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1455
Printing
Johannes Gutenberg completed the printing of the Bible, which was the first book printed in the West using movable type. Gutenberg’s printing press led to an information explosion in Europe. -
Steam engine
James Watt improved the Newcomen steam engine by adding a condenser that turned the steam back into liquid water. This condenser was separate from the cylinder that moved the piston, which meant that the engine was much more efficient. The steam engine became one of the most important inventions of the Industrial Revolution. -
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. -
Steamboat
Robert Fulton put the steam engine on water. His steamboat that was eventually called the Clermont took 32 hours to go up the Hudson River from New York City to Albany. Sailing ships took four days. -
Photography
In the early 1820s, Nicéphore Niépce became interested in using a light-sensitive solution to make copies of lithographs onto glass, zinc, and finally a pewter plate. He then had the great idea to use his solution to make a copy of an image in a camera obscura (a room or box with a small hole in one end through which an image of the outside is projected). In 1826 or 1827, he made an eight-hour-long exposure of the courtyard of his house, the first known photograph. -
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. The message: “What hath God wrought.” -
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.” -
Television
After the development of radio, the transmission of an image was the next logical step. Early television used a mechanical disk to scan an image. As a teenager in Utah, Philo T. Farnsworth became convinced that a mechanical system would not be able to scan and assemble images multiple times a second. -
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) -
Spaceflight
The Soviet Union surprised the world on October 4, when it launched the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, a small 83.6-kg (184.3-pound) metal sphere. The space race began between the Soviet Union and the United States, opening up a new front in the Cold War -
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. -
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.