The things people made, from the first stone tools to today: the tools, machines, medicines and ideas that changed how people live.
Everyday things, and the inventions they grew from, oldest first. Tap one to read about it.
At Lomekwi, by Lake Turkana in Kenya, scientists found sharp flakes of stone that had been knocked off bigger rocks on purpose, 3.3 million years ago. That is older than our own genus, Homo, so they were made by earlier human relatives. For most of human history, stone tools were the most advanced technology there was.
Burned bones and ash deep in Wonderwerk Cave, South Africa, show that human ancestors were using fire about a million years ago. Fire gave warmth, light and safety from animals, and cooked food is easier to eat. When people first learned to light a fire, not just keep one going, is still not known.
Tiny stone points found in Sibudu Cave, South Africa, carry traces of glue and wear that show they were arrowheads, about 64,000 years ago. A bow stores the energy of a pull and lets it go all at once, so hunters could strike from a safe distance.
The oldest needles with eyes, made of bone and bird bone, come from caves in Siberia and China. Sewing let people make close-fitting clothes from animal skins, which helped them live through the cold of the last Ice Age.
Pieces of clay pots from Xianrendong Cave in China are about 20,000 years old, made by hunters and gatherers, long before farming. Fired clay pots could hold water and go on the fire, so people could boil and store food.
In the Middle East, people began to plant wheat and barley and keep sheep and goats. Farming began separately in other places too: rice in China, maize in Mexico. Farming fed many more people from the same land, so villages, towns and cities could grow.
At Mehrgarh, in today’s Pakistan, archaeologists found threads of cotton preserved inside a copper bead about 7,000 years old. People in South Asia were the first to spin and weave cotton, and Indian cotton cloth was traded around the world for thousands of years.
People found that heating certain green and blue rocks in a very hot fire gives out shiny copper. It could be melted, poured into shapes, and hammered into tools, pots and jewelry. Melting metal out of rock, called smelting, was the start of metalworking.
The wheel first appears in Mesopotamia and Europe about 5,500 years ago, first as the potter’s wheel and soon on carts. The hard part was not the round shape but the axle: it had to fit the wheel closely and still turn. The oldest wooden wheel found, from Slovenia, is about 5,100 years old.
Metalworkers found that mixing a little tin into copper makes bronze, a metal much harder than either one. Bronze tools, weapons and bells spread so widely that the time is called the Bronze Age. Mixing metals to get better ones, called alloys, is still how most metals we use are made.
Pictures on pots from ancient Egypt show boats with sails on the Nile. The river flows north and the wind mostly blows south, so boats could float down and sail back up. For 5,000 years, until the steam engine, sails carried almost all long-distance trade.
In the cities of Sumer, in today’s Iraq, people pressed marks into wet clay to keep track of grain, beer and sheep. Over time the marks became a full writing system, called cuneiform. Writing was also invented separately in Egypt, China and Central America. Without it, none of the discoveries on these timelines could have been passed on.
The cities of the Indus Valley, such as Mohenjo-daro and Harappa in today’s Pakistan and India, had streets laid out on a grid, wells, bathrooms in many houses, and covered brick drains that carried waste water away. They also used standard weights, so trade was fair. Many cities in the world had nothing like it until the 1800s.
Egyptians told the time of day by the shadow of a stick and, at night, by water dripping out of a bowl with marks on the inside. Water clocks were also used in Babylon, India and China. They were the most accurate clocks in the world for 2,000 years.
Iron needs a much hotter fire than copper, and at first it was rarer than gold. Once smiths learned to work it, iron spread quickly, because iron ore is found almost everywhere. Iron tools and plows made farming easier. Today most of the metal we use is steel, iron with a little carbon.
The Phoenicians, traders on the coast of today’s Lebanon, wrote with just 22 letters, each for a sound, instead of hundreds of signs. An alphabet is far easier to learn. The Greek, Latin and Arabic alphabets, and probably the Brahmi script that Devanagari grew from, all come from it.
Smiths in southern India and Sri Lanka melted iron with plant material in small sealed clay pots and made a hard, springy steel with a wavy pattern. It was traded across the world, and swords made from it in the Middle East became famous as Damascus steel.
