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10,000 BCE
Animal Husbandry
Even though dogs were domesticated first, sheep and goats began to be domesticated around 10000 BC in the Middle East. Then Humans began to domesticate Cows and Horses. -
10,000 BCE
Archery
Archery is when someone using the sing force stored in a bow to launch a sharp object forward, and while some arrowheads (The pointy part of the arrow) were found in Africa around 60000 BC, the bow wasn't really used until around 10000 BC. -
10,000 BCE
Pottery
Even though it first started in 29000 BC, it wasn't really useful until 12000 BC, where people took clay, shaped it by hand, then fired it in a pit to make it hard and got clay bowls and pots. -
6000 BCE
Irrigation
While farming was invented before 6000 BC, people didn't start making channels and aqueducts for farming until 6000 BC in China. -
Period: 6000 BCE to 1000 BCE
Ancient Era
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5500 BCE
Sailing
Between 5500 and 5000 BC humans had developed sailing, which helped push boats forward rather than rowing. -
5000 BCE
Bronze Working
The earliest bronze artifacts – actually, arsenic bronze, alloys of metallic arsenic rather than tin – found by archaeologists in Iranian tombs date back to the fifth millennium BC. Tin-bronze was eventually found to be superior to arsenic-bronze ... and the fumes of the alloying process didn't kill the bronze worker. -
4000 BCE
Mining
The earliest mining took place in England and France around 4000 BC, then the Egyptians began mining around 2600 BC. However, the romans used aqueducts to bring water to mines, helping break down rock. -
4000 BCE
Writing
Writing allowed for civilizations to remember the past and began to organize government, economy, war and so much more. The first form of writing was pictography which used little pictures for representation. -
4000 BCE
Masonry
The ancient Egyptians mastered the art of masonry as early as the fourth millennium BC, constructing temples, palaces, pyramids and other edifices from limestone, sandstone, granite and basalt found in the hills of the Nile River. The Babylonians too used brick, held together with mortar made of lime and pitch. -
4000 BCE
Horseback Riding
There is archaeological evidence that around 4000 BC humans had used bits on their horses in the basins of the Dnieper and Don rivers; skeletons of horses found in the region shows signs that the horses chomped on bits. By the Middle Ages, however, heavily armored mounted knights dominated warfare in Europe. -
2500 BCE
Shipbuilding
In the fourth millennium BC, the Egyptians were constructing boat hulls from planks of wood, using treenails to hold them together and pitch to make them watertight. Across the ocean in India, the first shipbuilding docks were being utilized by the Harappans around 2500 BC. -
2000 BCE
Currency
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. The Egyptians soon adopted the practice for their own grain warehouses, so that individuals could claim a portion they had “banked” therein. -
1500 BCE
Construction
The ancient civilizations built in wood occasionally, but mostly in mud brick and in stone. Although remarkably durable, stone and brick are also quite heavy and inflexible. It's impossible to construct very tall structures out of these materials – unless the structure in question is solid stone or brick and is pyramid-shaped. -
1200 BCE
Wheel
Archaeological evidence for wheeled vehicles appears in the fourth millennia BC, more or less at the same time in Mesopotamia, the Caucasus and Central Europe (obviously, an idea whose time had come). In China the wheel was certainly in existence by 1200 BC, when Chinese chariots appeared. -
1100 BCE
Celestial Navigation
Celestial navigation is 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. A very useful skill for early sailors venturing out of sight of land. -
1000 BCE
Engineering
The term is somewhat vague – consider for example, software “engineering.” Originally the term referred only to creating “engines” of war; the Romans applied it to all sorts of public works, since their legions were building roads, bridges and walls all over the empire. -
Period: 1000 BCE to 500
Classical Era
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600 BCE
Iron Working
While the use of iron has been dated back to 4000 BC, the Hittites were the first to extract the ore, smelt it and fashion weapons – thus setting off the Iron Age around 1200 BC. In Asia, iron working developed at about the same time; iron Chinese artifacts have been unearthed dating back to around 600 BC. -
600 BCE
Mathematics
The Egyptians, needing to keep track of all the taxes and trade, not to mention designing massive pyramids and monuments, developed a written system of numerals during the Middle Kingdom period. Between 600 and 300 BC, the Greeks began a systematic study of mathematics, dividing it into two spheres: arithmetic and geometry (the understanding of shapes and area). -
420 BCE
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 (household chores and hunting expeditions and dodging barbarians and so forth). -
300 BCE
Stirrups
The saddle, invented around 800 BC, took care of the latter problem. But adding two pieces of leather with a loop (later made of metal) on the end hanging down didn't come about until around a half-millennia later – no one is quite sure when or where, although it was somewhere in east Asia as the Chinese Jin dynasty was using it by 322 BC. -
Period: 500 to 1350
Medieval Era
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976
Military Engineering
With the development of gunpowder, military engineers became vital, both in designing fortifications to withstand cannon (one of the first innovations: earthen walls worked better than stone ones, since the cannonballs just went thunk and sank into the dirt) and devising ways to get the cannon close enough to the fortifications to be effective. -
