Abbey Road Studios invented stereo recording (and was the site of most of the Beatles' recordings)

The cover of "Abbey Road" was shot in a quiet London neighborhood in 1969

The unassuming setting became one of the most famous attractions in the city and was the cover of the Beatles' last-recorded album. It was shot in the late 1960s, when the Fab Four was the most famous band in the world.

How the Beatles became the most influential band on Earth

Beatles geek and comedian Conan O'Brien is a special guest with the Rest is History podcast in this exploration of the quartet from Liverpool's mammoth role in global pop culture. The two-part podcast was recorded in Abbey Road Studios, the world's first dedicated recording facility, where the band recorded 190 of its 210 songs.

Phil Spector’s ‘Wall of Sound’ revolutionized girl groups—and pop music

The method captured a room of live musicians and transmitted the sound into a basement outfitted with more speakers and microphones. That sound was then sent into the central control room, producing a massive recording that sounded unlike anything else in pop music.

How AI helped the Beatles win their eighth Grammy

It’s been decades since the legendary British rock band broke up, yet they still managed to snag a Grammy at the 2025 awards ceremony. This feat is thanks to AI, specifically machine-learning technology, to isolate and clean up different components of a late 1970s recording. This mini-documentary shows how the band's surviving members crafted “Now and Then” with the modern technology.

The earliest known country recording is Louis Vasnier's 'Thompson's Old Gray Mule'

This BBC documentary offers a brief history of the recording, explaining how the wax cylinder recording was transferred to vinyl and how the singer was identified. Interestingly, it also suggests why this recording might have been overlooked for over a century.

The Beatles' US label rejected the band's first two singles

Although the quartet was already a sensation in Great Britain, Capitol Records turned down the opportunity to release "Please Please Me" and "From Me to You," licensing them instead to a smaller independent label in Chicago.

Broadway hit 'Stereophonic' was inspired by Fleetwood Mac

The show follows a 1970s rock band while they're in the studio, tracking a new album, and mirrors many of the internal conflicts that led to Fleetwood Mac's 1977 record, "Rumours." The play was a massive hit, earning 13 Tony nominations (the most ever for a play). It won five, including best play.

The Beatles' US label rejected the band's first two singles, 'Please Please Me' and 'From Me to You,' with one executive calling the band 'dead in the water.'

One disco producer saw 'Star Wars' four times on its opening weekend and was so inspired that he recorded the album 'Star Wars and Other Intergalactic Funk,' which produced a chart-topping single.

Tour the iconic Sun Studio in Memphis

Sun Studio is responsible for hundreds of hours of American music history, despite its rather modest setup. This tour of the one-room studio is not unlike the tour visitors take, with anecdotes about Elvis, U2, and a pious Bob Dylan, who quickly popped in to pay his respects.

The first compact cassette tape was introduced at IFA 1963

At IFA 1963 in Berlin, Philips introduced the compact cassette tape. This new standardized audio format replaced bulky reel-to-reel tape and would go on to dominate home recording and music listening for decades.

The origins of the Rolling Stones

Founded by Brian Jones, the Rolling Stones emerged during the massive shifts taking place in the 1960s. From the start, they were the edgier version of the Beatles, and their complex reputation gave them a unique profile in the public eye.

The Bristol Sessions built a structure for a nascent music industry

Peer presented each artist at the Bristol Sessions with three separate contracts: one for royalties on the record, one for publishing of the composition, and one for management. It was a business model that would become the norm for the nascent recording industry.

Breaking down the many box office records 'Star Wars' has broken

The first "Star Wars" film made history in 1977 when it surpassed "Jaws," considered the first Hollywood blockbuster, for the highest-grossing movie of all time. But that's just the first in a long line of records that the franchise has broken in the decades since then, with impressive records set by films like "The Force Awakens," "Revenge of the Sith," and "The Last Jedi."

'Jesus Christ Superstar' was an album before it was a musical

Written in the late '60s by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, who were hot on the heels of the successful "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat," "Jesus Christ Superstar" was first recorded as an album in the style of other popular rock operas of the time, like The Who's "Tommy."

Stonehenge has produced wild origin stories

Built before the wheel was invented, Stonehenge inspired increasingly fantastical explanations—from a 12th-century tale of Merlin and Nephilim giants to 1960s claims that aliens built it alongside the pyramids.

The origins of the Guinness Book of World Records

Yes, it was the beer company that started it. In 1955, the very first edition of the Guinness Book of World Records debuted as a marketing campaign for the famous Irish beer brand. Get all the details on the origins here.

When a radio company was the biggest tech stock around

The Radio Corporation of America was the biggest stock during the 1920s. Originally called Marconi Wireless, the company transformed radio technology. The company pioneered broadcasting, created NBC, and became a tech giant. After remarkable growth and challenges, RCA was acquired by General Electric in 1986, marking the end of its 67-year independent existence.

Take a virtual tour of St. Andrews

The Old Course at St. Andrews is one of the oldest in the world and became the gold standard for modern golf course design. Using drone footage, this Golf Digest video gives an aerial view and detailed description of every hole. Learn how the links course features common fairways and greens for some holes. And learn the bunker names at the courses' most notorious holes.

