This extensive timeline provides a brief overview of the major developments and key figures in the exciting history of science, highlighting the progression of human knowledge and understanding of the natural world over the millennium.
January 23, 2017
At some point in history there had to be one initial crucial step that separated humans from the other animals in our journey to becoming the dominant species on this planet.
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June 4, 2019
Domestication is the process of selective breeding for human use. The domestication of animals began with the now-lovable dog by at least around 14000 BCE and possibly thousands of years earlier.
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June 5, 2019
The human domestication of plants may have been the single most important event in human history.
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January 29, 2017
The importance of metallurgy to human culture is so vital that scholars typically divide ancient time periods by metalworking ages such as the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age.
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January 30, 2017
Wheels appear everywhere in today’s world. It is impossible to imagine civilization as we know it with out them.
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June 6, 2019
Writing is a set of markings used to represent a language. It augments the benefits of language by making permanent, allowing the message to travel further and persist through time.
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February 26, 2019
For tens of thousands of years there was no organized number systems and people counted things using their fingers and toes.
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March 25, 2017
Disease is humanity's oldest and most feared enemy. It harasses us constantly in a multitude of vicious ways through methods that have only recently been discovered.
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August 9, 2017
An important technology in allowing people do to work was the invention of the gear, a system consisting of cogs that takes energy from an input source, such as flowing water, and convert it to an output source, such as a pump.
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February 19, 2019
Algebra became recognized as a separate branch of mathematics thanks to work of the Persian mathematician Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi.
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August 9, 2017
Gunpowder was invented in China and spread to the Middle East, eventually arriving in Europe around 1300, nearly 400 years after its invention.
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August 11, 2017
A vital precursor to the scientific revolution, the invention of the printing press changed the way information spread across the world by improving its fidelity and, most importantly, by hastening its rate of reproduction.
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August 23, 2017
The Earth-centered universe was the prevailing wisdom of Medieval Europe until a Polish scholar named Nicolaus Copernicus suggested otherwise in his 1543 book, On the Revolutions of Celestial Spheres.
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January 31, 2018
Like many inventions, the exact date of the first microscope is disputed and confused, however credit is sometimes given to Zacharias Janssen and his father Hans Martenz for creating the first microscope as early as 1590, or possibly in 1595.
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January 19, 2018
The first evidence for what later was to be called the telescope was the submission of a patent to the Dutch government in 1608 by Hans Lippershey, although it is likely that the idea was hit upon earlier by other lens makers.
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January 23, 2017
Published by Galileo Galilei on March 13, 1610, Sidereus Nuncius (or Starry Messenger) revealed to the world Galileo’s observations as he view the night sky through his improved telescope.
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January 19, 2018
After thirty years of research, William Harvey’s landmark book On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals established once and for all that blood flow was entirely circular and that the heart was a pump.
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January 31, 2018
The existence of a vacuum, a space completely empty of matter, had been debated since at least the ancient Greek philosophers, and probably much longer.
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February 15, 2018
The pendulum clock was invented by Christiaan Huygens in 1656 and became the worlds most accurate time-keeping device until the early 20th century.
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February 2, 2018
The discovery of the relationship between gas volume and air pressure was published by Robert Boyle in 1662.
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January 31, 2018
The observation of what was coined the cell by Robert Hooke in 1665 provided the starting point for a sequence of discoveries at the microscopic level and continuing into our present time that have revolutionized our view of life.
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February 18, 2018
A refracting telescope uses lens to collect and focus the image as opposed to a reflecting telescope that uses a combination of mirrors to reflect and focus the image.
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February 10, 2018
Issac Newton’s 1687 publication of Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, more commonly known as Principia, may have been the most important and influential scientific piece of literature of all time.
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March 20, 2018
In 1712 Thomas Newcomen unknowingly ushered the world into the industrial revolution when he built an “atmospheric” engine to pump up water from a coal mine near Dudley Castle in England.
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September 15, 2018
Amazing that it may seem to people living in the 21st century, finding reliable longitudinal position at sea was not possible until 1730 when John Harrison invented the marine chronometer, a timepiece capable of keeping accurate time of a known, fixed location.
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March 18, 2018
Systema Naturae was the manuscript published by Carl Linnaeus that marked the beginning of the modern system of species classification.
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February 10, 2024
The Leyden Jar can be thought of as the first electrical capacitor – a device that stores and releases electrical energy.
