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Period: 1439 to
Early Modern Period
The early modern period of modern history follows the late Middle Ages of the post-classical era. Although the chronological limits of this period are open to debate, the timeframe spans the period after the late post-classical or Middle Ages through the beginning of the Age of Revolutions. -
1440
Printing Press
Goldsmith and inventor Johannes Gutenberg was a political exile from Mainz, Germany when he began experimenting with printing in Strasbourg, France in 1440. -
Period: to
Modern Period
It begins around 1750 with European industrialization and is marked by several political revolutions. It ends around 1945, with the relative advancement of industrialization in Europe, the United States, Japan, and Russia, and the end of World War II. -
Photographs
The world's earliest successful photograph was taken by French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1826. -
Telegraph
Developed in the 1830s and 1840s by Samuel Morse (1791-1872) and other inventors, the telegraph revolutionized long-distance communication. It worked by transmitting electrical signals over a wire laid between stations. -
Telephone
While Italian innovator Antonio Meucci (pictured at left) is credited with inventing the first basic phone in 1849, and Frenchman Charles Bourseul devised a phone in 1854, Alexander Graham Bell won the first U.S. patent for the device in 1876. -
First Wireless Communtication
The first wireless telephone conversation occurred in 1880, when Alexander Graham Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter invented the photophone, a telephone that sent audio over a beam of light. -
First wireless communication
The first wireless telephone conversation occurred in 1880, when Alexander Graham Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter invented the photophone, a telephone that sent audio over a beam of light. -
Radio
The first edition of radio was patented in 1896 by Guglielmo Marconi. Marconi was a pioneer of wireless telegraphy. Born in Italy in 1874, he began experimenting with his inventions at the age of 20 after becoming aware of the work of Hertz in electromagnetic waves, also known as radio waves. -
Silent Movies
A silent film is a film with no accompanying, synchronized recorded spoken dialogue. The technology for silent films was invented around 1860, but remained a novelty until around 1880 - 1900, when films on a single reel became easily produced. -
Movies with sound
The first feature film originally presented as a talkie was The Jazz Singer, which premiered on October 6, 1927. A major hit, it was made with Vitaphone, which was at the time the leading brand of sound-on-disc technology. Sound-on-film, however, would soon become the standard for talking pictures. -
Paperback books
The publication of the modern paperback began in 1935, with the publication of the first ten "Penguin" books. Paperback books provided a source of good-quality writing and literature, but at a lesser cost than traditional hard-bound books. -
Cable TV
Cable-television systems originated in the United States in the late 1940s and were designed to improve reception of commercial network broadcasts in remote and hilly areas. -
First Computer
The ENIAC was invented by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly at the University of Pennsylvania and began construction in 1943 and was not completed until 1946. -
Period: to
Contemporary Period
The United States, which emerged from World War II confident and economically strong, entered the Cold War in the late 1940s. ... The 1950s and '60s brought significant cultural shifts within the United States driven by the civil rights movement and the women's movement. -
Transistor Radio
Building on war-time research, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, working with group leader William Shockley, developed a device they called a transistor. The first laboratory demonstration took place on 23 December 1947. Bell publicly announced the new invention on 30 June 1948. -
Color movies
They were introduced around 1940 but only came into wide use for commercial motion picture production in the early 1950s. In the US, Eastman Kodak's Eastmancolor was the usual choice, but it was often re-branded with another trade name, such as "WarnerColor", by the studio or the film processor. -
Color tv
As early as 1939, when it introduced the all-electronic television system at the 1939 World's Fair, RCA Laboratories (now part of SRI) had invented an industry that forever changed the world: television. By 1953, RCA devised the first complete electronic color TV system. -
Recording to tape
On April 14, 1956 — 60 years ago last month — Ampex introduced the desk-sized Mark IV, the first commercial video tape recorder, to a stunned group of TV execs and engineers at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) confab in Chicago. To say that this machine changed the world is an obvious understatement. -
VCR
Invented in 1956, the technology which produced the video cassette recorder (VCR) is already at the end of its days. -
Artificial Intelligence
The beginnings of modern AI can be traced to classical philosophers' attempts to describe human thinking as a symbolic system. But the field of AI wasn't formally founded until 1956, at a conference at Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire, where the term "artificial intelligence" was coined. -
1st Satellite
Then history intervened. The Soviet Union rocketed Sputnik into space on Oct. 4, 1957. This was the first artificial satellite any nation sent out of the Earth. -
Laser Printers
We know laser printing best because we invented it. Specifically, Gary Starkweather invented the laser printer in 1969 at the Xerox research lab in Webster, New York. -
GPS
The GPS project was launched in the United States in 1973 to overcome the limitations of previous navigation systems, integrating ideas from several predecessors, including classified engineering design studies from the 1960s. The U.S. Department of Defense developed the system, which originally used 24 satellites. -
Cellular Phones
The first handheld mobile phone was demonstrated in 1973, nearly three decades after the introduction of the first mobile phone service. -
Apple 11 Computer
In 1976, computer pioneers Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs began selling their Apple I computer in kit form to computer stores. By August of that year, Wozniak started designing an improved version, the Apple II. Wozniak and Jobs demonstrated a prototype in December, and then introduced it to the public in April 1977. -
Email
"Email, upper case, lower case, any case, is the electronic version of the interoffice, inter-organizational mail system, the email we all experience today — and email was invented in 1978 by a 14-year-old working in Newark, NJ. -
3D printing
Who Invented 3D Printing? The first 3D printer, which used the stereolithography technique, was created by Charles W. Hull in the mid-1980s. -
Autonomous Vehicles
The first self-sufficient and truly autonomous cars appeared in the 1980s, with Carnegie Mellon University's Navlab and ALV projects in 1984 and Mercedes-Benz and Bundeswehr University Munich's Eureka Prometheus Project in 1987. -
Internet
January 1, 1983 is considered the official birthday of the Internet. Prior to this, the various computer networks did not have a standard way to communicate with each other. A new communications protocol was established called Transfer Control Protocol/Internetwork Protocol (TCP/IP). -
DVD Players
The first DVD player was the Toshiba SD-3000. I was first released over in Japan November, 1996. Originally, DVD stood for “Digital Video Disc.” It was later suggested that the acronym stands for “Digital Versatile Disc.” In large part because DVDs can be used for much more than storing video content. -
MP3 Player
The first portable MP3 player was launched in 1997 by Saehan Information Systems, which sold its “MPMan F10" player in parts of Asia in spring 1998. In mid-1998, the South Korean company licensed the players for North American distribution to Eiger Labs, which rebranded them as the EigerMan F10 and F20. -
Youtube
YouTube is an American online video sharing and social media platform owned by Google. It was launched in February 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is the second most visited website, with more than one billion monthly users who collectively watch more than one billion hours of videos each day. -
Iphone
June 2007: The first generation iPhone hits the U.S. market.
Announced in January 2007, the original iPhone was introduced by Steve Jobs as a combination of the iPod, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough Internet communicator. -
Ipad
The first iPad was released on April 3, 2010; the most recent iPad models are the ninth-generation iPad, released on September 14, 2021; the sixth-generation iPad mini, released on September 14th, 2021; the fourth-generation iPad Air, released on October 23, 2020; and the third-generation 11-inch (280 mm) and fifth- ...