The Earthquake That Invented Santa Barbara
How a 6.8 magnitude earthquake in 1925 destroyed an ordinary California city and a small group of architects replaced it with a Spanish fantasy that never existed.
How a 6.8 magnitude earthquake in 1925 destroyed an ordinary California city and a small group of architects replaced it with a Spanish fantasy that never existed.
On January 28, 1969, a Union Oil well ruptured on Platform A in the Santa Barbara Channel. The 100,000 barrels that followed changed American law forever.
In the 1890s, a thriving Chinese fishing community worked Santa Barbara's coast. The city erased them — first by law, then by fire, then by forgetting.
The Chumash built plank canoes from driftwood and tar, crossed 25 miles of open ocean, and maintained a maritime trade network for 2,000 years. The engineering was not primitive.
During Prohibition, the Channel Islands became staging areas for a sophisticated bootlegging operation that outran the Coast Guard and supplied the entire South Coast.
How a salvaged track became the perfect eulogy for the Gaucho era, featuring Larry Carlton's weeping guitar and the final silence of the machines.
Inside the spacecraft systems that kept astronauts alive for 8 days and 240,000 miles
How a 16-bit computer with less memory than a greeting card guided astronauts to the moon and back
How Grumman built a tissue-paper spacecraft with one engine that absolutely could not fail