In this episode of The Disappearing Spoon, Sam Kean talks about Mary Ward, a budding naturalist and astronomer from Ireland. She spent a lot of time observing plants and animals through a microscope and published a book of detailed sketches that dazzled readers and colleagues in the 1800s. However, her career was cut short by a strange curiosity of that time period: the automobile. They weren’t the same cars that are around today, but her death was the first car death recorded in history, and it foreshadowed the carnage the automobile continues to leave behind.
CreditsHost: Sam Kean
Senior Producer: Mariel Carr
Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez
Audio Engineer: Jonathan Pfeffer
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Acts of God, Acts of Men: When We Turn Nature into a Weapon
Old Brains, New Brains: The Human Mind, Past and Present
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Alchemy's Rainbow: Pigment Science and the Art of Conservation
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Drawing History: Telling the Stories of Science through Comics and Graphic Novels
Why the Chicken Became a Nugget and Other Tales of Processed Food
Digging Up the Bodies: Debunking CSI and Other Forensics Myths
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