It seems like every day some new technology arrives and changes the way we encounter the world.

The future can feel like a blur, racing out ahead of us, a bewildering landscape, the likes of which we've never seen before.

But are there patterns from history that can help us face the changes to come?

Or has our past locked us into an infinite loop?

Tech does change all the time, but people don't.

I'm Tom Standage.

And I'm Seth Stevenson.

In this transatlantic podcast from The Economist in London

and Slate in New York, we'll be telling you stories about technologies of the past

and what they teach us about the tech of tomorrow. It's unreasonable to expect anyone to have seen the whole picture from the beginning.

It's called The Secret History of the Future.

The idea was if you could have some sort of clock in the sky, then you could figure out your position.

Did the XPRIZ of the 1700s and its dubious outcome reveal a fundamental truth about

what drives innovation?

The competition itself is an amazing thing to be part of, because it's a catalyst for change.

Can a data breach of the 19th century French telegraph system teach us about modern cyber security?

It's sort of delightful that the first network in history also had the first hack in history.

Could investigating the death of the first pedestrian ever killed by an automobile,

help us avoid a pile up of mistakes as driverless cars take over our roads?

Whenever you introduce new

advanced technology, people die. You know, when airplanes came along, they were very unsafe.

Might the complicated history of the fork suggest a wondrous future for Google Glass

...