Inventions That Changed the World
3.4 Ma – ongoing40 items
technologyworldwideThree million years of making things
From a stone struck on a Kenyan lakeshore to a web page served from a desk at CERN. Each event is one invention, pinned where it was made or where it first turns up, and that is often far from where the history books were written: more than half the pins are outside Europe and North America.
How to read it
One invention, one event — dated by its oldest secure evidence rather than its fame. Where the sources disagree, the date is wider and the note says why.
Ages as bands — the Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages, named for what the best tools were made of, then the Song dynasty and the two industrial revolutions.
Deep time to single days — the Stone Age inventions are dated in years before present, with the uncertainty their papers give; the modern ones to the day. Newcomen’s engine keeps its English Old Style year, which began on 25 March.
Threads to follow
tools— the Stone Age toolkit, from flakes to needlesmaterials— clay, copper, glass, rubber, iron, paperenergy— fire, wind, steam, electricity, the atomcommunications— from clay tablets to the webtransport— the wheel, the stirrup, the car, the planechina— paper, gunpowder, the compass and printing
Writing, the steam engine, the telegraph, the transistor and the web each have a timeline of their own in this catalogue; here they get one event apiece.
For these three have changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world; the first in literature, the second in warfare, the third in navigation. — Francis Bacon on printing, gunpowder and the compass, Novum Organum, 1620. All three were Chinese.
Items
Stone tools
Oldowan flake tools
Hand axe
Controlled fire
Bow and arrow
Eyed needle
Pottery
Copper smelting
Wheel and axle
Writing
Papyrus
Glass
Processed rubber
Iron smelting
Paper
Stirrups
Zero as a number
Windmill
Gunpowder
Movable type
Magnetic compass
Eyeglasses
Printing press
Steam engine
Vaccination
Electric generator
Electric telegraph
Motor car
Aeroplane
Ammonia from the air
Nuclear reactor
Transistor
World Wide Web