Greek engineers built wheels turned by flowing water to lift water and grind grain. It was the first machine powered by something other than people or animals. In Nepal, the traditional ghatta, a water-powered mill, still grinds grain in the hills.
The Romans mixed lime with volcanic ash and stones to make concrete that set hard, even under water. The dome of the Pantheon in Rome, built about 1,900 years ago, is still the biggest dome of unreinforced concrete in the world. Some Roman harbor walls have grown stronger in seawater over time.
Divers found a lump of corroded bronze in a Roman-era shipwreck near the Greek island of Antikythera. X-ray scans showed at least 30 small gearwheels inside. Turning a handle showed the positions of the Sun, the Moon and the planets, and predicted eclipses. Nothing as complex was built again for more than 1,000 years.
Glass had been made for 2,000 years, but slowly, by molding. Glassmakers on the coast of today’s Syria and Lebanon found they could blow into a blob of hot glass through a tube and shape it like a balloon. Glass cups, bottles and later windows became cheap enough for ordinary people.
Cai Lun, an official at China’s imperial court, reported a way of making paper from tree bark, hemp, rags and old fishing nets, beaten into a pulp, spread thin on a screen and dried. Paper had been made in China before, but his method made it cheap. Nepal has made handmade lokta paper from the bark of a mountain shrub for centuries.
The Chinese astronomer Zhang Heng built a large bronze jar with eight dragons around it, each holding a ball. When the ground shook, a ball dropped from one dragon into the mouth of a bronze toad below, showing the direction of the earthquake. It is said to have detected an earthquake hundreds of kilometers away that nobody in the capital had felt.
People in India learned to boil sugarcane juice until it formed crystals that could be stored and carried. The Sanskrit word for them, khanda, gave us the word “candy,” and sharkara gave “sugar.” Sugar spread from India to Persia, the Arab world and Europe.
Chinese alchemists, looking for medicines to make people live forever, mixed saltpeter, sulfur and charcoal and found that it burned with a flash. Gunpowder was used for fireworks, then for weapons, and later for blasting tunnels and mines. It was the first explosive.
The Diamond Sutra, a Buddhist text found sealed in a cave in Dunhuang, China, was printed by carving each whole page into a wooden block, inking it and pressing paper onto it. It says it was made in 868, making it the oldest printed book with a date.
In Persia, in today’s Iran and Afghanistan, people built windmills with sails that turned around a standing shaft to grind grain and pump water. Windmills reached Europe in the 1100s. Today’s wind turbines, which make electricity, are their great-grandchildren.
Chinese writers describe a magnetized needle or a fish-shaped piece of iron that, floating in water, always points south and north. By about 1100 Chinese ships used the compass to find their way when clouds hid the Sun and stars. It reached the Arab world and Europe about a century later.
The Chinese craftsman Bi Sheng made a separate piece of baked clay for each character, which could be arranged into a page, printed, and then used again. In Korea, metal type was used by the 1200s. With thousands of Chinese characters, it was most useful for printing many copies.
Craftsmen in northern Italy made the first eyeglasses: two lenses of glass or crystal in frames, held on the nose, to help older people read. A sermon in Pisa in 1306 says they had been invented about 20 years before. Today more than half of the world’s people need glasses or contact lenses.
The first clocks with gears, driven by a falling weight, appeared in towers in Europe. They were often off by 15 minutes a day and had only an hour hand. Su Song in China had built a huge water-driven astronomical clock tower in 1088.
In Mainz, Germany, Johannes Gutenberg combined metal letters that could be cast quickly, an oil-based ink, and a press adapted from wine making. A press could print thousands of pages a day. Within 50 years there were millions of books in Europe, and new ideas, including the discoveries of science, spread faster than ever before.
Hans Lipperhey, a spectacle maker in the Netherlands, asked for a patent for a tube with two lenses that made faraway things look three times closer. Others claimed it too. A year later, Galileo built a better one and pointed it at the sky.
