Atlas
A trail is a short, ordered route through the atlas. Each stop says why it comes next, so a journey reads as an argument rather than a list. Start one, leave, and come back: your place is kept in this browser, and you do not need an account for that.
Six stops, one founding moment from each of this atlas thinnest media forms: a home console, a superhero debut, a newsmagazine, a technical trick inside an RSS feed, a friends list nobody called social media yet, and a...
6 stops
Media history is full of firsts, format wars and disputed accounts. This trail follows five entries where the record itself is the story: a home video format that lost despite arriving first, a documentary staged to...
5 stops
Two centuries of learning to see at a distance, in eight stops: a darkened room older than science, the first image light ever fixed, the cafe where projected pictures got an audience, and the upload that put a camera...
8 stops
American newspapers began as a business experiment: sell papers cheap enough for anyone to buy, and reach readers the subscription press had never courted. This trail follows that experiment from the first penny paper...
9 stops
A camera rig built partly from salvaged auto parts, a cable strung between hilltop antennas, an algorithm quietly swapping video quality mid-stream: this trail follows the devices, companies and ideas that carried media...
7 stops
Trails are curated by the atlas. Where you have got to in one is remembered by your own browser and is never sent to us.