Technological events

Stone tools

260,000 BCE

The oldest stone tool manufacturing developed for at least 2.6 million years. The Early Stone Age began with the most basic stone implements made by early humans. These Oldowan tool sets include hammer stones, stone cores, and sharp stone flakes. About 1.76 million years ago, early humans began making Acheule hand axes and other large cutting tools.

Wheel

3500 BCE

Wheels are the archetype of a primitive, caveman-level technology. But in fact, they're so ingenious that it took until 3500 B.C. for someone to invent them. By that time — it was the Bronze Age — humans were already casting metal alloys, constructing canals and sailboats, and even designing complex musical instruments such as harps.

Paper

3000 BCE

The paper is derived from the Greek word pápyros, the name of the papyrus plant. This plant grows only along the shorelines of streams in the Middle East, such as the Nile River (a river in Africa that flows into the Mediterranean Sea in Egypt). The "paper" of the papyrus plant was first used by the Babylonians and then by the Egyptians (around 3000 BC). Also the Greeks and Romans used papyrus, among others, for contractual obligations.

Pornography

1292 BCE

Depictions of a sexual nature have existed since prehistoric times, as seen in the Venus figurines and rock art. A vast number of artifacts have been discovered from ancient Mesopotamia depicting explicit heterosexual sex.

Fire

790 BCE

The discovery of fire is one of the most important events in the history of humanity, since it has allowed us to evolve into what we are today and to develop our intelligence. It is now known that Man discovered fire 790,000 years ago, despite previous research saying that Homo erectus had learned to manipulate and use fire, but it was not known whether he could actually create it or take it from other sites - for example, natural phenomena

Fan

500 BCE

The punkah fan was used in India about 500 BCE. It was a handheld fan made from bamboo strips or other plant fibre, that could be rotated or fanned to move air. During British rule, the word came to be used by Anglo-Indians to mean a large swinging flat fan, fixed to the ceiling, and pulled by a servant called the punkawallah.

Camera

1400

The camera’s history can be traced back to the Middle Ages with the first pinhole camera. A physicist by the name of Alhazen discovered the idea of Camera Obscura, which led him to the creation of the first pinhole camera. Camera Obscura, in short, is reproducing an image with color and perspective preserved.

Energy

1740

The concept of energy arose from the idea of vis viva (living force), which Leibniz defined as the product of the mass of an object and its speed squared; he believed that total vis viva was preserved. To explain the deceleration due to friction, Leibniz claimed that heat consisted of the random movement of the constituent parts of matter, a view shared by Isaac Newton , although it would be more than a century before this was generally accepted.

Skate

1940

The first skateboards started with wooden boxes, or boards, with roller skate wheels attached to the bottom. Crate scooters preceded skateboards, having a wooden crate attached to the nose (front of the board), which formed rudimentary handlebars. The boxes turned into planks, similar to the skateboard decks of today.

The parachute

1950

The parachute is, as its name indicates, a device designed to stop falls by means of the resistance generated by it as it passes through the air, achieving a safe and practically constant fall speed. There is also another type of parachute designed to create a deceleration to the body to which they are subject. They are mainly used in some aircraft with a very high landing speed, where the runway does not offer enough surface for the vehicle to stop in a conventional way.

Smartphones

1990

The development of the smartphone was enabled by several key technological advances. The exponential scaling and miniaturization of MOSFETs down to sub-micron levels during the 1990s–2000s made it possible to build portable smart devices such as smartphones, as well as enabling the transistion from analog to faster digital wireless mobile networks Other important enabling factors include the lithium-ion battery.