How do we know what works? In an uncertain world, full of untested treatments, disputed policies and untried inventions, it should be a pressing question. For an impoverished young tailor named Franz Reichelt, the answer was: we find out the hard way. In February...
https://omny.fm/shows/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/what-a-bloody-mess-were-in-britains-redacted-accident? Windscale is supposed to be Britain’s big leap into the nuclear Age, bringing science fiction to life in 1950s Northern England. But in the race to catch up...
He didn’t go to sample the Dolcetto d’Alba, I’m fairly sure of that. John Lombe’s mission was industrial espionage. He travelled to Piedmont with the goal of learning the Piedmontese art of spinning silk into strong yarn. Nobody was likely to teach him — that would...
Chargin' Charlie Beckwith is an American colonel who expects nothing less than perfection from his squad. When hostages are seized during the 1979 Iranian revolution, Chargin' Charlie is given the chance to lead the rescue operation - and to show what a leader who...
https://omny.fm/shows/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/attack-of-the-night-people If you tuned in to late-night WOR radio in 1950s New York, you'd enter the secret world of Jean Shepherd. Shepherd's nonconformist style, off-beat humour and love of pranks gathered a...
Keeping warm is sometimes expensive, but even a caveman can cope with the technical challenge: pull on an extra bearskin and throw another log on to the fire. Keeping cool is a trickier business. The eccentric Roman emperor Elagabalus sent his slaves into the...
https://omny.fm/shows/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/live-we-are-not-machines-with-sarah-oconnor When the Luddites smashed factory frames in a bid to defend their craft and livelihoods, the machines came out on top. Today, AI and automation threaten to wipe...
For those of us frustrated that the UK chancellor Rachel Reeves has been offering the wrong solution to the right problem, there has recently been progress, of a kind: she is now offering the wrong solution to the wrong problem. One of Labour’s key policy goals was to...
https://omny.fm/shows/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/treacle-tears-the-boston-molasses-disaster The children of North End, Boston, play in the shadow of an enormous steel tank of molasses. The thick, sticky sugar syrup is being used to make munitions for the First...