By Tim Harford  

In January 1842, Charles Dickens arrived on American shores for the first time. He was greeted like a rock star in Boston, Massachusetts, but the great novelist was a man with a cause: he wanted to put an end to cheap, sloppy pirated copies of his work in the US. They circulated with impunity because […]

Early in 1962, a young MIT student was on his way home in the nearby town of Lowell, Massachusetts. As Peter Samson stepped off the train and gazed up at the stars above, a meteor streaked across the heavens. Mr Samson reflexively grabbed for a game controller that wasn’t there, and scanned the skies, wondering […]

Imagine we could control the weather – pushing a button to make it warmer or cooler, wetter or drier. The implications would be enormous. No more droughts or floods, no heat waves or icy roads. Deserts would become verdant. Crops would never fail. In fact climate change has sparked some crazy-sounding ideas for hacking the […]

Wo graduate students stood silently beside a lectern, listening as their professor presented their work to a conference. Usually, the students would want the glory. And they had, just a couple of days previously. But their families talked them out of it. A few weeks earlier, the Stanford researchers had received an unsettling letter from […]

Wo graduate students stood silently beside a lectern, listening as their professor presented their work to a conference. Usually, the students would want the glory. And they had, just a couple of days previously. But their families talked them out of it. A few weeks earlier, the Stanford researchers had received an unsettling letter from […]

Almost a decade ago, I tried to place a bet with a leading UK betting shop that I would die within a year. They should have taken the bet – I am still alive. But they will not gamble on life and death. A life insurance company, by contrast, does little else. Legally and culturally, […]

Rudolf Diesel died in mysterious circumstances before he was able to capitalise on his ingenious invention. It was 22:00. Rudolf Diesel had retired to his cabin aboard the SS Dresden, travelling from Belgium across the English Channel. His nightclothes were laid out on his bed, but Diesel did not change into them. The inventor of […]

Tax is powerful stuff. “No taxation without representation,” thundered the American revolutionaries. It can also define the intimate details of our lives. The 18th century window tax reshaped British architecture. The abolition of Australia’s inheritance tax in 1979 put a ripple in the death rate: people clung to life to save tax until the change […]