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6000 BCE
Irrigation
Irrigation has been a big part of agriculture for over 5000 years and forms the basis for the economy and culture of many civilizations throughout history. Perennial irrigation was first practiced in Mesopotamia with water flowing through small channels connecting to a river or a small lake. In Egypt, several pharaohs during the Twelfth Dynasty used oases to store water for irrigation during the dry season. -
Period: 6000 BCE to 1000 BCE
Ancient Era
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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, so that was a plus. The oldest (c. 4500 BC) tin-bronze items have been found in a Vinca site in Serbia, and other early examples include odd bits found in China and Mesopotamia. -
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 Assyrians of the Fertile Crescent lacked easy access to stone but possessed rich deposits of clay, which they sun-dried into bricks. The Harappa city in now-Pakistan was built around 2600 BC with bricks and gypsum mortar. -
4000 BCE
Writing
Writing is a technology that changed the course of civilization. The ability to set things down 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. Writing allowed civilization to become organized and literature, is a great advance over mere oral tales. -
4000 BCE
The Wheel
The invention of the wheel comes in the late Neolithic Age, and the advance of several other technologies kicks off the Bronze Age. Archaeological evidence for wheeled vehicles appears in the fourth millennia BC, mostly at the same time in Mesopotamia, the Caucasus, and Central Europe. The first wheels were solid wood, planks with rounded ends that were put together to give a round shape. -
Period: 1000 BCE to 500
Classical Era
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600 BCE
Engineering
Engineering is the science of using science to design things: buildings, roads and bridges, machines, and other materially useful things. 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. Soon the term was being attached to the design and construction of all sorts of monumental monuments and wondrous works. -
500 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, ironworking developed at about the same time; iron Chinese artifacts have been unearthed dating back to around 600 BC. From those two places, using iron for weapons and tools spread quickly across the globe, except in the Americas where the natives continued to hit each other with rocks. -
500 BCE
Shipbuilding
Shipbuilding is the building of ships. Archaeological evidence indicates that humans sailed to Borneo from Asia 120 thousand years ago aboard constructed ships. 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. -
500 BCE
Construction
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 arose. This new class of skilled workers, including lots of slaves, laid the foundations for civilization. The ancient civilizations were built in wood occasionally, but mostly in mud brick, and in stone. Although remarkably durable, stone and brick are also quite heavy and inflexible. -
150 BCE
Celestial Navigation
Celestial navigation is the practice of taking angular measurements between a celestial body (sun, moon, or star) and a point on the horizon to determine one's position on the globe. The altitude of the sun above the horizon at noon when compared with the altitude of other bodies gave, for example, the latitude of the ship. Similarly, an angular measurement of the star Polaris and a similar measurement of a star near the western or eastern horizon could give an accurate longitudinal position. -
500
Education
Education has been around as long as mankind has. Throughout history, it was an informal affair, with parents teaching their children skills they needed to know to survive and be productive (household chores, hunting expeditions, dodging barbarians, etc). As a tribe expanded and grew more prosperous, village elders and priests educated the children while the healthy adults gathered food, built stuff, and made war. Eventually, a wealthy society had formal classes for the more important children. -
Period: 500 to 1350
Medieval Era
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700
Stirrups
The stirrup is considered one of the basic inventions needed to spread civilization. Humans had domesticated the horse around 4500 BC, but where to put one's feet and how to stay on when the horse began running? The saddle, invented around 800 BC, took care of the latter problem. But adding two pieces of leather with a loop on the end hanging down didn't come about until around a half-millennia later. The idea of stirrups spread quickly as barbarian horsemen of Central Asia saw the advantages. -
1000
Castles
Great piles of stone dominate the landscapes of Europe, castles dating back to the early 10th Century AD when feudal lords sought to ensure their power and influence. Castles served the ultimate utilitarian role in feudal society – imposing the lord's will on the land. The accumulation of surplus wealth and resources led to the need for defensive structures, and the earliest fortifications evolved in the Fertile Crescent, Indus Valley, Egypt, and China to keep the barbarians out of the larder. -
1100
Military Engineering
Military engineering dates back to the Roman legions, which each had a small, specialized corps devoted to overseeing the building of fortifications and roads. They were also the ones to build the catapults, battering rams, and siege towers. But for over five centuries after the fall of Rome in the West, military engineering barely progressed; it wasn't until late in the Middle Ages that the need for siege warfare again spurred the advance of military engineering. -
1300
Machinery
When humans began to develop tasks that they or their animals could or would 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. Later Greek thinkers added the wedge and the wheel/axle to the list of simple machines. Heron of Alexandria in his work Mechanica (c. 50 AD) described their fabrication and uses. -