1000
Castles
Great piles of stone – some still intact (more or less) – 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. -
1154
Cartography
During the Dark Ages, most Europeans barely knew what was around the next bend in the river, much less over the horizon. But the Arabs were producing marvelous atlases such as Muhammed al-Idrisi's Tabula Rogeriana in 1154 showing what was known of Africa, the Middle East, the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean and even the Far East. His work remained the most accurate and far-reaching map collection for three centuries. -
1240
Gunpowder
The earliest written record of it – a formula composed of sulfur, charcoal and potassium nitrate dating to the later Song dynasty – was supposed to be an elixir for immortality ... it was anything but. The Chinese found a more practical use for gunpowder in crude bombs and rockets which they used against the Mongols ... until the Mongols overran China and then used the new weapon against everyone else on their path westward. -
1300
Ballistics
As cannon became common in warfare military engineers began to study the combination of factors (ranging from elevation to windage) that might affect the path of a cannonball on its way to flatten a wall or a human being. They soon divided that study into four subfields: internal ballistics concerned with the initial acceleration, transition ballistics for the shift to unpowered flight, external ballistics which focused on trajectory, and terminal ballistics for the effects when the flight ends. -
Period: 1350 to
Renaissance Era
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1400
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. By the 1400s, a faster, cheaper method of reproducing the written word had become the “Holy Grail” for European booksellers, driven by the rise in education and literacy. Even the commoners wanted to read the Bible for themselves, and their kids were learning their letters in new grammar schools springing up all over the continent. -
1472
Banking
During the 14th Century, avaricious and clever individuals in families such as the Bardi, de Medici, Peruzzi, Gondi and others established permanent banks in their home cities of Florence, Genoa, Venice, Siena, Rome and elsewhere across Italy. The oldest bank still open is the Monte dei Paschi in Siena, operating continuously since 1472. -
1500
Metal Casting
Metal casting is the process by which a craftsman can make multiple, identical metal objects by pouring molten metal into a mold. In the West, cast iron did not take hold until around the 15th Century AD, the technique apparently moving along the Silk Road from Asia to Europe. In 1455 the Germans are using cast iron pipe to carry water in the Dillenburg Castle, and around 1500 the Italian Vannoccio Biringuccio builds the first cast iron foundry. -
1519
Square Rigging
The “Age of Exploration” saw the design of the square-rigged caravel (the caravela redonda – so named for its rounded stern) by the Portuguese for their long voyages around and across the oceans. It quickly became the definitive, most common beast of burden for the explorers, the forerunner of the much-larger galleon; Magellan had an all-caravel fleet when he circumnavigated the globe in 1519. -
Machinery
Thus, during the supposedly “Dark” Ages, men in various parts of the world began to devise machinery in which a tradeoff between distance and force was the principle behind producing mechanical energy. The complete dynamic theory of simple machines (the above plus some later ones) was worked out by Galileo Galilei and published in his Le Meccaniche in 1600. -
Steam Power
In 1705 Thomas Newcomen coupled a steam boiler with a piston in a cylinder. Seven years later, now partnered with the unsavory Savery he installed his first commercial steam engine, intended to pump water out of mines. In 1769, James Watt invented the separate condenser, installing a second cylinder with a water jet – making the steam engine both practical and much safer. -
Rifling
Rifling wasn't particularly effective with black-powder weapons, due to the residue left behind in the barrel (thus mucking up the grooves); the most effective rifled black-powder weapons were breech-loaded pistols, such as the Queen Anne flintlock. Although rifling dates from the 16th Century, it didn't become common until the wars of the Industrial Age. -
Period: to
Industrial Era
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Economics
Economics is the understanding of “the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services.” Adam Smith’s studies – notably his monumental The Wealth of Nations (1776) – are considered the foundation of modern economics. In his book, Smith contends that a free market is the most efficient means of assigning worth to and for distributing goods and services. -
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. The Industrial Revolution brought mass production to just about everything, even things that hadn't been invented when it started in the early 1800s. -
Industrialization
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. It is driven by the invention of new machinery and discovery of new power sources. The Industrial Revolution, beginning in Europe during the 18th century, brought about unforeseen changes in the way people lived their daily lives, both beneficial and detrimental. -
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. The German Friedrich Bessel managed to measure the distance to a star (61 Cygni) in 1838 for the first time. -
Sanitation
