Atlas
A trail is a short, ordered route through the atlas. Each stop says why it comes next, so a journey reads as an argument rather than a list. Start one, leave, and come back: your place is kept in this browser, and you do not need an account for that.
Every battery and fuel cell begins as a way to turn chemistry into a steady electric current. These eight pioneers carry that idea from the nineteenth-century cell that steadied the current, through the first fuel cell...
8 stops
Nuclear power began as an idea about a chain reaction, became a laboratory discovery in Berlin in 1938, and then became working reactors and a civilian industry. This path follows eight physicists, chemists and...
8 stops
This path follows the oil business from its first commercial refinery to the integrated companies of the twentieth century. It begins with a Scottish chemist who distilled oil from coal and shale, moves through...
10 stops
This trail follows solar power through the people who made it possible, from steam engines heated by mirrors in the 1860s, through the selenium discoveries of the nineteenth century, to the Bell Laboratories silicon...
9 stops
This path follows the people who turned electricity from a laboratory demonstration into an industry, in roughly the order their key work appeared: the self-exciting dynamo, early lighting and central stations, the...
10 stops
Follow one day of electricity in seven stops: the machine that spans a continent, the evening hours that stress it, the duck-shaped dent solar has put in its day, and the stores, turbines and willing customers that...
7 stops
Electricity generation is one lineage, not many separate inventions. This trail follows the principle Michael Faraday demonstrated in 1831 through the generator it made possible, the steam turbine that came to spin most...
6 stops
Nuclear power began as physics before it became infrastructure, and the path since has run through triumph, catastrophe and a slow attempt to build again. This trail follows that history from the science that made a...
9 stops
The shift away from fossil fuels has never run on technology alone. Laws, contracts and standards decided which power plants got built, who paid for them, and who bore the cost when they were built and then not needed...
7 stops
Trails are curated by the atlas. Where you have got to in one is remembered by your own browser and is never sent to us.