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6000 BCE
Ancient Era (BC) - Mining
So basically, it is one civilization's earliest technologies and it was also Roman engineers who actually developed large and efficient methods for mining. They also developed the process of something called "Thermal Cracking" to shatter the rocks. -
6000 BCE
Ancient Era - Irrigation
The Irrigation has been a central feature of agriculture for over 5,000 years, and forms the basis for the economy and culture of many civilizations throughout history. -
6000 BCE
Ancient Era - Writing
Writing is a technology that like a few others quite literally changed the course of civilization. The ability to set things down so as to remember them “external memory storage” unaltered beyond a single lifetime meant that every aspect of the human condition, every social structural and cultural more, altered significantly. -
6000 BCE
Ancient Era - Archery.
Archery is the method by which a person uses the spring power stored in a bent stick to shoot a slender pointed projectile a great distance at rapid speed. A very useful technology, whether employed against game animals or against other human beings. Now it's considered just recreation. -
6000 BCE
Ancient Era (BC) - Pottery
So, the earliest known "ceramics" are actually the Gravettian culture figurines that would date back to between 29 and 25 thousand BC. -
6000 BCE
Ancient Era (BC) - Animal Husbandry
So basically, domestication of the animals and the selective breeding of some to accentuate certain traits (husbandry) would appear to actually have occured around the same time as the Agriculture's development. -
6000 BCE
Ancient Era - 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. -
6000 BCE
Ancient Era - Sailing
Rowing a ship can be quite a lot of work for someone, so basically, men have developed sails to let the wind push it along in the sea. Sailing actually gave humans a much faster and more simple way to travel than just over land in general. And it has also been used for trade. -
6000 BCE
Ancient Era - 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, so that was a plus. -
6000 BCE
Ancient Era - Wheel
The invention of the wheel comes in the late Neolithic Age, and along with the advance of several other technologies kicks off the Bronze Age. 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. -
1000 BCE
Classical Era - Shipbuilding
So the shipwrights would follow a profession that traces its roots back to another age before the recorded history. -
1000 BCE
Classical Era - Celestial Navigation
Celestial navigation (or astronavigation, which sounds more scientific than artistic) 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 -
1000 BCE
Classical Era - 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. -
1000 BCE
Classical Era - 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. -
1000 BCE
Classical Era - Construction
When the architects and engineers get done mucking about, the contractors take over. Once there was agriculture and a reason to stay in one place, the first huts were constructed by the people who would live in them. As cities grew during the Bronze Age, professional construction workers – just bricklayers and carpenters at first – arose. -
1000 BCE
Classical Era - 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. -
1000 BCE
Classical Era - Mathematics
The term “mathematics” is derived from the Greek mathema, meaning “knowledge, study, or learning.” Appropriate, given that it is the science of science, focused on quantity, measurement, structure, logic and change. -
1000 BCE
Classical Era - Engineering
Engineering is the science (or perhaps “art,” if engineers themselves are involved in the discussion) of using science to design things: buildings, roads and bridges, machines, and other materially useful things. -
500
Medieval Era - Stirrups (AD)
Along with writing, gunpowder and pre-sliced bread, the stirrup is considered one of the basic inventions needed to spread civilization at least by some historians. -
500
Medieval Era - Machinery (AD)
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 -
500
Medieval Era - Education (AD)
So basically, humans learn things everyday and civilization results. And education has been around for as long as mankind has. And through most of human history, parents would be teaching their children the basics of being able to survive and be productive about life. -
500
Medieval Era - Castles (AD)
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. -
500
Medieval Era - Military Engineering (AD)
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. -
1325
Renaissance Era - Mass Production
There 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. -
1325
Renaissance Era - 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. -
1325
Renaissance Era - Gunpowder
Renaissance Era - Gunpowder 1350
The invention of Gunpowder is usually attributed to the Chinese alchemists. Also, the Arabs sometime between 1240 and 1280 AD have developed better recipes, and more deadly weapons. -
1325
Renaissance Era - 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. -
1325
Renaissance Era - 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. -
1325
Renaissance Era - 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. -
1325
Renaissance Era - 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. -
1350
Renaissance Era - Cartography
There 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. -
Industrial Era - Industrialization
So basically, Industrialization is also viewed by scholars as the transition from an agrarian society to an industrial one, which is also historically accompanied by the widespread socials and from the economic upheaval. -
Industrial Era - 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 -
Industrial Era - 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.” -
Industrial Era - Steam Power
hen 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. -
Industrial Era - 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. -
Industrial Era - 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 -
Modern Era - Radio
So, the idea of wireless communication begins with experiments in the wireless telegraphy and sending impulses through the ground, water and even steel railroad tracks in the 1830s. -
Modern Era - 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. -
Modern Era - 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. -
Modern Era - 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. -
Modern Era - 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. -
Modern Era - 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 -
Modern Era - 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. -
Modern Era - 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. -
Atomic Era - Computers
If one thinks of a computer as a device simply to aid computation, then these have been around for millennia. -
Atomic Era - Synthetic Materials
Once chemistry took hold of civilization, scientists started searching for ways to improve upon naturally occurring animal and plant products. -
Atomic Era - Advanced Flight
So, the first flight of a jet aircraft was actually made by the Italian Caproni Campini N.1 prototype around August of 1940. And the Germans had kept their own work, the Messerschmitt Me-262. -
Atomic Era - 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. -
Atomic Era - 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). -
Atomic Era - Nuclear Fission
Mushroom clouds and boundless energy; utopia or annihilation. The technology of nuclear fission carries the promise of both, or neither. -
Information Era - Lasers
So basically, the word/term "laser" is an acronym for "Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation," which pretty much describes what it happens to be. By the time of the 1st true laser, American and Soviet Russians scientists had built lasers amplifying the microwave radiation rather than light radiation. -
Information Era - Stealth Tech
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. -
Information Era - Telecommunications
Telegraph and telephone communications were carried by wire, much too slow for the modern day -
Information Era - 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 -
Information Era - Satellites
So it began. Sputnik, with an onboard radio signal transmitter, was launched in October 1957 AD by Soviet Russia. -
Information Era - 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. -
Information Era - Nanotechnology
Tiny machines inside animals and humans snipping, slicing, splicing, melding or mutating cells. Tiny machines creating new materials on the molecular level. -
Information Era - 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. -
Future Era - Advanced Power Cells
The first true solid-state device for generating electricity was created by the Italian inventor Alessandro Volta in 1800. -
Future Era - Advanced AI
Artificial Intelligence or mainly known as "AI", has actually become more widespread and more robust in terms of its capabilities, but particularly in the more large data sets. -
Future Era - Predictive Systems
Artificial Intelligence systems can create sophisticated models of behavior, with good predictive power for future behavior. -
Future Era - 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. -
Future Era - 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.” -
Future Era - Smart Materials
Materials are usually selected for use on the basis of a single quality. A brick, for instance, should not be flexible if it is to be a good basis for construction.