Each trail starts somewhere ordinary and ends somewhere you would not expect. Every step says why one article leads to the next.
Space Race to ARPANET
4 articles · 3 connections
The race began in earnest with the shock of Sputnik.
When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, in October 1957, the alarm it caused in the West became known as the Sputnik crisis.
Source: Space Race links to Sputnik crisis on Wikipedia.
Sputnik prompted the United States to create a new research agency.
In February 1958 President Eisenhower authorised the Advanced Research Projects Agency, ARPA (later DARPA), to develop emerging technologies for the US military.
Source: Sputnik crisis links to DARPA on Wikipedia.
ARPA funded and built an experimental computer network.
ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office played a vital role in creating ARPANET, a packet-switched network whose technology became the foundation of the Internet.
Source: DARPA links to ARPANET on Wikipedia.
Destination
ARPANET
Early packet switching network (1969–1990)
Why it’s unexpected: ARPANET's first computers were connected in 1969, the same year as Apollo 11: the Internet's ancestor and the Moon landing grew from the same Cold War shock.
All trails
- Apollo 11 → ARPANET (5 articles)
- Apollo 11 → V-2 rocket (4 articles)
- Apollo 11 → Microwave oven (5 articles)
- Microwave oven → Tizard Mission (4 articles)
- Loom → Lord Byron (5 articles)
- Pencil → Ig Nobel Prize (5 articles)
- Coffee → Lloyd's of London (4 articles)
- Banana → The Crystal Palace (4 articles)
- Purple → Gin and tonic (5 articles)
How trails are made
Every step follows a link that exists in the earlier article on Wikipedia, and every explanation restates what the articles themselves say: no step is a guess. Trails are written by hand and checked against Wikipedia automatically.