In 1596 Sir John Harington published his work A New Discourse on a Stale Subject in which he described the forerunner to the modern toilet, which he had installed in his home, incorporating a flush valve, a water tank, and a means to wash down the bowl when used. He also installed one for his godmother Queen Elizabeth I at Richmond Palace, but she refused to use it because of the unseemly noise. -
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. -
Combustion
In 1879 Karl Benz was granted a patent for a two-stroke gas engine; a few years later, he devised a four-stroke engine which he put in his “automobiles,” which he then put into production in 1886. By 1884, English tinkerer Edward Butler had invented the spark plug, ignition magneto, coil ignition and jet carburetor (and coined the term “petrol” to confuse motorists for generations). -
Chemistry
Chemistry achieved its dignified status in 1789, when Antoine Lavoisier published a paper describing the law of conservation of mass. In “Elements of Chemistry,” Lavoisier revealed the composition of air and water, coining the term “oxygen.” If Boyle is the godfather, Lavoisier is considered the father of chemistry. -
Electricity
The work of others – von Guericke, Boyle, Gray, and du Fay – led history's ultimate dilettante Benjamin Franklin to “discover” electricity while flying a kite with a key attached in a thunderstorm (don't try this at home). Franklin never did anything with his discovery, but it set others off searching for more sources of electricity. Ampere discovered electromagnetism; and Michael Faraday built the first electric motor in 1821. -
Period: to
Modern Era
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Radio
The first radio broadcast was made from Ocean Bluff-Brant Rock, Massachusetts, on Christmas Eve 1906, a broadcast that included holiday music and readings from the Bible; ships at sea reported picking up this first amplitude modulation (now just termed “AM”) transmission. Two years later, on his way to being a millionaire, Marconi opened civilization's first radio factory in Chelmsford, England. -
Flight
On December 17, the Wright flyer flew four times, at distances up to 852 feet. The years following the Wright brothers’ breakthrough saw rapid improvements in the technology of powered flight. In 1908 American Glenn Hammond Curtiss flew over one kilometer, and in 1909 Frenchman Louis Bleriot flew across the English Channel. -
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. -
Plastics
Following the First World War, radical advances in chemistry (all that production of poison gases and new explosives) led to an explosion of new forms of plastic. Polyvinyl chloride (or PVC), a rigid and durable plastic, began being manufactured commercially in the 1920s by various companies. The transparent polystyrene was commercialized in 1931 by I.G. Farben, and in 1941 – spurred by another war – Dow Chemical invented Styrofoam. -
Rocketry
German scientists were refining their own designs for rockets – for bombing the enemy, of course. Where the V-1 was a crude, simplistic flying bomb, the V-2 was a marvel, with turbopumps, inertial guidance systems and many other innovations still used by rocket scientists. The end of the war set off a “space race” when the two superpowers “assimilated” many of Germany's top rocket scientists from Peenemunde, notably America's acquisition of Wernher von Braun. -
Nuclear Fission
Scientific geniuses such as Marie Curie, Ernest Rutherford, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, and Edward Teller, the United States funded the Manhattan Project, headed by physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, in 1942 AD to create a sustainable nuclear reaction using uranium or plutonium. The result was the first atomic bomb successfully tested in the New Mexico desert in July 1945. The next month, America dropped two more on Japanese cities, leaving between 129 thousand and 246 thousand dead. -
Period: to
Atomic Era
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Computers
It was the arrival of electricity that spawned the “Computer Age.” The principles of pioneer “computer scientist” (actually, he was a mathematician) Alan Turing were first set out in his 1936 paper “On Computable Numbers.” Most of the engineers used electricity and vacuum tubes rather than mechanical switches, and gave their monstrous machines names such as “ABC,” “Colossus”, and ENIAC in 1946, the first “Turing-complete” machine. -
Replaceable Parts
Manufacturing was revolutionized by the slide rest lathe, screw cutting lathe, milling machine and metal planer, in turn. Add electrification of the machines for higher speed, and now hundreds of identical parts could be churned out each hour by skilled machinists. Configuration management evolved in the 1950s as a systems engineering field to insure consistency in performance and physical attributes of manufactured parts. Then came robots to work the assembly lines. -
Nuclear Fusion
Instead, it was left to the weapons engineers to create the first man-made fusion reaction – Ivy Mike, the first thermonuclear bomb tested in 1952 at Enewetak atoll. Two years later Castle Bravo was exploded at Bikini Atoll, with a yield of 15 megatons. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union was building and testing its own thermonuclear arsenal. But these were all uncontrolled fusion reactions. -
Telecommunications
Satellite telecommunications – or at least the idea for them – can be traced to a piece written by science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke published in the magazine Wireless World in October 1945. Sputnik, with an onboard radio transmitter, was launched by the Soviet Union in 1957; NASA soon followed with the balloon named Echo 1 which was capable of relaying signals between distant stations on the surface. Thus the Information Age floated into history. -
Satellites