1350
Square Rigging
The first two-mast square-rigged ships appeared in the Mediterranean in the mid-14th Century AD, replacing the triangular-rigged lateen sailing ships that had been used for the previous thousand years. Perpendicular square sails had been used on sailing ships in Northern Europe before (on cogs and longships), and the design was adopted by the Crusaders for their transports, giving more speed so they could get to the Holy Land quicker. -
Period: 1350 to
Renaissance Era
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1400
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. The first production of cast iron was in China between 800 and 700 BC; using sand mold casting, the Chinese were making cast iron plowshares by 233 BC. Mostly, the ancients used metal casting to make jewelry. -
1400
Printing
Woodblock printing has 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. The invention revolutionized the world and gave rise to mass communication. -
1400
Banking
Hammurabi set down laws governing banking in his famous Code – mostly these were private individuals who made loans, with various methods to ensure repayment. With the fall of Rome in the West and the fall of money lending, Banks did not reappear in Europe until the Middle Ages, rediscovered by rulers looking for ways to fund their bloody and expensive Crusades. Benches were used by Jewish Florentine money-lenders as temporary exchange tables, and thus the term “bank.” -
1500
Cartography
There is a scholarly debate about how long the “science” of making maps has been around and what makes 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. But the first ink splatter that is a map is the “House of the Admiral” wall painting dating to the Minoan civilization c. 1600 BC. Around the 4th Century BC, the Greeks and the Romans were making somewhat more portable maps. -
Period: to
Industrial Era
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Industrialization
Not many “technologies” give a label to a revolution in 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. It is driven by the invention of new machinery and the discovery of new power sources. The Industrial Revolution, beginning in Europe during the 18th century, brought about changes in the way people lived their daily lives, both beneficial and harmful. -
Steam Power
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. The move towards a workable steam engine began a century later when Edward Somerset published a collection of his “inventions,” including a steam pump. In 1680 Huygens published memoirs describing an engine that drives a piston; in 1698, Thomas Savery built a virtual copy of Somerset's machine and patented it in just about every use of steam power. -
Ballistics
The mechanics of throwing things have been known for a while; 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. Then bows were invented around 10 thousand years ago; then gunpowder and the study of the mechanics of launching things gets rather complicated. The motion, behavior, and effects of bullets, shells, bombs, rockets, and the like became of great interest. -
Sanitation
A clean water supply and sanitation have been important for the rise of civilization since. Without it, people tend to fall prey to disease and death. Especially when crowded together in urban centers. The earliest signs of city sanitation have been found in the ruins of the Harappan settlements Mohenjo-daro and Rakhigarhi in the Indus Valley c. 2500 BC. These groups of homes obtained water from a common well, and wastewater was emptied into covered drains that lined the streets. -
Rifling
Rifling is merely the cutting of helical grooves into the inner part of a gun barrel to induce spin in a ball or bullet which serves to stabilize the projectile, giving it greater accuracy and range. Although problematic to decide who first came up with the idea, the rifling of musket barrels was begun by several gunsmiths in Augsburg in the late 15th Century; August Kotter, in Nuremberg, improved upon the design around 1520 AD. -
Period: to
Modern Era
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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 that electromagnetic waves could be transmitted through the air. It took an obscure Italian inventor by the name of Guglielmo Marconi to build the first working, completely successful wireless telegraph or radio, as some folks call it in 1894. -
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. Within a few decades, however, steel mills were springing up all over the world using Bessemer's method; the steel industry had been born, producing tons of it for the new bridges, skyscrapers, trains and automobiles, household gadgets, and weapons of the modern era. -
Flight
From the earliest times, there have been legends of men strapping on wings or other devices and attempting to fly, by jumping off something tall. In the Middle Ages, Armen Firman strapped wings with vulture feathers to himself and jumped off a tower in Cordoba during 852 AD. In China, man-carrying kites were the method of choice. It wasn't until 1783 when the Montgolfier brothers launched a hot-air balloon that man finally took off and landed safely. Ballooning became all the rage across Europe. -
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. It quickly became possible to produce higher-quality, cleaner-burning fuels like kerosene and fuel oil from crude oil. -
Electricity
Mankind has known electricity existed since the first bunch of Neanderthals got blasted by a lightning bolt, for millennia afterward, electricity in this form was associated with angry gods. Egyptian texts dating from c. 2750 BC record people getting shocks from electric eels. Around 600 BC Thales of Miletus observed that static electricity could be generated by rubbing rods of amber with a cat's fur. Electricity remained nothing more than a scientific curiosity through the 17th Century. -
