Discoveries and inventions that changed how we live, from the first tools to the internet.
234 events, oldest first.
240 BC
Chinese astronomers recorded it, and it has been seen on every return since.
1054
It was bright enough to be seen in daylight for 23 days.
1202
His book Liber Abaci also contains the famous Fibonacci sequence.
1473
He was born in Toruń, in present-day Poland.
c. 1495
Engineers built a working version from his notes in 2002.
1543
Legend says he was handed the first printed copy on his deathbed.
1543
His detailed drawings corrected errors that had stood since Roman times.
1564
He was born in the same year as Shakespeare, and three days before Michelangelo died.
1572
Tycho lost part of his nose in a duel and wore a metal replacement.
1604
It is the most recent supernova in our galaxy seen with the naked eye.
1608
Hans Lipperhey applied for a patent on it, but was refused.
1609
Kepler showed that planets move in ellipses, not perfect circles.
1610
He named them after his patrons, the Medici family.
1628
He worked out that the heart pumps more blood in an hour than the body contains.
1633
He spent his last nine years under house arrest.
1639
He was the first person known to have predicted and watched one.
1642
He was born in the same year that Galileo died.
1660
Its motto, 'Nullius in verba', means 'take nobody's word for it'.
1665
He named them after the small rooms that monks lived in.
1669
Hennig Brand found it by boiling down huge quantities of urine.
1675
The gap, the Cassini Division, still bears his name.
1675
It was set up to help sailors work out their longitude at sea.
1676
He was a cloth merchant who ground his own microscope lenses.
1687
Harvard had already been teaching for half a century when Newton's Principia came out.
1709
His Coalbrookdale furnace helped kick-start the Industrial Revolution.
1712
It was used to pump water out of mines.
1717
She saw smallpox inoculation in Istanbul and championed it in Britain.
1723
Ambrose Godfrey's device used a small charge of gunpowder to scatter fire-fighting liquid.
1724
He set 0 as the coldest temperature he could make with ice, water and salt.
1730
His later H4 watch helped solve the problem of finding longitude at sea.
1735
It began the system of classifying living things that scientists still build on.
1742
His original scale was upside down: water boiled at 0 and froze at 100.
1745
Early experimenters used it to give each other shocks for entertainment.
1752
He showed lightning was electricity, and went on to invent the lightning rod.
1758
Edmond Halley had died 16 years earlier.
1764
It let one worker spin several threads at once.
1766
He called it 'inflammable air'.
1769
The unit of power, the watt, is named after him.
1771
It is often called the world's first modern factory.
1774
Priestley also invented fizzy soda water.
1781
It was the world's first major bridge made of cast iron.
1781
Herschel wanted to name it 'George's Star' after King George III.
1783
He also gave hydrogen its name.
1795
The metre was defined as one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator.
1796
The word 'vaccine' comes from vacca, Latin for cow, after the cowpox Jenner used.
1798
He worked out Earth's density using a delicate torsion balance in a shed.
1800
Alessandro Volta's name gives us the word 'volt'.
1801
It was spotted on the first night of the 19th century.
1807
The Swansea and Mumbles Railway's first passengers rode in a horse-drawn carriage.
1816
Laennec rolled paper into a tube rather than press his ear to a patient's chest.
1817
The ancestor of the bicycle had no pedals; riders pushed along with their feet.
1821
Michael Faraday had little schooling and started out as a bookbinder's apprentice.
1822
A full Difference Engine No. 2 was finally built from his plans in 1991 - and it worked.
1823
German chemist Johann Döbereiner's lamp made a flame from hydrogen and a platinum catalyst.
1825
It helped make New York City America's busiest port.
1825
The Stockton and Darlington Railway's opening train carried coal, flour and hundreds of passengers.
1826
English chemist John Walker found it by accident when a chemical-coated stick caught fire as he scraped it.
1827
His work was dismissed at first, before becoming a foundation of electronics.
1829
It reached about 30 mph, astonishing the crowds.
1830
He based it on a machine for trimming cloth.
1839
For the first photographic self-portrait, he had to sit still for several minutes.
