By Hunter Oatman-Stanford — There’s plenty to hate about driving—traffic jams, car accidents, speeding tickets—not to mention the endless headache of finding a spot to park. So what if you discovered an invention that could wean us from our vehicles, combating suburban sprawl and making city streets less dangerous, congested, and polluted? Well, that device has been around for nearly 80 years: It's called the parking meter. Contrary to popular belief, the parking meter was originally designed to keep traffic moving...

Why People Flip Over Vintage Pinball Machines

By Maribeth Keane and Ben Marks — I didn’t really get into to pinball machine collecting until maybe 15 years ago, but when I was a freshman in college, video games were really big. I went to Purdue University. They had a huge arcade there. I always said that Space Invaders and Pac-Man took so much of my money—money that I really didn’t have—that it would have been cheaper to just buy one of those machines. So one day I went to an auction of coin-operated video games. They had pinball machines there, too, including a 1980...