“Beep … beep … beep.” So it began. 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. Sputnik 2 was launched in November, with the first living creature in space aboard, a dog named Laika, who died. -
Synthetic Materials
The first synthetic diamond was created in 1953. The year 1960 saw a team of researchers in North Carolina create the first artificial turf, which came to prominence when “AstroTurf” was installed in the Houston Astrodome in 1966. Borazon, an artificial cubic form of boron nitride created at temperatures greater than 1800 degrees, in its crystal form is one of the hardest materials known. -
Lasers
The first functional laser was demonstrated in May 1960 when the Hughes Research Laboratories introduced laser technology capable of storing data on optical devices. Later that same year, the Iranian Ali Javan headed an international team that produced the first gas laser, utilizing helium and neon, capable of continuous operation in the infrared spectrum. -
Composites
In 1961, carbon fiber was spun and within a few years the first carbon fiber composites were commercially available. The 1970s and 1980s saw a series of breakthroughs in producing ultra-high molecular weight composites, exceedingly sturdy and resistant to corrosion, soon used in the production of aircraft, boats, automobiles and a lot of household gadgets. By the mid-1990s, the production of composite materials dominated materials manufacturing. -
Steel
Along with petroleum, steel is the backbone of modern civilization. In 1980, there were a half-million steelworkers in the United States alone. Between 2000 and 2005, demand for steel increased 6% worldwide, driven by the building boom in India and China. In 2005, China was the world's leading steel producer, followed (in order) by Japan, Russia and America. In 2008 steel began being traded as a commodity, first on the London Metal Exchange. Seems it really is worth (nearly) its weight in gold. -
Stealth Technology
In 1964, Lockheed's Skunk Works produced the SR-71 “Blackbird.” A high-altitude stealth aircraft with – along with the above – canted vertical stabilizers and composite materials, lowering its radar signature significantly. It was followed in the 1970s by the stealth F-117 fighter and B-2 bomber. No doubt there are newer stealth aircraft, and even ships and ground vehicles, but those are as yet unseen by the public (or anyone else, if the technology works). -
Period: to
Information Era
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Robotics
In 1973, Wabot-1 was built, able to walk, communicate in Japanese, and measure distance to objects with artificial eyes and ears. (Almost as entertaining as the Digesting Duck, apparently.) Soon enough, just about every year a new robot was delighting the world. In 2005, Wakamaru made its first appearance, a Japanese-built domestic robot intended to provide care and companionship for the elderly and disabled. -
Nanotechnology
In March 2011, the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies identified some 1300 nanotech products, with new applications being made available at the rate of three or four each week. Meanwhile, the National Nanotechnology Initiative was created by the American government for research to “foster the transfer of new technologies for public benefit … and support responsible development of nanotechnology.” -
Period: to
Future Era
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Smart Materials
An analogy would be a brick that is solid when used as a building material, but which could be flat and flexible for easy storage and portability otherwise. These are becoming more and more common as material science advances. Ferrofluids, and dielectric and self-healing elastomers are representative examples of current smart materials. -
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. A live electronic device is capable of marvels. One without a working battery is an expensive hindrance. Increases in capacity, working voltage, and lifespan continue, and the search continues for a reliable, affordable means of storing energy. -
Offworld Missions
Approaches for sustained life away from Earth are still in the theoretical stages in the early Twenty-First Century. It is hoped that as human beings develop the ability to live away from our home planet, those learnings will also be passed back to those of us living on Earth, in order to help us make better use of the resources we possess and safeguard them for future generations. -
Cybernetics
The cybernetics program of study had a decidedly reductivist, machine-metaphor flavor to its course of study. New experimental programs in psychology and advances in computer science meant its practitioners largely migrated into those two academic departments within a few decades, although the machine-metaphor view of life processes does occasionally recur. The rest of the world seems content to let the term refer to robot limbs, eyes, and so on. -
Advanced AI
An AI in these cases often “studies” a problem through developing and testing hypotheses about underlying patterns in the data, matching them against the data, and creating iteratively refined models with considerable explanatory power. As AI continues to improve, it will probably be applied to more and more problems, with solution algorithms being treated as a “black box”—meaningful only to the AI and irrelevant to the humans interest in the model outputs. -
Predictive Systems
There is some cultural discomfort with the increasing scope of this kind of preventative analysis, in part because the AI-generated models are often opaque (data goes in, recommendations come out, the intervening calculation is sensible only to the AI), and because some of the analysis treads on traditional notions of privacy in those cultures that value such.