History of technology

The first tools

90,000 BCE

The history of technology begins even before the beginning of our own species. Sharp flakes of stone used as knives and larger unshaped stones used as hammers and anvils have been uncovered at Lake Turkana in Kenya. The tools were made 3.3 million years ago and thus were likely used by an ancestor such as Australopithecus.

Fire

50,000 BCE

When humanity first used fire is still not definitively known, but, like the first tools, it was probably invented by an ancestor of Homo sapiens. Evidence of burnt material can be found in caves used by Homo erectus beginning about 1 million (and maybe even 1.5 million) years ago.

Neolithic Revolution

20,000 BCE

During the Neolithic Period several key technologies arose together. Humans moved from getting their food by foraging to getting it through agriculture. People came together in larger groups. Clay was used for pottery and bricks. Clothing began to be made of woven fabrics. The wheel was also likely invented at this time.

Irrigation

6000 BCE

The first irrigation systems arose roughly simultaneously in the civilizations of the Tigris-Euphrates river valley in Mesopotamia and the Nile River valley in Egypt. Since irrigation requires an extensive amount of work, it shows a high level of social organization.

Sailing

4000 BCE

The first sailing ships were used on the Nile River. Since the Nile does not allow as much space for free sailing as the ocean, these ships also had oars for navigation.

Iron

1200 BCE

About this time, the production of iron became widespread as that metal supplanted bronze. Iron was much more abundant than copper and tin, the two metals that make up bronze, and thus put metal tools into more hands than ever before.

Gunpowder

850

Alchemists in China invented gunpowder as a result of their search for life-extending elixirs. It was used to propel rockets attached to arrows. The knowledge of gunpowder spread to Europe in the 13th century.

Windmill

950

Nearly 5,000 years after the first sailing ships, the wind was first used to operate a mill. The first windmills were in Persia. They were horizontal windmills in which the blades were set on a vertical shaft. Later, European windmills were of the vertical type. It has been speculated that the windmill may have been invented independently in Persia and in Europe.

Compass

1044

The first definitive mention of a magnetic compass dates from a Chinese book finished in 1044. It describes how soldiers found their way by using a fish-shaped piece of magnetized iron floating in a bowl of water when the sky was too cloudy to see the stars.

Mechanical Clock

1300

Hourglass and water clocks had been around for centuries, but the first mechanical clocks began to appear in Europe toward the end of the 13th century and were used in cathedrals to mark the time when services would be held.

Printing

1455

Johannes Gutenberg completed the printing of the Bible, which was the first book printed in the West using movable type. Gutenberg’s printing press led to an information explosion in Europe.

Steam engine

1765

James Watt improved the Newcomen steam engine by adding a condenser that turned the steam back into liquid water. This condenser was separate from the cylinder that moved the piston, which meant that the engine was much more efficient. The steam engine became one of the most important inventions of the Industrial Revolution.

Railways

1804

English engineer Richard Trevithick improved James Watt’s steam engine and used it for transport. He built the first railway locomotive at an ironworks in Wales.

Steamboat

1807

Robert Fulton put the steam engine on water. His steamboat that was eventually called the Clermont took 32 hours to go up the Hudson River from New York City to Albany. Sailing ships took four days

Photography

1827

In the early 1820s, Nicéphore Niépce became interested in using a light-sensitive solution to make copies of lithographs onto glass, zinc, and finally a pewter plate. He then had the great idea to use his solution to make a copy of an image in a camera obscura (a room or box with a small hole in one end through which an image of the outside is projected). In 1826 or 1827, he made an eight-hour-long exposure of the courtyard of his house, the first known photograph.

Telegraph

1844

Samuel Morse was a successful painter who became interested in the possibility of an electric telegraph in the 1830s. He patented a prototype in 1837. In 1844 he sent the first message over the first long-distance telegraph line, which stretched between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore. The message: “What hath God wrought.”

