Francis Gooding

Like​ many other important scientific inventions, the first true recipes for gunpowder were devised in China. The classic cocktail of sulphur, saltpetre and charcoal was known from at least the ninth century CE, though Taoist alchemists, searching for both gold and immortality, had by then been aware of similar preparations for hundreds of years. A very early reference appears in the

Lacing up​ a Steenbeck editing desk to watch a reel of 35mm film is a delicate process. With the reel placed flat on the left-hand friction plate, you thread the filmstrip carefully around a pinball-like maze of rollers and sprockets. Arms clack into place, holding the strip in front of the bulb while a mirrored prism reflects the illuminated image onto the small viewing screen....

‘Ihave a neolithic kind of intelligence,’ Claude Lévi-Strauss remarked in Tristes Tropiques (1955), his luminous reminiscence of anthropological fieldwork in Brazil. He didn’t mean he was a caveman. His own gloss was that his intellectual affinities were closer to the people anthropologists usually studied than to the people doing the studying. But there’s an...

Machu​ Picchu is not very old. Despite giving the impression of great and mysterious antiquity, the construction of the site was roughly contemporary with Brunelleschi’s completion of the duomo in Florence. Built as a royal estate for the Inca emperor Pachacuti, the citadel was occupied only for a century or so before being abandoned during the Spanish Conquest; it was dissolving into...