Railroads and long-distance communication led to the development of time zones

Noon had been determined independently at each location based on when the sun was highest in the sky, but this became impractical for standardizing transportation. British star-mapping and navigation advancements established Greenwich as the prime meridian through Greenwich Mean Time, or GMT.

Hollywood alternative Flying A Studios was housed in Santa Barbara for a decade

Founded in 1910 in Chicago, the American Film Company moved west to Santa Barbara to shoot cowboy westerns. For a decade, the studio was prolific, putting out an average of 242 films a year but collapsed within a decade due to a lack of vision.

Fenway Park is the oldest professional baseball stadium in use

The legendary park was built in 1912 and is considered hallowed ground for baseball fans, along with iconic venues like Yankee Stadium in the Bronx and Wrigley Field in Chicago.

An interactive sound map of 8,000 locations around the world

Cities and Memory's global sound map covers 140 countries, featuring paired recordings: original field captures of a moment in time and an artist's recomposition built from the same source. The structure treats every location as both document and raw material, giving 2,500 contributors the same prompt with unpredictable results.

Hear 50 years of iconic hip-hop samples, the genre's foundational looped tracks

Sony set the standard for cylinder-shaped batteries when it repurposed manufacturing equipment used to make rolls of magnetic recording tape.

An electric pipe organ in Germany is playing a song for 639 years

Created by composer John Cage, the Halberstadt organ first began playing the piece in September 2001, and has since made only nine chord changes. The device within a medieval church utilizes compressed air to play continuous tones. The next chord change is scheduled for August 2026.

One office park had an outsized role in the birth of Silicon Valley

Developed in 1951, Stanford Research Park was more than just a pioneering suburban office park. It would go on to catalyze Silicon Valley's tech ecosystem as a whole.

England's Stoke-on-Trent was a hub for ceramics

The area of Staffordshire was a major production center for over 300 years, exporting pottery from brands like Wedgwood across the globe.

The first interferometric gravitational wave detector was invented in 1972

Robert Weiss completed the designs after his students asked about an earlier apparatus that used stretched aluminum cylinders to detect passing gravitational waves. Unfamiliar with general relativity and hoping to keep the course focused on experimental tests rather than mathematics, Reiss later asked his students to consider his device for homework. (Some readers may experience a paywall.)

The first horror movie is believed to be George Méliès' 1986 short 'The Haunted Castle,' which pioneered the use of special effects

The name 'Silicon Valley' arose from the founding of Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Fairchild Semiconductor in 1956-57, founded near Stanford University in Palo Alto

Fish populations in the Great Barrier Reef have increased after installing waterproof speakers on the ocean floor that played recordings of sounds from healthy coral reefs.

A researcher recently discovered an interview from 1967 between groundbreaking journalist Joan Didion and the Grateful Dead, years before the band became an institution.

Long before Major League Baseball began allowing instant replay for balls and strikes, an umpire reluctantly used the technology to determine whether a hit was a home run, a move that inadvertently ushered in a new era for the sport.

The history of many kitchen appliances involves unexpected discoveries and applications, including wartime radar turned hamster defroster and replacing an 'ice king' with heat-stealing boxes.

The Ramones' 'Pet Sematary,' the theme song for the Stephen King novel of the same name, was written while the band was admiring the writer's collection of horror memorabilia.

English mathematician Ada Lovelace wrote the first computer algorithm a century before computers existed and hypothesized that computing devices would one day be able to compose music—foreseeing the generative AI systems of today.

The first image of a black hole was captured by creating an Earth-sized virtual observatory from a network of eight radio telescopes.

Legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright designed the SC Johnson headquarters in Wisconsin, aiming to make a cathedral-like workplace

Stanford built a Google Maps for the Roman Empire, revealing how much it cost to travel in the ancient world

The Mona Lisa's celebrity status and repeated restorations have obscured what made the painting so revolutionary for its time

See how Budweiser's famous Clydesdales spend their days at Warm Springs Ranch, where roughly 70 to 80 of the beer brand's giant horses can be found at any given time.

After the Boston Tea Party, colonists switched to coffee, which became the main morning drink for revolutionaries.

Hear about the 250-year history of the United States Postal Service, complete with some of its strangest deliveries, important innovations, and the figures that made it an American institution.

Before writing 'Walden,' transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau nearly burned down his hometown with a campfire that grew out of control.

Double world record holder Hunter Ewen helped conquer his fear of balloons, called globophobia, by training to win Guinness World Record titles for balloon inflation.

Apollo astronauts left items in the moon's 'toss zone,' including golf balls, family photos, and bags of human waste, to make room for lunar rocks.

Warren Buffett's former professor Benjamin Graham is known as the 'father of value investing,' a strategy in which investors seek to buy stocks trading below their intrinsic worth.

See photos of Meteora, a mountainous site in central Greece, home to 14th-century monasteries perched atop soaring outcroppings.

Bone marrow (soft tissue found inside certain bones) generates roughly 500 billion new blood cells each day