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10,000 BCE
Pottery
A pot made of clay and mixed with sand, grit, crushed shells, and bones. The first known piece of pottery was 12,000 years ago. -
10,000 BCE
Archery
A person uses the spring power stored in a bent stick to shoot a slender pointed projectile a great distance at rapid speed. Use to hunt animals. -
Period: 10,000 BCE to 1000 BCE
Ancient Era
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6000 BCE
irrigation
water flowing through small channels connecting to a river. Nubians used a waterwheel device to bring water to their fields. -
4500 BCE
Bronze Working
alloys of metallic arsenic rather than tin found by archaeologists in tombs. grave goods in the tombs of royalty and nobility. -
4000 BCE
Animal Husbandry
The selective breeding of some animals can make animals domesticated and friendly. 95 percent of dogs originated in China. -
4000 BCE
writing
The ability to set things down to remember them like external memory storage. Changed the course of civilization. -
4000 BCE
Masonry
It was used to construct temples, palaces, pyramids, and other edifices from limestone. Later it was used to pave roads. -
3200 BCE
Sailing
Rowing was a lot of work so men developed sails to let the wing push it. Gave people a better and faster way to transport goods -
2500 BCE
Mining
the main reason people started mining is because if you can't find it you dig it up. Roman engineers developed large mining methods and found copper, iron, and gems -
1200 BCE
Wheel
the wheel came in the late Neolithic Age, and along with the advance of several other technologies kicked off the Bronze Age. evidence for wheeled vehicles appears in the fourth millennia BC, -
1000 BCE
Currency
where something relatively worthless in itself represents some amount of actual value, has been the bane of civilization since around 2000 BC, when a form of receipt was used to show ownership of stored grain in temples in Sumer. -
Period: 1000 BCE to 500
Classical Era
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600 BCE
Iron working
Using iron for weapons and tools spread quickly across the globe. one producing wrought iron and the other cast iron. It could be beaten into all sorts of shapes, and it was used extensively across Europe during the Middle Ages. -
500 BCE
Construction
The history of construction is the history of advances in tools, materials and energy. The first huts were constructed by the people who would live in them. -
300 BCE
Mathematics
Is derived from the Greek mathema, meaning knowledge, study, or learning. It is also the art of art focused on shape, space, relationship, perspective, and fractals. -
401
Stirrups
The stirrup is considered one of the basic inventions needed to spread civilization. Adding two pieces of leather with a loop on the end hanging down didn't come until around a half-millennia later. -
476
Celestial Navigation
the practice of taking angular measurements between a celestial body (sun, moon, planet, or star) and a point on the horizon to determine one's position on the globe. -
476
Shipbuiding
The building of ships. The Egyptians were constructing boat hulls from planks of wood, using treenails to hold them together and pitch to make them watertight -
500
Horseback Riding
Humans used horses as combat near the Middle Ages by horseback riding them -
500
Engineering
Engineering is the science to design things: buildings, roads and bridges, machines, and other materially useful things. -
Period: 500 to 1350
Medieval Era
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501
Education
Humans learn things, and civilization results. Obviously education has been around as long as mankind has. Through most of history, it was an informal affair, parents teaching their children the skills they needed to know to survive and be productive -
1000
Castles
dominate the varied landscapes of Europe, castles dating back to the early 10th Century AD when feudal lords sought to insure their power and influence. Some were little more than cold, dirty square stone boxes; others were fairy structures with tall towers, crenelated parapets and flying buttresses. -
1224
Machinery
When humans began to develop tasks that they or their animals could not do, they invented machines. From those first simple machines the lever, pulley and screw that Archimedes went on about, a machine civilization has evolved on Earth. -
1300
Military Engineering
Loosely defined as “the art and practice of designing and building military works and maintaining lines of military transport and communications,” military engineering dates back to the Roman legions, which each had a small, specialized corps devoted to overseeing the building of fortifications and roads -
Period: 1350 to
Renaissance Era
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1400
Gunpowder
the Chinese did discover that it burned explosively and the resultant gases expanded rapidly when exposed to heat; so it was useful for making fireworks. -
1409
Printing
No technology since writing so impacted civilization as did movable-type printing. Woodblock printing had been used for decades in China, India and Europe. The pecia system developed in the early 13th Century at Italian universities gave booksellers a method for producing multiple copies of a book in a relatively short time. But books remained expensive, and possessions only for the educated elite. -
1454
Cartography
here is a fair amount of scholarly debate about how long the “science” of making maps has been around, since there's a fair amount of debate about what constitutes a map. The oldest “map” to have been discovered is a depiction of what may be local terrain features about Catal Huyuk in Anatolia, dated to the 7th millennium BC. -
1455
Metal Casting
Metal casting is the process by which a craftsman can make multiple, identical metal objects by pouring molten metal into a mold. The oldest such yet found is a copper frog cast in Mesopotamia around 3200 BC. -
1472
Banking
