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Episode 1024: Greatest American Inventions — The Nuclear Reactor
Beneath a football stadium at the University of Chicago on December 2, 1942, Enrico Fermi's team achieved the first self-sustaining nuclear chain rea…
2 weeks, 5 days ago
Episode 1023: Greatest American Inventions — The Moving Assembly Line
Henry Ford didn't invent the automobile—he invented a way to make it affordable. Newt examines how Ford's 1913 moving assembly line cut Model T produ…
2 weeks, 6 days ago
Episode 1022: Greatest American Inventions — The Personal Computer
For thirty years, a computer was something only governments and corporations could own—an entire room of machinery. Newt tells how that changed in 19…
3 weeks ago
Episode 1021: Greatest American Inventions — The Internet
On the night of October 29, 1969, a UCLA student typed two letters into a Stanford-bound terminal before the system crashed—and the internet was born…
3 weeks, 1 day ago
Episode 1020: Greatest American Inventions — The Polio Vaccine
Before 1955, polio closed swimming pools, filled hospital wards with iron lungs, and terrified American parents every summer. Newt tells the story of…
3 weeks, 2 days ago
Episode 1019: Greatest American Inventions — The Transistor
At Bell Labs in December 1947, three scientists—John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley—demonstrated a tiny device that would outlast the…
3 weeks, 3 days ago
Episode 1018: Greatest American Inventions — The Electrical Power System
Every invention in this series—the phone, the internet, the smartphone—depends on one foundational breakthrough. Newt unpacks the electrical power sy…
3 weeks, 4 days ago
Episode 1017: Greatest American Inventions — The Airplane
Two bicycle mechanics from Ohio, with no college degrees and no government funding, beat every well-financed rival to achieve the impossible. On Dece…
3 weeks, 5 days ago
Episode 1016: Greatest American Inventions — The Telephone
Alexander Graham Bell grew up obsessed with the human voice—his family taught elocution and speech to the deaf. That obsession led him, on March 10, …
3 weeks, 6 days ago
Episode 1015: Greatest American Inventions — The Electric Telegraph
In 1844, a painter named Samuel Morse and machinist Alfred Vail shattered the oldest limit on human civilization: the speed of information. Their ele…
4 weeks ago