On a late summer afternoon in 1882, Thomas Edison flipped a switch at J.P. Morgan’s Wall Street office and a single light bulb flickered to life. It was powered by the world’s first central power station, the Pearl Street Station in lower Manhattan. For the first time, a city district was illuminated by electricity generated and distributed from one location. The station's six steam-driven "Jumbo" dynamos supplied 110 volts of direct current to 59 customers, lighting 400 lamp

In 1904, New York City opened its first subway line, a 9.1-mile system from City Hall to Harlem that carried 100,000 people on its very...

We last looked at fire in July, when tragedy forced change. This month, we return to fire, not for disaster, but for invention. The...

In September 1987, computer scientist Charles Eastman published one of the first papers outlining the concept of Building Information...

St. Petersburg, known through history as Petrograd and later Leningrad is often called Europe’s most beautiful city. Peter the Great...

On 15 August 1914, the SS Ancon made the first official passage through the Panama Canal, a project that redefined global trade. Cutting...