Teotihuacan becomes the Americas' first metropolis
A planned city of perhaps 100,000 people with monumental pyramids, apartment compounds and apparent multiethnic governance rose in the Basin of Mexico.
Humanity
115 events across three thousand years — chosen to be multi-regional and honest about uncertainty. Follow a thread to trace one capability through time, or filter by region and kind.
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The Maya classic era: cities of the calendar
Maya city-states developed the most sophisticated pre-Columbian script and astronomical calendars, recording dynasties and sky events in stone.
Tenochtitlan rises from Lake Texcoco
The Mexica built their capital on an island, engineering causeways, aqueducts and chinampa gardens into one of the world's largest cities.
The Inca road network: Qhapaq Ñan
Some 40,000 km of roads stitched a mountain empire together, run by relay runners — chasqui — carrying knotted quipu records instead of writing.
'What hath God wrought': the telegraph
Samuel Morse's line between Washington and Baltimore carried the first formal message in code — information traveling without any physical carrier to see.
Bell patents the telephone
Alexander Graham Bell's patent — hours ahead of a rival filing — turned the telegraph's clicks into the human voice over wire.
Edison lights the night
Edison's Menlo Park lab delivered a practical incandescent lamp, then the Pearl Street station (1882) to power it — light sold as a service.
The Wright Flyer leaves the ground
Orville and Wilbur Wright flew a powered, controlled, sustained heavier-than-air machine for twelve seconds at Kitty Hawk.
ENIAC switches on
The first general-purpose electronic computer filled a room, weighed 27 tons, and recalculated artillery tables in seconds instead of days.
The transistor, three weeks after Christmas
Bardeen and Brattain demonstrated a point-contact transistor at Bell Labs on December 23, 1947, with Shockley's team driving the solid-state program.
The integrated circuit
Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce at Fairchild independently put multiple transistors onto single pieces of semiconductor.
ARPANET sends its first packets
The first node at UCLA attempted to log in to a machine at SRI; the system crashed after 'LO' — but packet switching worked, and the network grew.
A computer on a chip
Intel's 4004 packed a complete CPU — 2,300 transistors — onto one chip, built for a Japanese calculator and priced accordingly.
AWS rents out the datacenter
Amazon opened its S3 storage and EC2 compute services to anyone with a credit card — infrastructure as a self-service API.
The smartphone puts the network in every pocket
The iPhone fused phone, iPod and internet device with a multitouch screen; Android followed within a year, and mobile apps became a new layer of civilization.
AlexNet wakes up deep learning
A neural network trained on two gaming GPUs halved the error rate of the best computer-vision systems at ImageNet, stunning the field.
Chronology
Teotihuacan becomes the Americas' first metropolis
A planned city of perhaps 100,000 people with monumental pyramids, apartment compounds and apparent multiethnic governance rose in the Basin of Mexico.
The Maya classic era: cities of the calendar
Maya city-states developed the most sophisticated pre-Columbian script and astronomical calendars, recording dynasties and sky events in stone.
Tenochtitlan rises from Lake Texcoco
The Mexica built their capital on an island, engineering causeways, aqueducts and chinampa gardens into one of the world's largest cities.
The Inca road network: Qhapaq Ñan
Some 40,000 km of roads stitched a mountain empire together, run by relay runners — chasqui — carrying knotted quipu records instead of writing.
'What hath God wrought': the telegraph
Samuel Morse's line between Washington and Baltimore carried the first formal message in code — information traveling without any physical carrier to see.
Bell patents the telephone
Alexander Graham Bell's patent — hours ahead of a rival filing — turned the telegraph's clicks into the human voice over wire.
Edison lights the night
Edison's Menlo Park lab delivered a practical incandescent lamp, then the Pearl Street station (1882) to power it — light sold as a service.
The Wright Flyer leaves the ground
Orville and Wilbur Wright flew a powered, controlled, sustained heavier-than-air machine for twelve seconds at Kitty Hawk.
ENIAC switches on
The first general-purpose electronic computer filled a room, weighed 27 tons, and recalculated artillery tables in seconds instead of days.
The transistor, three weeks after Christmas
Bardeen and Brattain demonstrated a point-contact transistor at Bell Labs on December 23, 1947, with Shockley's team driving the solid-state program.
The integrated circuit
Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce at Fairchild independently put multiple transistors onto single pieces of semiconductor.
ARPANET sends its first packets
The first node at UCLA attempted to log in to a machine at SRI; the system crashed after 'LO' — but packet switching worked, and the network grew.
A computer on a chip
Intel's 4004 packed a complete CPU — 2,300 transistors — onto one chip, built for a Japanese calculator and priced accordingly.
AWS rents out the datacenter
Amazon opened its S3 storage and EC2 compute services to anyone with a credit card — infrastructure as a self-service API.
The smartphone puts the network in every pocket
The iPhone fused phone, iPod and internet device with a multitouch screen; Android followed within a year, and mobile apps became a new layer of civilization.
AlexNet wakes up deep learning
A neural network trained on two gaming GPUs halved the error rate of the best computer-vision systems at ImageNet, stunning the field.