1876: Thomas Edison receives a patent for the mimeograph. It will dominate the world of small-press-run publication for a century.

Before the inkjet printer, before the laser printer, before the dot-matrix printer, before the photocopier, there came the mimeograph machine. They were everywhere — in schools, offices and the military.

If you needed just a few copies of a document, you used carbon paper. If you needed thousands (and had the time and the budget), you could send it to a print shop for typesetting and publication.

But if you needed something in between, say 30 copies for a classroom...

Slovenian aircraft manufacturer Pipistrel is entering next month’s NASA/CAFE Green Flight Challenge with an unusual electric airplane built in mere months specifically for the competition.

The Taurus G4 is a test bed to develop a high-power electric propulsion system. It features twin fuselages, room for four and the biggest electric motor we’ve seen bolted to an airframe. In a nod to the early days of aviation, when new designs went from idea to runway in just weeks or months, the airplane came together remarkably quickly.

“The airplane was designed and built in the course of four months,” Pip...