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1455
Printing
Johannes Gutenberg completed the printing of the Bible, which was the first book printed in the West -
Railways
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. -
Telegraph
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. -
Telephone
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.” -
Airplane
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. -
computer
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
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. -
personal computer
The first computers that emerged after World War II were gigantic, but, with advances in technology, especially in putting many transistors on a semiconductor chip, computers became both smaller and more powerful. Finally, they became small enough for home use. The first such personal computer was the Altair, which was soon supplanted in 1977 by the Apple II, the TRS-80, and the Commodore PET. -
Internet
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. -
CRISPR
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
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.
