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200 BCE
Europeans Harness Water Energy to Power Mills
The vertical waterwheel spread across Europe within a few hundred years. By the end of the Roman era, waterwheels powered mills to crush grain, full cloth, tan leather, smelt, and shape iron, saw wood, and carry out a variety of other early industrial processes. Productivity increased, dependence on human and animal muscle power gradually declined, and locations with good water-power resources became centers of economic and industrial activity. -
347
Chinese refine petroleum into oil
Long ago, the Chinese already applied petroleum for lamps, as lubricants, in medicine, and for military actions. Similarly, the technology of heating and evaporating brine from flowing brine wells for producing edible salt was also developed more than a thousand years ago (East Jin Dynasty, 347 AD) in China." -
Dutch built windmills
The windmill was the chief agent in land reclamation. The threat of inundation by the sea led these North Sea fishermen and farmers to attempt not only to control the water itself but by keeping it back, to add to the land. -
First steam engine is invented
[Thomas] Newcomen... built a steam machine close by a coal shaft... in 1712... Newcomen's first machine made twelve strokes a minute, raising 10 gallons of water with each stroke. Its strength is estimated at 5.5 horsepower, not impressive to us, but the 'fire engine,' as it was sometimes called, was a sensation in power-starved Britain and Europe. Soon there were scores of Newcomen engines, most nodding at the pitheads of Britain's mines, which now could be dug twice as deep as before. -
First Solar Panels Made
When William Grylls Adams and his student, Richard Evans Day, discovered that an electrical current could be started in selenium solely by exposing it to light, they felt confident that they had discovered something completely new. Thomas Edison called the discovery 'scientifically of the most far-reaching importance.' This pioneering work portended quantum mechanics long before most chemists and physicists had accepted the reality of atoms. -
Hoover dam is built
Hoover Dam is completed on the Colorado River in Arizona in 1936, five years after construction began in 1931. At the time of its completion, the Hoover Dam was the largest hydroelectric producer in the world. -
First controlled nuclear chain reaction
As the world went to war in the 1940s, famous physicist Enrico Fermi, and others in Europe and America came to understand that a uranium atom split by a neutron would cause a self-perpetuating chain reaction of atom splitting that would release enormous energy. This process, called nuclear fission, suggested possible military applications In 1942, when President Franklin Roosevelt authorized the 'Manhattan Project Fermi and his team produced the first controlled nuclear chain reaction. -
Worlds first wind farm is built
In December 1980, U.S. Windpower installed the world's first wind farm, consisting of 20 wind turbines rated at 30 kilowatts each, on the shoulder of Crotched Mountain in southern New Hampshire.