Distillations | Science History Institute Science History Institute

If Ted Talks were around in the early 1990s, Horace Fletcher would have given his fair share of them. Fletcher was a health reformer who thought people didn’t chew their food nearly enough. He believed that most swallowed food way too quickly. This had all sorts of detrimental health consequences, he said, including nasty bowel movements.​​ So he over-chewed his food. He once chewed a green onion 722 times before he let himself swallow it.

And what does it have to do with the unusual chemistry of carbon?

The debut of the female birth control pill in 1960 was revolutionary. . But the pill had many unpleasant and even dangerous side effects. In fact, some doctors argue that it wouldn’t win government approval today. So why haven’t scientists tried to create a birth control pill for men? It turns out they have. In the 1950s scientists created a really good one. But it had one problem—you can’t drink alcohol when you take it.

When American women bought Marie Curie a vital gram of the element.

The so-called 'Peking Man' fossils are some of the first ancient human remains discovered in mainland Asia. So when they disappeared during World War II it was called one of the worse disasters in the history of archaeology. Now some archeologists claim to have tracked them down. The only problem is they're underneath a parking lot.

The Science History Institute has launched a second podcast! Listen to this first episode about when the global vaccine supply chain depended on children.