1839
A Daguerre street scene caught the first person ever photographed: a man having his boots polished.
1842
It was later tested with trumpeters playing on a moving train.
1843
She wrote it for Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, which was never built.
1843
Scottish inventor Alexander Bain patented it more than 30 years before the telephone.
1843
John Quincy Adams sat for it after leaving office; an 1841 image of William Henry Harrison is lost.
1844
The message 'What hath God wrought' travelled from Washington to Baltimore.
1845
Stephen Perry's patent used vulcanised rubber.
1846
The Boston operating theatre where it happened is now known as the Ether Dome.
1846
It was found by maths first: Urbain Le Verrier calculated where astronomers should look.
1849
Walter Hunt is said to have invented it in a few hours to pay off a $15 debt, then sold the patent for $400.
1851
Singer's company pioneered selling machines on instalment plans.
1854
He had the handle of the Broad Street pump removed.
1858
Henry Gray died of smallpox just three years later, aged 34.
1858
Queen Victoria's 98-word greeting to President Buchanan took about 16 hours to send.
1858
It pushed Darwin to finally publish his own ideas.
1859
Booksellers took up the whole first printing of 1,250 copies on the day it came out.
1860
A phonautograph caught someone singing 'Au clair de la lune' 17 years before Edison's phonograph.
1863
The world's first underground railway opened while Lincoln was president, using steam locomotives.
1865
His equations showed that light is an electromagnetic wave.
1866
His work on heredity was ignored for 34 years before being rediscovered.
1867
He used carbolic acid, and Listerine mouthwash was later named after him.
1868
It was detected in sunlight 27 years before it was found on Earth.
1868
The gas-lit signal outside Parliament predated the motor car, and it exploded a few weeks later.
1868
The QWERTY layout was designed partly to stop the typebars jamming.
1869
He left gaps for undiscovered elements and correctly predicted their properties.
1869
Ships could finally sail between Europe and Asia without going all the way around Africa.
1872
British engineers helped build the line between Tokyo and Yokohama.
1874
Joseph Glidden's design helped fence off the open range of the American West.
1876
Bell's lawyer filed his patent on the same day as a rival claim by Elisha Gray.
1877
The first words he recorded were 'Mary had a little lamb'.
1878
His photos proved a galloping horse has all four hooves off the ground at once.
1879
His later carbonised bamboo filaments could burn for over 1,200 hours.
1880
Work began in 1248, so the cathedral took over six centuries to finish.
1882
Gaudí worked on it for over 40 years, and it is still being finished today.
1882
On its first day it lit about 400 lamps for around 80 customers in Manhattan.
1883
P. T. Barnum later led 21 elephants across it to prove it was safe.
1885
His patient, nine-year-old Joseph Meister, survived and later worked at the Pasteur Institute.
1886
Napoleon III had served his most honoured guests on aluminium plates, then worth more than gold.
1886
She was a wealthy socialite fed up with servants chipping her china.
1886
Two years later, Bertha Benz secretly drove it 106 km to her mother's house to prove it worked.
1887
His flat discs were far easier to mass-produce than Edison's cylinders.
1887
Asked what use they had, Hertz reportedly said, 'Nothing, I guess.'
1888
Its slogan was 'You press the button, we do the rest'.
1888
Louis Le Prince's Roundhay Garden Scene lasts about two seconds.
1889
It was built for the 1889 World's Fair and was meant to stand for only 20 years.
1890
Her short wax-cylinder message can still be heard today.
1890
Repainting it seemed so endless that it became a byword for a never-ending task.
1892
He invented it for keeping chemicals cold in the lab, not tea hot.
1893
It was built to rival the Eiffel Tower at the World's Columbian Exposition.
1894
It is often mistaken for London Bridge, which is the next bridge upstream.
1895
Wilhelm Röntgen's first X-ray image showed his wife's hand, wedding ring and all.
1896
Italian officials showed little interest, so he patented it in Britain.
1898
Nervous customers were offered brandy or smelling salts at the top.
1898
Marie Curie's notebooks are still so radioactive they are kept in lead-lined boxes.
