How We Got To Now With Steven Johnson, Premieres Tonight.

HOW WE GOT TO NOW WITH STEVEN JOHNSON premieres Wednesdays, October 15, 9-11 p.m. and October 22-November 12, 10-11 p.m. ET on PBS. Get the companion book. 

A Rare Look at Design Genius Jony Ive: The Man Behind the Apple Watch

The cultural shift at Apple continues. To the point they've allowed the publishing of a very rare profile of Jony Ive. But that's not even the most surprising thing, the profile was in Vogue, re-iterating how Apple is certainly moving towards fashion in their marketing of the Apple Watch, a device they allowed writer Robert Sullivan to know about and handle before the product announcement, which is unheard of for Apple. 

In 1985, the year Jobs was forced out of Apple, Jony Ive was in design school in England, struggling with computers, blaming himself. “Isn’t that curious?” he says now. “Because if you tasted some food that you didn’t think tasted right, you would assume that the food was wrong. But for some reason, it’s part of the human condition that if we struggle to use something, we assume that the problem resides with us.”

Watch 128 Years Of Coca-Cola’s History In 2 Minutes

It is very easy to forget how influential Coca-Cola has been to culture over the years. 

Marc Newson On Designing Watches

Despite the fact that almost everyone stopped wearing a watch more than a decade ago the introduction of the Apple Watch has awakened a conversation around horology. Here is the recently hired by Apple Marc Newson showing his portfolio. 

In this movie Marc Newson, in his London studio, tells us about the watches he's designed, including the first ones that he built himself in the late 1980s.

Flicking through a proof of his new book for publishers Taschen, Newson shows a 1:1 image of a model from 1986 that's as big as his fist, saying "I pre-dated the trend for large watches by about a decade."

Newson also talks about jewellery he's designed, the huge glass Atmos clocks powered by tiny changes in temperature and the hourglass full of ball-bearings that was his last product for the Ikepod watch brand he founded.

Who Made The Cocktail Shaker?

Jens Mortensen for The New York Times

Melanie Rehak in The New York Times on the innovation of the cocktail shaker: 

Throughout the 1870s, inventors sought to improve on the basic design. One featured a plunger system for mixing six tumblers at once; another had air vents. But none of these took. Then in 1884, Edward Hauck of Brooklyn patented the three-part metal shaker with a built-in strainer and a little top — a configuration that has remained essentially unchanged to this day. It came to be known as the cobbler shaker (the sherry cobbler, made of sherry, sugar, ice and orange or lemon, was among the most popular cocktails of the era). When stainless steel was invented in the early 20th century, it quickly became the shaker material of choice, an honor it continues to enjoy.