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6000 BCE
Irrigation and Neolithic Society in the Near East
The rise of Neolithic communities arose after 10,000 BCE. With the hunter-gatherer lifestyle becoming a thing of the past, we began to see settlements begin around water with "tamed" crops. Such crops are wheat, rice, corn, and potatoes in the Near East. Irrigation is used to grow the crops in the new stable lifestyle. With such a laborious process from sustainment, this eventually prompted a plethora of new advancements specifically to make farming easier. -
Period: 6000 BCE to 650
Ancient History
Ancient history is a time period from the beginning of writing and recorded human history to as far as late antiquity. The span of recorded history is roughly 5,000 years, beginning with the Sumerian cuneiform script. -
547 BCE
Anaximander - Advancing Time-telling & Navigation
He is credited with inventing the gnomon on the sundial (the part that casts a shadow) and with drawing the first map of the world in which people live. These maps indicated directions, roads, towns, borders, and geological features. Anaximander's innovation was to represent the entire inhabited land known to the ancient Greeks. Like many scientists, he sought to make life convenient. This is one of the events that spearheaded cartography. -
323 BCE
Alexander the Great - City of Alexandria
Alexander the Great, King of Macedon from 336–323 BCE. His empire spread from Gibraltar to the Punjab, and he made Greek the common language of his world. This was the Hellenistic period during which Greek (or Macedonian) leaders spread Greek culture to the areas Alexander had conquered. Ptolemy took over Alexander's Egyptian conquest and created a city of Alexandria that became famous for its library, which attracted the leading scientific and philosophical thinkers of the age. -
200 BCE
Mayan Calendar
The Mayan Calendar and dating system is the most complex in the Americas and possibly the world. The most notable is the tzolkin, which is the 260-day cycle consisting of thirteen 20 day periods. This was meshed with Egypt's 365 day "vague year" to create the Calendar Round. Astronomy was closely linked to the calendar. Observatories would monitor celestial activity and note solstices, creating a slight link between celestial activity and calendars. -
565
Byzantine Hospital
The first hospital with in-patient treatment is credited as a Byzantine innovation, acting as a center of medical technology not science. With the growth of hospitals around the Byzantine Empire, they also doubled as areas of research. Additionally, veterinary activity was also noted at this time. The vet primarily serviced monarchs who had an interest in the well-being of their war horses. This was the foundation of our modern healthcare, unbeknownst to them, they were well ahead of their time. -
Period: 1500 to
Scientific Revolution
The Scientific Revolution was a series of events that marked the emergence of modern science during the early modern period, when developments in mathematics, physics, astronomy, biology and chemistry transformed the views of society about nature. -
1521
Girolamo Fracastoro - Syphilis
Fracastoro was the first to write about Syphilis in 1521 as an outbreak was decimating European populations following Columbus's return from the New World. His work was translated into 100 languages and brought him great fame. While he was just writing down his observations, he didn't realize the lasting impact he would have on the field of microbiology; describing fomites and modes of transmission. He studied many epidemic diseases. -
1564
Blaise Pascal - Pascal's Triangle
Blaise Pascal established fundamental groundwork for Probability Theory and corresponding rules of combinatorics in their discussions of a gambling game problem posed by Chevalier de Mere in 1564. The question posed pertained to the number of turns required to ensure obtaining a six in the roll of two dice and led to the beginning of the concepts of probability and expectation. This was a necessary precursor of Utility Theory in the 18th - 19th centuries. Ever heard of Pascal's Triangle? -
Galileo Telescope - Observe the Cosmos!
The first iteration of telescopes were created by Dutch spectacle maker Hans Lipperhey in 1608. The first telescope magnified objects 3-4 times. Galileo took this invention and made improvements. In 1609, he created a telescope multiple revisions that could magnify objects by 30 times. He was well aware of the significance of this capability. He discovered Jupiter's moons, sunspots, and craters of the moon. They learned how important technology is to advancing scientific knowledge. -
Francis Bacon - Natural Philosophy and Scientific Methodology
Francis Bacon (1561–1626) was one of the leading figures in natural philosophy and in the field of scientific methodology. To the present day Bacon is well known for his treatises on empiricist natural philosophy (The Advancement of Learning, Novum Organum Scientiarum) as well as the idea of a modern research institute, which he described in Nova Atlantis. He outlined his ideas on the cooperation and interaction of the various fields of science, revolutionizing scientific practices. -
Emilie Du Chatelet - Trailblazer
Emilie was a French mathematician and physicist. Despite being primarily self-taught, she published "Foundations of Physics" discussing physics and metaphysics. Additionally, she bested an acclaimed director at the "Academy of Science" and optimized the kinetic energy formula. She even made corrections to Galileo's hypotheses. Emilie was a true feminist and broke barriers to teach herself in a male-dominated area of study and challenge the status-quo, establishing that women had plenty to offer. -
Period: to
Industrial Revolution
The Industrial Revolution was the transition to new manufacturing processes in Great Britain, continental Europe, and the United States, that occurred during the period from around 1760 to about 1820–1840. -
James Watt - Optimizing the Steam Engine
Scottish inventor James Watt in 1765, building on earlier improvements, increased the efficiency of steam pumping engines by adding a separate condenser, and in 1781 he designed a machine to rotate a shaft rather than generate the up-and-down motion of a pump. This enabled production lines, greater power output on locomotives to improve commerce, and bolstered trade. During this time, inventions were made out of convenience, it is likely that people did not know the world changing impact! -
Eli Whitney - The Cotton Gin
In 1794, Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin. This device mechanized the process of removing seeds from cotton, something that had previously been done largely by hand. But what made Whitney's invention particularly special was its use of interchangeable parts. If one part broke, it could be easily replaced by another inexpensive, mass-produced copy. This made processing cotton cheaper, in turn creating new markets and wealth. -
Eleanor Coade - Coade Stone
