Distillations magazine

Inventor Charles Babbage drew inspiration from an unusual source for his analytical engine.

When William Aspdin stumbled on the secret to modern concrete, it was the first and one of the few fortuitous steps in an unsteady life.

For more than 2,000 years human ingenuity has turned natural and synthetic poisons into weapons of war.

In 1916 the United States sent its first official observer to the trenches of Europe, where he found a new kind of warfare.

During the Napoleonic Wars one man in particular kept scientific knowledge flowing between enemies.

Faced with political opposition to his work, the Czech chemist created the first wearable soft contact lens using a set of toys, a hot plate, and a gramophone motor.

Following World War II, President Dwight Eisenhower attempted a risky balancing act between war and peace, secrecy and transparency.

Pity butter’s poor relative, margarine, which has shifted from outlaw to savior to villain in the space of 100 years.

Katharine Burr Blodgett was the first female scientist hired by General Electric. Her work was truly invisible, deliberately so.

Three Hungarian scientists who survived the Nazi occupation of their country and escaped Soviet oppression.

In 1667 Margaret Cavendish was the first woman allowed to visit the all-male bastion of the Royal Society, a newly formed scientific society. Who was this woman?

When Communist East Germany built a wall across Berlin, it created two different cities, two different countries, and for scientists two different careers.

Reatha Clark King wanted to be a research chemist, so she made the journey from the segregated South to Illinois. At the University of Chicago her dreams came true.

Chemist Frank Field turned a hand-me-down mass spectrometer into pioneering career.

Robert Boyle is best known in chemistry classrooms for Boyle’s law, but the law was never stated outright in Boyle’s work.

The 1944 Morgenthau Plan envisioned postwar Germany as an agrarian state. Fortunately, the Marshall Plan was adopted instead.

Faced with a sudden shortage of rubber, the wartime United States turned to an unlikely place: a Japanese American internment camp in California.

How did a seemingly benign chemical and a near-miraculous public-health initiative spark decades and decades debate?