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June 3, 2019
Bayes' theorem is a fundamental concept in probability theory. It was formulated in 1763 by the English statistician and Presbyterian minister, Reverend Thomas Bayes.
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March 9, 2019
In 1781 William Herschel announced the discovery of a new planet that became named Uranus in the tradition of naming planets after classical mythology.
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October 30, 2018
The first vaccination was performed by English physician Edward Jenner in 1796.
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November 9, 2018
Right at the turn of the 19th century electricity was becoming an increasing topic of study.
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June 3, 2024
Dalton's atomic theory had a profound impact on the development of the emerging science of chemistry, and it laid the groundwork for many further scientific discoveries in atomic theory.
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April 5, 2020
Electromagnetism was discovered at the turn of the second decade of the 19th century.
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August 14, 2021
The electrical telegraph harnessed the new science of electricity to revolutionize long distance communication.
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February 21, 2019
The Carnot cycle is the ideal cycle of operations that provides the maximum theoretical efficiency for any engine that utilizes heat.
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January 17, 2019
Principles of Geology was a groundbreaking work that promoted and popularized the James Hutton’s concept of uniformitarianism.
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November 15, 2018
The invention of electric motor can be said to happened in May 1834 by Moritz Jacobi, although later that year Thomas Davenport independently created one as well.
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February 19, 2019
Absolute zero is the lowest temperature theoretically possible.
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January 4, 2019
The laws of thermodynamics are some of the most fundamental laws of physics.
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January 22, 2019
In 1859 Charles Darwin published his landmark book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.
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July 20, 2019
The Germ Theory of Disease seems like common knowledge to just about everybody today, but this has not always been the case.
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November 28, 2023
In nature there exists a continuum of radiation waves, all traveling at the same speed of light, with a nearly infinite possibility of wavelengths and frequencies. This is the electromagnetic spectrum.
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February 6, 2019
In 1866 the Augustinian monk Gregor Mendel published Experiments in Plant Hybridization that explained his pea plant experiments and the resulting laws of inheritance.
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February 23, 2019
In 1869 Dmitri Mendeleev published his periodic table of elements.
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November 12, 2021
The story of the invention of the telephone one is a complex one, rife with rival claims over the invention itself, and the product of numerous discoveries and individual contributions. However credit is given to the Scottish born inventor Alexander Graham Bell who was awarded the first telephone patent in 1876.
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November 9, 2018
It was speculated for some time the atoms may be composed of additional fundamental units, and by the late 19th century evidence began to emerge from experimental research to support this hypothesis.
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April 24, 2019
Quantum mechanics is a paradigm shifting theory of physics that describes nature at the smallest scale.
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April 25, 2020
On December 17, 1903 just outside Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville and Wilbur Wright completed the first successful sustained and controlled heavier-than-air, powered flight.
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May 29, 2019
Special Relativity is a theory proposed by Albert Einstein that attempts to explain the relationship between space, time and motion.
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June 17, 2019
The discovery of the nucleus was the result of experiments conducted by Ernst Rutherford and his team, where a beam of alpha particles were fired at a thin sheet of gold foil.
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March 13, 2019
In 1913 Niels Bohr proposed a model of the atom based on quantum physics which helped solve problems of previous atomic models that were based on classical physics.
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January 22, 2024
The theory of general relativity is one of the most profound and revolutionary achievements in the history of science and transformed our understanding of space, time, and gravity.
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May 8, 2023
According to the Big Bang theory, the observable universe began in a singularity of infinite density and temperature at a specific moment in time some 13.8 billion years ago.
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February 4, 2024
The neutron was discovered by the British physicist Sir James Chadwick in 1932, marking a pivotal moment in the understanding of atomic structure.
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March 18, 2019
The discovery of nuclear fission is a process that releases an enormous amount of energy by splitting the nucleus of an atom.
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May 2, 2020
The transistor was invented by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley of Bell Labs in 1947 as a replacement for the inefficient vacuum tube.
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May 8, 2019
In April 1953, Francis Crick and James Watson published a paper in Nature which established the structure of DNA.
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May 27, 2022
Plate tectonics is a scientific theory that explains the movement of the Earths surface and many of its most prominent geological features
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May 21, 2019
The Voyager Program consists of two spacecraft, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, launched by NASA in 1977 in order to probe the four outer planets of the Solar System.
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To read more about the lives of the scientists who made these discoveries, be sure to check out the Impactful Scientists section.
