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Precision instruments specifically for scientific use were invented, such as the telescope, microscope, barometer, thermometer, air pump, pendulum clock, and spring watch.
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At the end of the 18th century the French government held the first international scientific conference, intended to come up with a uniform, universal system of measurement
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In 1760 John Harrison, an English craftsman, produced H-4, a watch for keeping precise time at sea and therefore for measuring longitude.
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From the early 18th century, a growing population was seen as vital to a state’s future, so governments got into statistical estimations of the rates of birth, death, marriage etc.
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Publications and literacy spread in the 18th century
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The Royal Society For the Improvement of Natural Knowledge by Experiment was founded in London in1662.
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An obtrusively bright supernova appeared among the fixed stars in 1573
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In the 16th century scholars used mathematics not only to describe, but to explain the workings of the physical world.
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The invention of moveable metal type in Europe in the mid-15th century (a technique devised earlier in China and Korea) led to mass production of identical books and pamphlets.
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The mathematical notations “+” and “=” were introduced in the mid-1500's
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In the 15 thcentury Muslim scientists in Samarkand (in today’s Uzbekistan) published new, more accurate astronomical tables, which were later introduced to Europe.
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Renaissance artists of the 15th -16th centuries studied anatomy and optics to help represent their subject accurately. They formulated basic rules of linear perspective as a way to represent three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional surface.
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Increasingly accurate maps were produced in Europe, influenced by Muslim maps and Ptolemy’s 2nd century CE Geography, which had become available in Europe in the 14th century.
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Humanism emerged in the 14th and 15th centuries among the urbanized and commercial inhabitants of north Italian city-states
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The power and prestige of the Roman Catholic Church declined in the 14th and 15th centuries
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The mariners’ compass was probably introduced to Islam from China in the 11th century, and was familiar to Christian sailors in the Mediterranean by the end of the 12th century.
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Repeated decrees by various religious authorities forbidding the teaching of particular books or topics in the universities were not successful
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Knowledge of paper-making reached Islam through Chinese prisoners of war in the 10th century
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They were introduced to the Muslim world in the 9th century CE by al-Khwarizmi’s book The Hindu Art of Reckoning, which explained how to use them for calculating without an abacus
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In 12th and 13th century Europe, the rise of towns and longer-distance trade; the extension of royal power over wider geographical areas