17th December 2019

The Black Void

MIT engineers have reportedly discovered a new material that is ten times darker than any previously known black substance. The ultra-black substance is capable of absorbing up to 99.965% of any light that strikes, causes anything coated with the substance to take on the appear

2nd December 2019

From Mines to Mainstream: The History of Denim

Open any closet in the United States and you’re almost guaranteed to find a pair of jeans hanging there. But denim was not always as ubiquitous as it is today. In its early days, it was considered a working-class material fit only for miners, cowboys, and other rough professions

19th November 2019

Hoverboarder Breaks World Record with Trip Across English Channel

On Bastille Day in 2019, the crowd along the Champs-Elysees was treated to a unique spectacle as a working hoverboard soared overhead. Piloted by French inventor and former jet-skiing champion Franky Zapata, the show was a prelude to something even more ambitious: a crossing of

11th October 2019

Flame Throwing Drones Officially on the Market

Flame throwing drones? The concept might sound like something out of a Terminator movie or dystopian novel, but they're real - and you can actually purchase one for yourself. Developed by flamethrower company Throwflame, the attachment for personal drones, called the Throwflame

3rd October 2019

When Britain Went Atomic

On October 3, 1952, the world’s nuclear powers welcomed a third member into its ranks: the United Kingdom. Known as Operation Hurricane, the first test of a British atomic device was conducted in the Monte Bello Islands of Western Australia and the explosion left a saucer-shaped

Thomas • 15th April 2019

Ring of Silence

Although current noise-mitigating barricades, called baffles, are capable of dulling the sound of traffic or focusing the sound of music, they often fall short when it comes to situations where airflow is also critical. Tarmac workers, for example, must wear headphones if they w

Thomas • 12th April 2019

A New Class of Mechanism

Welcome to Thomas Insights — every day, we publish the latest news and analysis to keep our readers up to date on what’s happening in industry. Sign up here to get the day’s top stories delivered straight to your inbox. Engineers at Brigham Young University have unveiled a new technology that would allow them to build complex mechanisms into the exterior of a structure without taking up space below the surface. Dubbed “developable mechanism,” these new mechanisms are made with materials that c

Thomas • 27th December 2018

Artificial Intelli-sense

The world of robotics has been picking up steam lately with the announcement of new innovations in automation and artificial intelligence becoming almost a weekly occurrence. Robots, once considered to be possible only in the minds of science fiction writers, may soon be

Thomas • 26th December 2018

The Birth of the Microphone

With the introduction of the microphone in the 20th century, ideas could be broadcast immediately around the world, bridging the gap between people and nations across the globe. The story of the microphone is a reflection of the rapid technological process that defined the 20th

Thomas • 14th December 2018

First Flight to Venus

The great Space Race of the mid-20th century was a driving force behind the technological explosion of the period. Progress began picking up speed on August 2, 1955, when the Soviet Union announced their intent to keep up with the satellite launches of the United States. The bit

Thomas • 12th December 2018

The City of the Future

We live in the age of smart: smartphones, smartwatches, smart-TVs, and even smartcars; but what if we could expand our intelligence? What if we could build an entire smart city? That’s the very question that New York-based Sidewalk Labs seeks to answer. Founded in 2015 as a sub

Thomas • 6th December 2018

Bye-rofoam: The End of the Styrofoam Cup?

Made from polystyrene, which was invented by the Dow Chemical Company in 1947, styrofoam quickly became the go-to application for cushioning, packaging, and yes, styrofoam cups. First shipped out in 1960 by the Dart Container Corporation, Styrofoam cups have been a staple of co

Thomas • 15th November 2018

The World's First Microprocessor

In 1969, Intel was approached by Busicom, a Japanese calculator company, and commissioned to help in the design of chips for a new computerized calculator. Intel engineers Ted Hoff and Stanley Mazor began work on a series of four chips that could be used in the calculator: a 25

Thomas • 31st October 2018

Dye-ing for a Change

Dyeing has been a staple of the textile industry for virtually as long as textiles have been produced. For most of human history, dyes were painstakingly extracted from plants or animals and then manually applied to textiles. However, around the mid-19th century, advances in

Thomas • 24th October 2018

How Revolutions Came to Music

Like many American inventions, we owe part of audio recordings development to Thomas Edison. In the 1870’s, Edison invented the phonograph which, unlike some earlier predecessors, was capable of both recording and reproducing audio. Edison’s first attempts at reproducing audio

Thomas • 2nd October 2018

New Lense-Free Could Change the World of Photography

Miniaturization has been a common theme in the world of electronics over the past few decades, and cameras have been no exception. Now, a professor of electrical engineering at Caltech believes cameras may soon be less than the size of penny. And, if that wasn’t enough,

Thomas • 24th September 2018

Back to School

It’s September, and that means the kids are finally going back to school, and school buses are taking to the streets. You might think that the school bus is 20th Century invention, developed sometime after cars and the universal public education system. But their history can be

Thomas • 27th August 2018

Holy Moly!

Have you ever been deep in thought, staring at a blank page and chewing on the cap of your pen when you caught yourself wondering why that hole in the cap is there? As it turns out, those holes in our pen caps are actually an important safety feature. Roughly 100 people in the

Thomas • 10th July 2018

Haber-Bosch: The Process that Gave Birth to Billions

In 1900, the population of the Earth was roughly 1.6 billion people, but by 2024 that number will have grown to nearly 8 billion. How was such an incredible population explosion even possible? Many people credit the Haber-Bosch process, a chemical reaction otherwise known as

Thomas • 2nd July 2018

Flight of the Zeppelin

On July 2, 1900, the doors of a floating wooden hangar opened on the waters of Lake Constance, Germany. From its doors emerged a 420-foot long, 38 ½ foot wide behemoth of rubberized cotton fabric and aluminum, containing 399,000 cubic feet of hydrogen. After exiting the hangar,