World War II pushed the U.S. military to find faster, safer ways to send battlefield messages across the Pacific. On May 4, 1942, the U.S. Marine Corps launched one of its most effective answers by recruiting the first 29 Navajo men to create a code based on the Navajo language. Continue reading →

What secrets are buried inside this 15th-century masterpiece? Discover the hidden musical notes, the impossible anatomy, and the dark mystery of the negative space that shocked art historians.

Ben Franklin played a key role in America’s founding, which included helping to design its paper currency. Kristina Davis

Benjamin Franklin understood something fundamental about money that still shapes modern economies: Money only works when people believe it is real.

In the early 18th century, the British colonies suffered from a chronic shortage of gold and silver coins, forcing local governments to rely on paper bills for trade and everyday commerce. But paper currency created a dangerous new problem: Unlike metallic coins, paper money could be easily copied, altered and faked.

Long before his experiments with electricity or his role in the American founding now 250 years ago, Franklin spent years working with paper, ink and printing. In the process, he developed a practical understanding of materials and manufacturing. Continue reading →

On January 9th, 1776, the pamphlet “Common Sense” is published in Philadelphia. The pamphlet immediately becomes a bestseller, selling tens of thousands of copies across America. In “Common Sense,” Thomas Paine, the author and violent foe of aristocracy and monarchy, attacks the King and Parliament and offers Americans an alternative to British rule: true independence.

This investigation explores how the alphabet evolved before 1700, why certain letters shifted or vanished from common use, and how the process of standardization shaped one of the most familiar systems humans use every day without ever questioning its origins.

The copy of the Declaration of Independence Jonas Phillips mailed to his relative Gumpel in July 1776 represents one of the 26 surviving original broadsides of the founding document.

The Dunlap Broadside on display at the Museum of the American Revolution. Courtesy of the National Archives of the United Kingdom

Jonas Phillips had been living with the Declaration of Independence for a little more than three weeks by late July 1776, when one scorching Philadelphia day he decided he should go ahead and send a copy to his relative Gumpel.

Gumpel Samson, a cousin and business partner who lived in Amsterdam, must have had a lively curiosity in such things as rebellion and independence. Enough so, anyway, that Phillips, a Jewish immigrant patriot and civil rights leader, folded a broadside of the declaration that he likely had torn from the window of a Market Street shop, stuffed it into an envelope, and sent it on the next tall ship out of Philly.

This copy of the declaration then took its own trip — one beginning in those feverish Philly days in 1776 when independence was still new, and spanning nearly two and a half centuries and a continent and an ocean, before finding its way back to Philadelphia. Continue reading →

Silence Dogood. Richard Saunders. Benevolus. Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim. All were pen names that allowed Franklin to say things he couldn’t have otherwise said.

Image by Victoria Maxfield

Benjamin Franklin’s fertile mind constantly spun off inventive and useful ideas. His lightning rod saved buildings and lives. His energy-saving improvement of the wood-burning fireplace kept families warm and forests from being leveled. His lending library extended literacy to those who couldn’t afford books. His map of the Gulf Stream made travel faster and commerce more efficient.

But Franklin’s ingenuity showed most clearly in his invention, or rather recurrent reinvention, of himself. In the course of his life, Franklin devised dozens of authorial personas in print, which allowed him to challenge authority, identify folly and promote human progress with an unsparing vigor he never could have achieved under his own name. Continue reading →