Eleanor Coade was a British businesswoman known for manufacturing Neoclassical statues, architectural decorations and garden ornaments made of Lithodipyra or Coade stone. The artificial stone that Eleanor Coade invented and produced, and which bore her name, was one of the most widely used materials of the 18th century. A ceramic material – whose recipe remained a closely guarded secret – Coade stone was exceptionally resistant to weathering and erosion. -
Sarah Guppy - Engineering Expert
Sarah Guppy is the epitome of a subject matter expert. In 1811, she patented a method of making safe piling for bridges. Her design went on to be used in Telford’s magnificent Menai Bridge. She also became involved in the construction of the Great Western Railway, suggesting her ideas to the directors, such as planting willows and poplars to stabilize embankments. Sarah Guppy did not the strictly enforced gender-roles at this time stop her. -
Samuel Morse - Morse Code
Samuel Morse revamped the telegraph and made it electric! Slashing what used to be a 23 wire system - later a 5 wire model, to his ideal one wire model in 1837. By the following year, he had developed an improved system; he created a dot-and-dash code that used different numbers to represent the letters of the English alphabet and the ten digits. His telegraph established long distance communication and served still long after the telephone. At this point, society knew big change was here! -
Period: to
Rise of the University
The flourishing of the American research university and the emergence of public sector institutions. -
Justin Morill & The Morill Land Grant Act of 1862
Justin Morrill was a congressman from Vermont who championed the Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862. The act provided accessible state colleges and universities with a broad utilitarian curriculum. Some of its major contributions to higher education include the expansion of state colleges into the university model; the mandatory military training of male students, later designated as the Reserve Officer Training Corps; and the connection of professional education to bachelor’s degree programs. -
Black Collegiate Education in the United States
From 1828 to 1910, despite "technically" being able to attend university, only under 700 African Americans graduated. They attended college while facing racism and discrimination from staff, and other students. There were institutional barriers to education such as high costs to education. Also, segregated inner city schools did not properly prepare students for collegiate level work. These issues highlighted the education disparity for minorities and will motivate future activism and protests. -
American Association of University Professors
The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) was founded in 1915 to “advance the professionalization of America’s faculty.” The AAUP helped standardize faculty ranks to clearly define entry into and progression of careers through the profession of teaching in higher education. The AAUP has also played a vital role in the establishment and continuation of the policies surrounding academic freedom, including the defense of faculty whose rights have been violated. -
Community College
Junior colleges - later named "community colleges", were a response to the fact that no university could provide statewide access. They started to grow in the 1920s as masses of students were seeking some type of post-secondary instruction after WWI.These colleges provided affordable, geographically accessible college to students who would not have been able to go otherwise, and they continue to be a critical component in the American higher education structure today. -
The G.I. Bill (The Servicemen's Readjustment Act)
The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 was significant for a number of reasons, including its primary purpose to provide education benefits to military personnel returning from WWII. Over two million veterans chose to enroll in some type of post-secondary educational program, thanks to the G.I. Bill. This provided a needed relief to the labor market to allow factories adequate time to retool from wartime production to peacetime production without an influx of veterans seeking employment. -
Period: to
The Space Age & Information Age
The Space Age is a period encompassing the activities related to the Space Race, space exploration, space technology, and the cultural developments influenced by these events, beginning with the launch of Sputnik 1 during 1957, and continuing to the present. The Information Age began around the 1970s and is still going on today. It is also known as the Computer Age, Digital Age, or New Media Age. This era brought about a time period in which people could access information and knowledge easily. -
Sputnik 1 Launch
On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched the earth's first artificial satellite, Sputnik I. The successful launch came as a shock to experts and citizens in the United States, who had hoped that the United States would accomplish this scientific advancement first. The success of Sputnik had a major impact on the Cold War and the United States. Fear that they had fallen behind led U.S. policymakers to accelerate space and weapons programs. -
Katherine Johnson
Katherine Johnson was a mathematician and one of the first Black women to work at NASA as a scientist. In 1937, she graduated from West Virginia State University with two degrees. Her calculations were essential to some of the first human spaceflights. She calculated the trajectory for the space flight of in 1961 Alan Shepherd – the first American to go to space – and verified electronic calculations of John Glenn’s orbit around Earth. She also worked on the Apollo 11 and Apollo 13 missions. -
Altair 8800
The Altair 8800 is a microcomputer designed in 1974 by MITS and based on the Intel 8080 CPU. Interest grew quickly after it was featured on the cover of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics and was sold by mail order through advertisements there, in Radio-Electronics, and in other hobbyist magazines. Altair 8800 inspired the creation of a group called Homebrew Computer Club. From the said group emerged twenty-three computer companies, including Apple Computer. -
World Wide Web
Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist, invented the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1989, while working at CERN. The Web was originally conceived and developed to meet the demand for automated information-sharing between scientists in universities and institutes around the world. The basic idea of the WWW was to merge the evolving technologies of computers, data networks and hypertext into a powerful and easy to use global information system. -
A.I. Defeats Chess Grandmaster
In 1997, reigning world chess champion and grand master Gary Kasparov was defeated by IBM’s Deep Blue, a chess playing computer program. This highly publicized match was the first time a reigning world chess champion loss to a computer and served as a huge step towards an artificially intelligent decision making program. In the same year, speech recognition software, developed by Dragon Systems, was implemented on Windows.