Ron the Yarnspinner

          David Gestetner: The Father of the Photocopy Machine   “ Ejha!” (“Oops!”) That might have been what Hungarian inventor David Gestetner exclaimed after accidentally spilling ink on a stack of kite paper—only to notice the ink had seeped through and left a consistent pattern. What started as a mistake sparked an idea that would revolutionize the way documents were copied.   In 1870, Gestetner left Hungary for Austria, where he worked at the Vienna Stock Exchange. One of his most tedious tasks was copying stock transactions by hand at the end of each trading day. Frustrated and convinced there had to be a better way—"Kell, hogy legyen jobb módja ennek!"—he quit his job and moved to the United States. There, while working for a kite manufacturer in Chicago, inspiration struck. That ink spill incident gave him the idea for a new duplicating method.   Gestetner eventually moved to London, where he began manufacturing his inventio...

                                                                           The Trinity Test     Eighty years ago, on July 16, 1945, at   5:29 a.m., the world’s first nuclear bomb was detonated in the remote desert of New Mexico. Known as the Trinity Test, the explosion unleashed the power of a 21-kiloton blast—lighting up the predawn sky, cracking the air with a deafening roar, and sending a towering mushroom cloud 38,000 feet into the atmosphere. It marked the beginning of the nuclear age.   The test site was located in the Jornada del Muerto—a bleak, ninety-mile stretch of desert whose name translates to “Journey of the Dead Man.” Spanish colonists had given it the name centuries earlier, after several members of a traveling party died a...