Fascinating timeline! I will definitely delve deeper into these, as it has sparked my curiosity. Surprised not to see anything past 1977.
Thanks for enjoying the timeline! Thanks for the feedback, I am working on updating more recent science.
wow. Great timeline. Fascinating to read about so many different facts
It’s amazing to see how far we’ve come since our early ancestors discovered fire!
i absolutely loved how you wrote out your post, the blocks makes it so easy to follow! cool post!
History is so amazing, there is always something new and fascinating to learn about our past.
I’ve always had a weird infatuation with science. Its always so intriguing to learn the power of science.
everything is science and science is everything. great timeline! I love the history. 👊
Love this very easy to follow timeline! good info! Thanks!
Very informative and interesting post with awesome compilation of timelines. Thanks for sharing
Wow – great post – a lot of data you heard at school but forgot already! Super informative!
For useful information. Thank you for this time line.
I miss learning about science! I had no idea when gunpowder or where it was first invented!
Interesting post. Thanks for sharing useful info.
This is fascinating! Wow, you made me stop on each mark, how many things. Great job!
Very informative, you know your stuff!
I don’t think I can appreciate this article enough! I am a huge science and fact nerd, I simply loved reading every piece. Thanks!
Such an interesting topic. I like how you formatted the blog post!
This is really cool to read and I like how you have it set up!!
Couldn’t stop reading the information given here. Great job!
This is very informative! My oldest loves Science and I imagine would love this timeline!
This is fascinating!!! Very well done! I love how you put everything that matters chronologically! So good.
I always love reading through these time lines and seeing the history of the earth
This is a comprehensive timeline going all the way back. Very interesting to read!
Such a great and very informative post. Honestly, I am not good at Science when I was studying bit this makes me interested
This is a great compilation and you have done a good bit of research!
This is an awesome timeline! I never knew when some of these major scientific things happened before!
What a comprehensive timeline! I loved the details & history of Science is so fascinating…isn’t it?
This is great! I found out several things that I didn’t know–such as batteries were first invented in 1799!
What an amazing timeline. I can’t wait to use this for a lesson Im teaching
Such a long list.. I didn’t know most of these, though I love watching and reading about science haha. Thanks for sharing.
Such an informative and interesting post. I love science so much. I really enjoyed reading this.
Great post, i really enjoyed reading this, so informative, I really loved science so it doesn’t bore me at all.. 😊
I love this layout and timeline great job!
This is so great to be able to have a quick timeline of our greatest scientific discoveries
Such a cool timeline with interesting material available! I’m currently reading Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari’s and this is so in line with the book hehe:)
Hello Dan,
Thanks for a really interesting post. History is very fascinating not least because history always repeats itself. Sadly we have always shown that we never seem to learn anything from the lessons of history.
Best,
Pedro
I didn’t expect the first vaccination to date as far back as 1796. I thought it would be more recent
Amazing History of Science there. I got so hooked on them. wow.
This is super cool. I love the timeline and I really did learn some great info here.
I love reading your timelines. They give such a clear picture and make history easier to understand and follow.
So cool! Loved reading your article. Thank you! 😊
Great article! As a suggestion, you could add horseback riding.
This timeline is great! I cannot imagine how much research and time has gone into this. It’s fascinating!
The visual aspect of this is so useful. It puts into context how long some things have been around and how some have evolved. Will be poking around through the timeline. Thanks for sharing this!
This is an awesome timeline! I have book marked for future reference 🙂
This is so cool how you structured this! Very cool blog post. I am looking forward to reading more.
So cool, I loved the layout of the timeline. This was so very interesting to read. Thank you for sharing.
This is beyond interesting and beyond fascinating to me, wow!!! The timeline really puts everything in perspective, I love it.
Perfectly executed. This was so cool to read through!
This timeline is incredible! I thought it was fascinating that it took gunpowder so long to get to Europe!
It’s interesting that domestication of animals can before plants. I would have thought it would be the other way around.
This is a timeline that proves the superiority of the human race! However, with every power, comes a bigger responsibility! Now, we, as humans face a bigger threat of Climate Change, Terrorism and we all need to develop our mindset and technology to counter them! Maybe, you would need to modify this timeline to include climate change technology.
What a great compilation. A useful way to remind ourselves where we have come from with regard to science!
Love how you formatted everything. Makes it super easy to follow without getting overwhelmed . Great post!
this was so interessting to reead