendish describes the maiden voyage of the Queen Mary on May 27th, 1936.

Richard Cavendish remembers Ivan Pavlov who died on February 27th, 1936. Pavlov won the Nobel Prize for physiology in 1904.

To conclude his series on the opportunities offered to historians by new technology, Nick Poyntz looks at how recent developments may help to bridge the gap between academic and public history.