In May 1990, a German cargo ship traveling from Korea to the United States lost 21 shipping containers in a Pacific storm north of Japan. Several broke open after the containers went overboard, releasing over 60,000 pairs of Nike shoes into the rough seas. About nine months later, roughly 1,600 sneakers washed up along the coast of Oregon, on the Queen Charlotte Islands in Canada, and along other stretches of the northern Pacific coast.
The incident, which became known as “The Great Shoe Spill,” was one of the largest recorded losses of cargo at sea. But as Alexander Klose explains in a Reader excerpt from his book The Container Principle, the fiasco was an inadvertent boon to oceanographers. Researchers treated the drifting shoes as accidental “probes,” using their eventual landfalls to produce precise maps of Pacific Ocean currents. Today, ocean-surface buoys transmit their locations via satellite, allowing scientists to measure a multitude of variables in real time, such as pressure, salinity, and wind. “But damaged containers have sometimes proven superior,” writes Klose.
Also this month: a brief history of the advance-fee scam, the Amish philosophy on technology adoption, the false promise of the first "smart homes," and more.
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Fraudsters have long told stories of imprisoned nobles and hidden fortunes, with desperate pleas for help. Email simply gave their messages a perfect medium.
By: Finn Brunton
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Oceanographers have quietly used lost cargo to build the most precise maps of ocean currents ever created.
By: Alexander Klose
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After three years studying the community, I came to see that the real question isn't what technology can do, but what it asks us to give up.
By: Lindsay Ems
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Computerized rooms, telework stations, and child-soothing technologies sold a seductive illusion that automation could solve the problems of maternal care.
By: Hannah Zeavin
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Efforts to revive the thylacine and woolly mammoth are forcing conservationists to face a long-overdue debate over what kind of natural world we want to build.
By: Taylor Dotson
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Long before AI, teaching machines promised to make education more efficient. Their forgotten history reveals why that dream keeps falling short.
By: The Editors
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In trying to understand how we make better choices, I found an unlikely guide in the Renaissance architect’s experiments with linear perspective.
By: Elspeth Kirkman
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The turn-of-the-century energy transition dazzled the nation — while concealing segregation, extraction, and ruin.
By: David E. Nye
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Decades before recommendation algorithms, video stores served as social hubs where conversation and camaraderie became a form of taste-making.
By: Joshua M. Greenberg
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