Design

The New U.K. Passport Celebrates Way More Men Than Women

Critics have proposed adding Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, and the Brontë sisters, among others, to balance things out.
U.K. Passport Office

It took 250 years, but John Harrison finally had the last laugh.

His critics said that his claims about his clocks were laughable. Had he not solved the so-called Longitude Problem in 1765, changing navigation for seafaring forever? And yet when Harrison said that he could make a pendulum clock that was accurate within a second over 100 days, he was ridiculed for “an incoherence and absurdity that was little short of the symptoms of insanity.”