Telephone

1876

Once it was possible to send information through a wire in the form of dots and dashes, the next step was actual voice communication. Alexander Graham Bell made the first telephone call, on March 10, 1876, when he asked his assistant Tom Watson to come to him: “Mr Watson—come here—I want to see you.”

Electric light

1879

After thousands of trials, American inventor Thomas Edison got a carbon-filament light bulb to burn for 13½ hours. Edison and others in his laboratory were also working on an electrical power distribution system to light homes and businesses, and in 1882 the Edison Electric Illuminating Company opened the first power plant.

Automobile

1885

The internal-combustion engine improved, becoming smaller and more efficient. Karl Benz used a one-cylinder engine to power the first modern automobile, a three-wheeled car that he drove around a track. However, the automobile did not make a commercial splash until 1888, when his wife, Bertha, exasperated with Karl’s slow methodical pace, took an automobile without his knowledge on a 64-mile trip to see her mother.

Radio

1901

Guglielmo Marconi had been experimenting with radio since 1894 and was sending transmissions over longer and longer distances. In 1901 his reported transmission of the Morse code letter S across the Atlantic from Cornwall to Newfoundland excited the world.

Airplane

1903

On December 17 Orville Wright made the first airplane flight, of 120 feet, near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. He and his brother Wilbur made four flights that day. On the last, Wilbur flew 852 feet.

Rocketry

1926

As a young boy in the late 1890s, Robert Goddard was inspired by H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds and the possibilities of space travel. As a middle-aged man in the mid-1920s, he achieved the first test flight of a liquid-fueled rocket, from his aunt’s farm in Auburn, Massachusetts. The rocket flew 12.5 meters (41 feet) in the air.

Television

1927

After the development of radio, the transmission of an image was the next logical step.. As a teenager in Utah, Philo T. Farnsworth became convinced that a mechanical system would not be able to scan and assemble images multiple times a second. Only an electronic system would do that. In 1922 the 16-year-old Farnsworth worked out a plan for such a system, but it wasn’t until 1927 that he made the first electronic television transmission, a horizontal line.

Computer

1937

Iowa State mathematician and physicist John Atanasoff designed the first electronic digital computer. It would use binary numbers (base 2, in which all numbers are expressed with the digits 0 and 1), and its data would be stored in capacitors. In 1939 he and his student Clifford Berry began building the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC).

Nuclear power

1942

As part of the Manhattan Project to build the first atomic bomb, it was necessary to understand nuclear reactions in detail. On December 2 underneath the football stands at the University of Chicago, a team of physicists led by Enrico Fermi used uranium to produce the first self-sustaining chain reaction.

Spaceflight

1957

The Soviet Union surprised the world on October 4, when it launched the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, a small 83.6-kg (184.3-pound) metal sphere. The space race began between the Soviet Union and the United States, opening up a new front in the Cold War.

Internet

1974

Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn produced the TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol), which describes how data can be broken down into smaller pieces called packets and how these packets can be transmitted to the right destination. TCP/IP became the basis for how data is transmitted over the Internet.

World Wide Web

1989

The development of the World Wide Web was begun in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues at CERN, an international scientific organization based in Geneva, Switzerland. They created a protocol, HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which standardized communication between servers and clients.

CRISPR

2012

American biochemist Jennifer Doudna and French microbiologist Emmanuelle Charpentier developed CRISPR-Cas9, a method for editing genes—that is, making changes to DNA sequences. Gene editing has the potential to treat many diseases but also opens up the ethical gray area of creating designer humans.

Artificial intelligence

2017

The team behind the AlphaGo artificial intelligence program announced that it had become the world’s best go player. Go is a game with very simple rules but many possible positions. The previous year AlphaGo had defeated the great player Lee Sedol in a match 4–1. AlphaGo then played itself and, through continual improvement, was able to defeat the version that had defeated Lee, 100–0. Through machine learning, AlphaGo had become better at the game than any human.