Rocketry
Until the Second World War, rockets remained relatively short-range, inaccurate, clumsy weapons or were used for making pretty fireworks. In 1792, iron-cased rockets were used by Tipu Sultan fending Mysore against the British East India Company. In 1914, Robert Goddard – inspired by the fanciful tales of H.G. Wells – patented several concepts that proved pivotal in the history of rocketry: a combustion chamber, multiple stages, and a nozzle to increase exhaust speed. -
Nuclear Fission
In physics and chemistry, nuclear fission is the decay whereby the nucleus of an atom breaks down into lighter nuclei, spinning off neutrons and photons, thus releasing big amounts of energy. Building on the work of 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. -
Period: to
Atomic Era
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Computers
If one thinks of a computer as a device simply to aid computation, then these have been around for millennia. An abacus, used as early as 2400 BC, is just such as device. Most people think of a computer as a programmable device to perform a wide variety of tasks. The primogenitor of such was built in 1833 by the Englishman Charles Babbage. His programmable “mechanical computer” incorporated punched cards, a printer, an arithmetic logic unit, conditional branching, and even an integrated memory. -
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 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. The first jet fighter to see combat, its appearance was too late to affect the war significantly, but the Me-262s shot down 542 enemy planes. -
Plastics
Following the First World War, radical advances in chemistry 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. (In 1960, Dart Container company, the largest maker of the now-ubiquitous Styrofoam cup, shipped their first order.) -
Composites
The earliest examples of Composites were Egyptian bricks, made from straw and mud. The Romans invented concrete, another composite used in construction. Around 3400 BC the Mesopotamians invented plywood, thin sheets of various woods glued together giving added strength and durability. More recently, fiberglass was invented in the 1930s. In 1961, carbon fiber was spun and within a few years, the first carbon fiber composites were commercially available. -
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 Sputnik served notice to the humans huddled on the surface that the world had dramatically changed. Sputnik 2 was launched in November, with the first living creature in space aboard, a dog named Laika. The American military announced its program to put a satellite into orbit. Three months later, the United States sent Explorer 1 around the Earth. -
Robotics
In 1942 AD, the science fiction author Isaac Asimov proposed three “laws of robotics.” In 1948 the American mathematician Norbert Wiener developed the “principles of cybernetics” as the basis for practical robotics. In 1961 the first programmable robot (Unimate) was constructed to lift and stack hot pieces of metal from a die-casting machine. Automata – self-operating machines – have been around since described in the third-century BC Chinese text 'Liezi' attributed to the philosopher Lie Yukou. -
Telecommunications
The telegraph and telephone communications made the world smaller and changed the landscape of many things. Scientists and inventors were soon searching for “wireless” telecommunications. In 1894 Guglielmo Marconi built the first commercially viable wireless telegraph, soon termed “radio.” In October 1925 Scottish inventor John Logie Baird publicly demonstrated the transmission of moving halftone images, soon termed “television.” -
Nanotechnology
The theoretical foundations of nanotech date back to December 29, 1959 AD, when the American physicist Richard Feynman introduced it at a Physical Science conference at CalTech. Norio Taniguchi first used the term “nanotechnology” in 1974 to describe the “process of separation, consolidation, and deformation of materials by one atom or one molecule.” In 1985, fullerenes were discovered by a trio of chemists, who were able to form semiconductor clusters using pulsed molecular beams. -
Period: to
Future Era
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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 to them can tell you) but it is also being used in other areas as well. Medical and health professionals are interested in the increased efficacy of targeted preventative programs. Law enforcement is interested in being able to anticipate crime. -
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. Approaches for sustained life away from Earth are still in the theoretical stages in the early 21st Century. It is hoped that as humans develop the ability to live away from our home planet, those learnings will also be passed back to those of us living on Earth, to help us make better use of the resources we possess and guard them for future generations. -
Advanced AI
In the 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. An AI in these cases often “studies” a problem by developing and testing hypotheses about underlying patterns in the data, matching them against the data, and creating iteratively refined models with notable power. As AI continues to improve, it will probably be applied to more and more problems. -
Smart Materials
Materials are usually selected for use based on a single quality. A brick, for instance, should not be flexible if it is to be a good basis for construction. Smart materials are materials that can assume different properties on command, in response to different situations. 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. -
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. One of the earliest projects of scientists in the cybernetic program was interest in developing more effective artificial limbs, and thus the term "cybernetics" became equated in popular culture with the replacement of organic physiology with artificial physiology.