Although there had been “banks” before – Hammurabi even set down laws governing banking in his famous Code – mostly these were private individuals that made loans, with various unsavory methods to insure repayment. -
1519
Square Rigging
The first two-mast square-rigged ships appeared in the Mediterranean in the mid-14th Century AD, replacing the triangular-rigged lanteen sailing ships that had been used for the previous thousand years. -
Mass Production
Until the Industrial Revolution, the idea of “mass production” was limited to pottery (molds), Chinese crossbows with interchangeable parts, and assembly line production of books. But in the Renaissance, Venice began mass-producing ships to maintain their grip on the Mediterranean in their famed Arsenal, using prefabricated parts and assembly lines that would not be matched for output for three centuries. -
Astronomy
Significant advances in astronomy have usually come with the introduction of new technology; it helps to be able to see things larger, farther away or in other spectrums when studying infinity. Better and better telescopes allowed William Herschel to create a detailed catalogue of nebulae and clusters, and to “discover” the planet Uranus in 1781. -
Period: to
Industrial Era
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Economics
Economics is the understanding of “the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services.” This understanding was a lot easier in olden times when things were distributed via barter (“I have a daughter and you have some goats; let’s trade."), but even in the early stages of coinage and mercantile trade notions of production and profits was pretty straightforward. -
Rifling
Rifling is merely the cutting of helical grooves into the inner part of a gun barrel so as to induce spin in a ball or bullet which serves to gyroscopically stabilized the projectile, giving it greater accuracy and range. -
Industrialization
Not many “technologies” (or, in this case a convergence of several technologies) give a label to a revolution and to an era. Industrialization is viewed by scholars as the transition from an agrarian society to an industrial one, which was historically accompanied by widespread social and economic upheaval. -
Steam Power
When heated to boiling, water produces steam. Even barbarians knew this. But harnessing that steam wasn't thought of until Taqi al-Din Muhammed ibn Ma’ruf described a hypothetical steam turbine for turning a spit in 1551 AD. -
Ballistics
The mechanics of throwing things have been known for quite awhile; primitive cultures are quite adept at throwing things. The science of those mechanics is known as “ballistics.” The first ballistic weapons were sticks, stones and spears. -
Sanitation
A clean water supply and sanitation has been rather important for the rise of civilization, since without such folk tend to fall prey to disease and death. Especially when crowded together in urban centers. -
Combustion
Although there were internal combustion engines described by engineers before the 19th Century – for instance, a piston-and-cylinder gas-fired engine by Jean Joseph Étienne Lenoir in 1860 AD – until industrial-level drilling for petroleum and methods for refining it into gasoline, they really weren't much more than a curiosity. -
Period: to
Modern Era
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Chemistry
As astronomy evolved from astrology, chemistry evolved from another pseudoscience: alchemy. Alchemy spans four millennia and three continents; never underestimate mankind's ability to believe in the irrational. -
Flight
Since the Renaissance, mankind has learned how to fly ... and how to crash too. Leonardo da Vinci's visions of flight are well-known, of course, but he certainly wasn't the first. From the earliest times there have been legends (some maybe even true) of men strapping on wings or other devices and attempting to fly, usually by jumping off something tall (most ended badly). -
Electricity
Mankind has known electricity existed since the first bunch of Neanderthals got blasted by a lightning bolt; in fact, for millennia afterwards, electricity in this form was associated with angry gods. -
Steel
Modern steelmaking got its start in 1855 AD, when Henry Bessemer perfected his process using pig iron as the basis to make “mild” (or “low-carbon”) steel in quantity fairly cheaply, a century after Benjamin Huntsman had established the first steelworks in Sheffield, England – a refinement but not much improvement over the old “crucible” method. -
Radio
The idea of “wireless” communication begins with experiments in wireless telegraphy – sending impulses through the ground, water and even steel railroad tracks – in the 1830s. In 1888 AD, Heinrich Hertz proved conclusively that electromagnetic waves could be transmitted through the air; his publications set off a mad scramble among inventors and crackpots to produce these Hertzian waves. -
Petroleum Refining
Petroleum refining developed in parallel with the chemical revolution of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, starting with the drilling of the first oil wells in the United States around 1860. The increased volume in crude oil's availability led to experiments in improving its qualities, starting with simple distillation rigs, and increasing in complexity and sophistication. -
Replaceable Parts
Evidence for the use of interchangeable parts can be traced back to the warships of Carthage during the First Punic War, when standardized parts made repairs to their galleys relatively quick. During the Warring States period, the Qin dynasty employed mass-produced crossbows with interchangeable parts to pummel its rivals. -
Period: to
Atomic Era
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Computers
most people think of a computer as a device that is programmable to perform and display a wide variety of tasks, something more than a souped-up calculator. The primogenitor of such was built in 1833 – about a century ahead of its time – by the “father of the computer,” the Englishman Charles Babbage. -
