Purple clothes seem ordinary to us, but to the Ancient Greeks they symbolised power. Purple dye was incredibly hard to find – coming from a sea snail called the murex – so it was only accessible to emperors, priests, kings and judges. It wasn’t until 1856 that a British chemist found a synthetic version of purple, soon making it available to the masses.
Art & Design
Owen Maclaren designed the undercarriage for the Spitfire, Britain’s most famous warplane, and years later applied the same thinking to create the first foldable pram. Aluminium rods enabled the plane undercarriage to retract and fold into the fuselage, so he used the same material for his prams.