Sublime

On November 24, the day the battle for Tarawa ended, Turner’s staff forwarded a training syllabus to Lieutenant Thomas Crist, the commanding officer of the coral-blasting Seabee unit back in Hawaii, calling for the creation of two provisional units capable of dealing with underwater obstacles—something called the “underwater demolition teams,” or U

He loathed arrogance and experts, by which he meant those who want you to believe that they know everything about a subject when the inventive mind knows instinctively that there are always further questions to be asked and new discoveries to be made. The Sea Truck was Jeremy’s

Fritz Haber’s discovery of how to fix nitrogen from the air, using pressure and a catalyst, was a great invention. But it was Carl Bosch’s years of hard experiment, overcoming problem after problem and borrowing novel ideas from other industries that eventually led to the manufacture of ammonia on a large scale and at a price that society could aff

Individuals like Hunter Harrison are rare. They are singular in their talents, possessing laser-like focus and an atomic-level understanding of their businesses. By dint of starting at the bottom, questioning the status quo, and enduring backbreaking effort, they can slide into a niche that few others occupy. As a result, they represent extraordina

TerraPower’s reactor could run on many different types of fuel, including the waste from other nuclear facilities. The reactor would produce far less waste than today’s plants, would be fully automated—eliminating the possibility of human error—and could be built underground, protecting it from attack.