1900
Its Art Nouveau entrances were designed by Hector Guimard.
1901
His horse-drawn machine parked outside and fed its hoses in through the windows.
1901
His discovery made blood transfusions far safer.
1903
London's first plate, A 1, went to Earl Russell for his Napier car.
1903
She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize.
1903
Orville Wright lived until 1948 - after a jet had already broken the sound barrier.
1904
King C. Gillette's real money came from selling the disposable blades.
1904
About 150,000 people rode it on its first evening.
1905
He was working as a clerk at the Swiss patent office at the time.
1906
Reginald Fessenden played 'O Holy Night' on the violin to ships at sea.
1908
Ford's moving assembly line later cut its build time from about 12 hours to 90 minutes.
1910
Georges Claude displayed the first neon lamps at the Paris Motor Show.
1911
He compared the result to a shell bouncing back off tissue paper.
1912
He was widely ridiculed, and plate tectonics wasn't accepted until the 1960s.
1914
The 23-minute hop across Tampa Bay carried one paying passenger.
1914
It saved ships sailing from New York to San Francisco a voyage of nearly 8,000 miles.
1915
It predicted that gravity bends light.
1915
Bell repeated 'Mr Watson, come here', and Watson replied it would take him a week.
1916
Germany introduced it first, to save coal during the First World War.
1919
Arthur Eddington's measurements made Einstein world-famous overnight.
1920
KDKA in Pittsburgh began by broadcasting US presidential election results.
1921
Charles Strite invented it after being served burnt toast in a factory canteen.
1922
The first patient, 14-year-old Leonard Thompson, made a dramatic recovery.
1928
Alexander Fleming noticed mould killing bacteria on a dish left out while he was on holiday.
1929
Einstein later visited Hubble at Mount Wilson Observatory.
1930
Its name was suggested by Venetia Burney, an 11-year-old schoolgirl in Oxford.
1930
Ellen Church was a registered nurse.
1931
It was built in just 410 days.
1932
James Chadwick won the Nobel Prize for it just three years later.
1935
It was installed in Oklahoma City.
1936
He imagined a universal machine years before any real computer existed.
1937
Its name comes from the Greek word for 'artificial'.
1937
Its famous 'International Orange' colour was inspired by the primer used on the steel.
1938
Lise Meitner helped explain it but was left out of the Nobel Prize.
1938
The Hungarian journalist got the idea from the fast-drying ink used to print newspapers.
1942
Chicago Pile-1 was built in a squash court under the stands of a football stadium.
1947
Grace Hopper's team found it in a relay and taped it into their logbook.
1947
A single smartphone chip today contains billions of them.
1948
Columbia's long-playing record held over 20 minutes of music per side.
1951
Crossings were already marked by amber 'Belisha beacons', named after a transport minister; they only began flashing in 1952.
1952
The de Havilland Comet halved journey times on some routes.
1953
Rosalind Franklin's X-ray image, 'Photo 51', was crucial to the discovery.
1954
A French engineer's wife persuaded him to coat her pans with Teflon.
1954
It was between identical twins in Boston.
1955
Jonas Salk never patented it, asking: 'Could you patent the sun?'
1955
George de Mestral was inspired by burrs that stuck to his dog's fur on a walk in the Alps.
1957
It was first intended to be a textured wallpaper.
1958
The Preston bypass was just 8 miles long.
1958
Its first patient went on to outlive the device's inventor.
1958
Jack Kilby built the first one while most of his colleagues were away on summer holiday.
1958
It was inspired by the Eiffel Tower but painted orange and white for air safety.
1960
Within five years, millions of American women were using it.
1960
Early sceptics called it 'a solution looking for a problem'.
1962
An instrumental named after it, by the Tornados, topped the US charts.
1963
Philips let other manufacturers use the design for free, helping it spread worldwide.
1964
The line opened just nine days before the Tokyo Olympics.
1965
Moore's law predicted that the number of transistors on a chip would keep doubling.
1967
Christiaan Barnard performed it in Cape Town; the patient lived for 18 days.
