Utterly interesting

Electric cars feel like a thoroughly modern development, quietly gliding through city streets with an efficiency that would have seemed improbable not long ago. Yet more than eighty years before today’s EV boom, one French designer was already imagining a compact electric future. His solution did not resemble anything on the road. It looked like an egg. The L’Oeuf Electrique was created in the early 1940s by industrial designer Paul Arzens, and it remains one of the most unu

Mid century mugshots from Philadelphia reveal more than crime records. These 1950s and 1960s booking photographs capture fashion, social change and the human stories behind police archives.

On 14th February, 1779, Captain James Cook, one of Britain’s most celebrated navigators, was killed at Kealakekua Bay in the Hawaiian Kingdom. He was fifty years old. By the time of his death, Cook had already transformed European understanding of the Pacific Ocean, charting vast stretches of coastline and producing maps of remarkable accuracy. Yet his final encounter in Hawaii exposed the fragile and often volatile nature of first contact between Europeans and Indigenous soc