Microscopes with two lenses appeared in the Netherlands around 1620; who made the first is not known. With them, Robert Hooke saw cells and Antonie van Leeuwenhoek saw bacteria. Today’s electron microscopes can show single atoms.
At 19, Blaise Pascal built a calculating machine to help his father, a tax collector, with sums. Turning dials added and subtracted numbers, and the machine carried the tens by itself. It was expensive and only about 20 were made, but it was one of the first calculators.
Evangelista Torricelli filled a glass tube with mercury and turned it upside down in a dish. The mercury fell to about 76 cm and stopped, held up by the weight of the air outside. The height changes with the weather, so barometers help forecast it. Higher up, as in Kathmandu, the mercury stands lower.
Christiaan Huygens built the first pendulum clock, using Galileo’s discovery that a pendulum’s swing always takes the same time. Clocks went from being off by about 15 minutes a day to about 15 seconds. They stayed the most accurate clocks until the 1930s.
Jethro Tull, an English farmer, built a horse-drawn machine that made rows of holes, dropped in seeds at the right depth and covered them. Fewer seeds were wasted than when scattered by hand. Seed drills had been used in Babylon, China and India long before, but his spread across Europe.
Thomas Newcomen built an engine that used steam to pump water out of a coal mine in England. It was slow and burned a lot of coal, but for the first time, people had a machine that turned heat into work wherever it was needed, not just by a river or in the wind.
Daniel Fahrenheit made the first reliable thermometers by sealing mercury in a thin glass tube, so that different thermometers gave the same reading. In 1742 Anders Celsius proposed the scale with 100 steps between freezing and boiling water, which most of the world uses.
Sailors could not tell how far east or west they were, and ships were wrecked because of it. John Harrison, a carpenter who taught himself clockmaking, spent 30 years building a watch that kept time even on a rolling ship. Comparing it with the time of noon told sailors their position.
James Watt added a separate chamber to cool the steam, so the main cylinder could stay hot. His engines used about a quarter of the coal of Newcomen’s, and later ones could turn wheels. They powered the factories of the Industrial Revolution. The unit of power, the watt, is named after him.
The armies of Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan, rulers of Mysore in southern India, used rockets with iron cases, which could hold more gunpowder and fly farther, about 2 km. The British studied captured ones and copied them as the Congreve rocket, the first step towards modern rockets.
The Montgolfier brothers, papermakers in France, found that a paper and cloth bag filled with hot air would rise. On this day two men flew over Paris for about 25 minutes in one of their balloons, the first people ever to fly. A sheep, a duck and a rooster had gone up first, as a test.
Edward Jenner noticed that milkmaids who caught cowpox, a mild disease, did not catch smallpox. He put matter from a cowpox sore into a cut on a boy’s arm, and the boy was protected. In China, India and Turkey, people had protected themselves from smallpox with powdered scabs for centuries, more dangerously. “Vaccine” comes from vacca, Latin for cow.
Alessandro Volta stacked discs of zinc and copper with cloth soaked in salt water between them, and got a steady electric current, the first one ever made. Scientists could finally experiment with electricity that flowed, instead of single sparks. The unit of electric push, the volt, is named after him.
Joseph Marie Jacquard built a weaving loom controlled by a chain of cards with holes punched in them. The holes decided which threads were lifted, so the loom wove complicated patterns by itself. Punched cards were used to give instructions to computers until the 1970s.
Richard Trevithick’s steam engine on wheels pulled 10 tonnes of iron and 70 people along a tramway in Wales. In 1825 the first public steam railway opened in England, and in 1853 India’s first passenger train ran from Bombay to Thane. Nepal’s first railway, from Raxaul to Amlekhganj, opened in 1927.
Nicolas Appert, a French cook, found that food sealed in glass jars and boiled kept for months. He won a prize offered by Napoleon’s government for feeding its soldiers. Peter Durand in England patented the tin can the same year. Nobody knew why it worked until Pasteur found microbes.
René Laennec, a French doctor, rolled a sheet of paper into a tube to listen to a patient’s heart and found he could hear it far better. His wooden tube became the stethoscope. Listening to the heart and lungs is still one of the first things a doctor does.