1968
The first mouse had a casing carved from wood.
1969
The network crashed after the first two letters, 'LO', of the word 'LOGIN'.
1970
The temples of Abu Simbel were cut into blocks and moved to save them from its reservoir.
1970
The Boeing 747's famous hump was designed so it could easily be converted into a cargo plane.
1971
The Intel 4004 was designed for a calculator made by Japanese company Busicom.
1971
Ray Tomlinson chose the @ sign and later said the test message was something like QWERTYUIOP.
1972
Leap seconds keep atomic clocks in step with Earth's slightly irregular spin.
1973
Motorola's Martin Cooper made it on a New York street - and called a rival engineer at Bell Labs.
1975
Bill Gates and Paul Allen's first product was a BASIC language for the Altair computer.
1976
It flew London to New York in about three and a half hours, at twice the speed of sound.
1976
It was the world's tallest freestanding structure for over 30 years.
1977
The first full-body scanner was named 'Indomitable'.
1978
GPS was originally built for the US military.
1978
Louise Brown was born in Oldham, England.
1978
It advertised DEC computers to a few hundred ARPANET users.
1980
Their weak glue was an accidental discovery by a 3M scientist trying to make a super-strong adhesive.
1980
It remains the only human disease ever wiped out worldwide.
1981
It ran an operating system Microsoft had bought from another firm for about $50,000.
1982
The first CD album released commercially was Billy Joel's 52nd Street.
1982
It was written by a 15-year-old as a prank and spread on Apple II floppy disks.
1982
Scott Fahlman suggested it to mark jokes on a university message board.
1984
It was launched with a famous Super Bowl advert directed by Ridley Scott.
1988
The Morris worm, written by a graduate student, slowed thousands of computers to a crawl.
1991
Cambridge scientists used it to check whether the pot was empty before walking over.
1991
They honour research that first makes people laugh, and then makes them think.
1991
The first website explained what the web was and how to use it.
1992
It read 'Merry Christmas' and was sent from a computer to a phone.
1994
It was the first collision of two solar system bodies ever observed.
1994
Its undersea section is the longest of any tunnel in the world.
1994
It had a touchscreen and apps 13 years before the iPhone.
1995
It was a broken laser pointer, bought by a collector of broken laser pointers.
1995
Its discoverers won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2019.
1995
Microsoft paid to use the Rolling Stones' 'Start Me Up' in its launch adverts.
1996
The first mammal cloned from an adult cell was named after Dolly Parton.
1997
Kasparov had beaten an earlier version of the machine the year before.
1998
Japanese scientists cloned eight calves from a single cow.
1998
Its original name was BackRub.
1999
The file-sharing service was created by a college student and shut down within about two years.
2000
Billions were spent fixing Y2K, and very few systems failed.
2001
Its slogan promised '1,000 songs in your pocket'.
2001
Its predecessor, Nupedia, managed only a couple of dozen finished articles.
2003
Its name grew out of 'sky peer-to-peer'.
2003
It took 13 years and cost about $3 billion.
2004
It reaches 431 km/h on its run to the airport.
2006
Pluto was officially a planet for just 76 years.
2007
Steve Jobs unveiled it in January 2007 and it went on sale that June.
2008
It launched with about 500 apps.
2008
It was founded in Sweden, where music piracy was rife.
2008
It broke down nine days later, and repairs took more than a year.
2009
Its creator, known only as Satoshi Nakamoto, has never been identified.
2010
At 828 metres, it is more than twice the height of the Empire State Building.
2012
Its discoverers won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020.
2012
Peter Higgs had predicted it nearly 50 years earlier.
2012
At about 310 metres, it is the tallest building in the UK.
2012
At 634 metres, it is the world's tallest tower.
2015
They came from two black holes that collided about 1.3 billion years ago.
2016
It is element 118, and only a handful of its atoms have ever been made.
2017
It was the first known object to pass through our solar system from interstellar space.
2019
Radio telescopes around the world were combined into one Earth-sized virtual telescope.
2020
It was developed in less than a year.
2022
It reached an estimated 100 million users in about two months.
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