Nuclear Fission
Mushroom clouds and boundless energy; utopia or annihilation. The technology of nuclear fission carries the promise of both, or neither. In physics and chemistry, nuclear fission is the decay – natural or not – whereby the nucleus of an atom breaks down into lighter nuclei, spinning off neutrons and photons, thus releasing significant amounts of energy. -
Advanced Flight
The first flight of a jet aircraft was made by the Italian Caproni Campini N.1 prototype in August 1940. The Germans had kept their own work, the Messerschmitt Me-262, under wraps. Although successfully test flown as early as 1941, mass production didn't start until mid-1944 when several Luftwaffe jet squadrons took to the skies against the Allied bombers. -
Rocketry
Until the Second World War, rockets remained relatively short-range, inaccurate, clumsy weapons ... or were used for making pretty fireworks (not that military rockets don't make pretty explosions). -
Plastics
Synthetic or semi-synthetic organic polymers derived (generally) from petrochemicals of high molecular mass that are incredibly durable, malleable, lightweight and now pervasive in modern civilization. -
Synthetic Materials
Once chemistry took hold of civilization, scientists started searching for ways to improve upon naturally occurring animal and plant products. First up, synthetic fibers pioneered by Joseph Swan in the early 1880s; his fiber was made from tree bark, intended as a longer-lasting filament for light bulbs but somewhat better as a textile. -
Composites
A composite is any material made from two or more materials with significantly differing physical or chemical properties; composites are distinct from alloys or chemical compounds (in which the components do not retain their original properties). -
Period: to
Information Era
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Satellites
Sputnik, with an onboard radio signal transmitter, was launched in October 1957 AD by Soviet Russia. Orbiting overhead, the artificial satellite (as opposed to natural satellites like the Moon) Sputnik served notice to the humans huddled on the surface that the world had dramatically changed for better or not remained to be determined. -
Lasers
The term “laser” is an acronym for “light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation,” which pretty much describes what it happens to be. The theory dates back to a paper by Albert Einstein in 1917 which offered a derivation of Planck's Law concerning stimulated emission of electromagnetic radiation. -
Stealth Technology
The ability to creep around unseen and unleash havoc is the fantasy of every five-year-old; modern scientists are close to making it reality. Modern stealth technology is a combination of multiple military projects and experimental science expanded beyond what humans can see, trying to both hide and detect objects by radar, acoustics, thermal readings, or other less readily visible methods. -
Robotics
In 1942 AD, the science fiction author Isaac Asimov proposed three “laws of robotics.” In 1948 the American mathematician Norbert Wiener formulated the “principles of cybernetics” as the basis for practical robotics. And in 1961 the first programmable robot – “Unimate” – was constructed to lift and stack hot pieces of metal from a die casting machine. -
Telecommunications
telegraph and telephone communications were carried by wire, much too slow for the modern day. And even though they made the world smaller and changed the landscape of business, war, and politics, scientists and inventors were soon searching for “wireless” telecommunications, the process of sending electronic signals through the atmosphere to special receivers. I -
Nuclear Fusion
In contrast to nuclear fission – where energy is generated by the division of a nucleus – nuclear fusion occurs when two or more atomic nuclei slam together hard enough to fuse, which also releases photons in quantity. Fusion reactions power the stars of the universe, giving off lots of light and heat. -
Nanotechnology
Tiny machines inside animals and humans snipping, slicing, splicing, melding or mutating cells. Tiny machines creating new materials on the molecular level. Or tiny machines making more tiny machines. Whatever use it may be put to, nanotechnology is just beyond the edge of science fiction. -
Period: to
Future Era
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Advanced Al
In the ensuing decades since the Turing Test was proposed, artificial intelligence has become more widespread and more robust in terms of its capabilities, particularly in the analysis of large data sets. -
Advanced Power Cells
There have been countless refinements to Volta's electrochemical cell design since then, and with the digital revolution the development of battery technology has undergone ever-greater investment and interest. -
Cybernetics
the term "cybernetics" is taken from the ancient Greek term to describe the skill of a ship's helmsman, and was re-invigorated in 1948 by American mathematician Nobert Weiner, who used it as a term for the study and practice of controlling complex systems, particularly with regard to human sensory input and locomotor function. -
Predictive Systems
Artificial Intelligence systems can create sophisticated models of behavior, with good predictive power for future behavior. This is becoming widely exploited in commercial domains (as anyone who carefully observes the Internet advertisements served up them can tell you) but it is also being used in other areas as well. -
Offworld Missions
If human beings are to settle away from planet Earth, it will be necessary to develop competencies for life isolated from the main planet—simple matters like “growing food” and “finding enough water” and “not having to run home for spare parts.” -
Smart Materials
The term “programmable matter” is used to describe a hypothetical substance which could be given any property on command, and represents something of the Holy Grail of the smart material research program.