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10,000 BCE
Neolithic Revolution
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6000 BCE
Irrigation
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4000 BCE
Sailing
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1200 BCE
Iron
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850 BCE
Gunpowder
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Internal Combust Engine
In contrast to steam engines, German engineer Nikolaus Otto's engine moved a piston by burning fuel inside of it. Later on, cars would be powered by this kind of engine. -
Electrical Light
Thomas Edison, an American inventor, succeeded in getting a carbon-filament lightbulb to burn for 13.5 hours after hundreds of experiments. In addition to developing a mechanism for distributing electrical power to light buildings and commercial spaces, Edison and associates at his laboratory established the first power plant in 1882 under the name Edison Electric Illuminating Company. -
Automobile
The internal combustion engine evolved, growing more compact and effective. Karl Benz powered the first modern automobile, a three-wheeled vehicle he drove around a track, using a one-cylinder engine. But the car didn't become popular until 1888, when Bertha, Karl's wife, became frustrated with his sluggish, methodical pace and, without telling him, drove a car 64 miles to see her mother. -
Airplane
Orville Wright accomplished the first airplane flight, a 120-foot jump, on December 17 in the vicinity of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. That day, he and his brother Wilbur took four flights. Wilbur soared 852 feet on the final one. -
Television
A mechanical disk was employed in early television to scan images. Philo T. Farnsworth, a teenager in Utah, was more persuaded that a mechanical system could not possibly scan and construct pictures several times per second. It could only be done by an electronic system. Farnsworth, then 16 years old, devised a proposal for such a system in 1922, but he didn't make the first electrical television transmission—a horizontal line—until 1927. -
Computer
The first electrical digital computer was created by mathematician and physicist John Atanasoff of Iowa State. Its data would be kept in capacitors and it would employ binary numerals (base 2, where all values are stated with the digits 0 and 1). He and his pupil Clifford Berry started constructing the ABC, or Atanasoff-Berry Computer, in 1939. -
Nuclear Power
In order to construct the first atomic weapon, the Manhattan Project required a thorough understanding of nuclear processes. Under the University of Chicago football stands on December 2, a group of physicists under the direction of Enrico Fermi created the first self-sustaining chain reaction using uranium. -
Spaceflight
On October 4, the Soviet Union shocked the world by launching Sputnik 1, a tiny metal sphere weighing 83.6 kg (184.3 pounds), which was the first artificial satellite. The start of the space competition between the US and the USSR created a new front in the Cold War. -
CRISPR
The CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technique was created by French microbiologist Emmanuelle Charpentier and American scientist Jennifer Doudna. It allows for modifications to be made to DNA sequences. While gene editing holds promise for treating a wide range of illnesses, it also raises ethical questions over the creation of "designer humans." -
Artificial Intelligence
The developers of the AlphaGo AI system declared it to be the greatest go player in the world. Go is a game with several potential locations and extremely basic rules. The year before, AlphaGo had won a 4-1 match against the legendary player Lee Sedol. Then, using self-play and constant development, AlphaGo overcame the iteration that had beaten Lee 100 to 0. AlphaGo had surpassed all human players in the game thanks to machine learning.