Karl Drais built a wooden “running machine” with two wheels in a line, which riders pushed along with their feet. Pedals came in the 1860s, and in 1885 the “safety bicycle,” with a chain to the back wheel and two wheels the same size, looked much like bicycles today.
Michael Faraday made a wire carrying electricity spin around a magnet, turning electricity into movement for the first time. It took decades to make motors strong enough for real work. Today they run fans, pumps, washing machines and electric cars.
Louis Braille, blind since the age of three, was 15 when he invented a way to write letters with patterns of up to six raised dots that can be felt with a fingertip. Blind people around the world, including in Nepal, read and write braille, and there is braille for Nepali.
Nicéphore Niépce coated a metal plate with a kind of asphalt that hardens in light and left it in a camera at his window in France for hours, maybe days. The result, the view of rooftops from his window, is the oldest photograph from a camera that survives. In 1839 Louis Daguerre made photography quick enough for portraits.
Jacob Perkins built a machine that cooled things by letting a liquid evaporate and pumping it back to be used again, the same idea fridges and air conditioners use today. Household refrigerators became common only in the 1900s, and they keep food safe far longer.
Charles Babbage designed the Analytical Engine, a steam-powered machine that could follow a program on punched cards, store numbers in a memory, and make decisions. It had all the parts of a modern computer, but it was never built. Ada Lovelace wrote what is often called the first computer program for it.
Samuel Morse sent the message “What hath God wrought” by electric telegraph from Washington to Baltimore, 60 km away, in dots and dashes. In England, William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone had built a working telegraph in 1837. By 1866 a cable under the Atlantic joined Europe and America.
At a hospital in Boston, the dentist William Morton made a patient breathe ether, and a surgeon removed a lump from his neck while he slept. Before anesthesia, surgery was agony and had to be done in minutes. In Japan, Hanaoka Seishū had operated with a herbal anesthetic in 1804.
Henry Bessemer found that blowing air through melted iron burns off the extra carbon, turning tonnes of iron into steel in minutes instead of days. William Kelly had found the same in the USA. Cheap steel built railways, bridges, ships and skyscrapers.
Louis Pasteur found that heating wine to about 55 °C for a short time killed the microbes that spoiled it, without boiling it. The same treatment, now used mostly for milk, prevents diseases like tuberculosis that once spread through it.
Joseph Lister read about Pasteur’s germs and began cleaning wounds, bandages and tools with carbolic acid. Deaths after surgery in his hospital in Glasgow fell sharply. Surgeons began to wash their hands and tools, and today operations are done in germ-free conditions.
Alfred Nobel found that soaking the dangerous liquid explosive nitroglycerin into a fine, crumbly rock powder made it much safer to carry. Dynamite blasted tunnels, roads and mines, and was also used in war. Nobel left most of his fortune to set up the Nobel Prizes.
Alexander Graham Bell spoke the first words over his telephone to his assistant in the next room: “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you.” Elisha Gray applied for a patent for a telephone on the same day, and Antonio Meucci had worked on one years before; who deserves the credit is still argued about.
Thomas Edison’s phonograph scratched sound waves into a sheet of tinfoil wrapped around a turning drum, and could play them back. The first words recorded were “Mary had a little lamb.” For the first time, a voice could be heard after the speaker was gone.
Joseph Swan in England and Thomas Edison in the USA both made electric light bulbs that glowed for many hours, with a thin thread of carbon heated inside a glass bulb with the air taken out. Edison also built power stations and wires to bring electricity to homes. Today’s LED bulbs use about a tenth as much electricity.
In Appleton, in the USA, water turning a wheel drove a generator that lit a few buildings, one of the first hydroelectric plants. Nepal’s first, at Pharping, near Kathmandu, opened in 1911. Today almost all of Nepal’s electricity comes from its rivers.
Karl Benz patented a three-wheeled carriage driven by a gasoline engine, the first true car. In 1888 his wife, Bertha Benz, drove it 106 km to visit her mother, without telling him, to show it worked. She stopped at a pharmacy to buy fuel.
The Lumière brothers showed ten short films to a paying audience in a Paris café. Their camera, which was also the projector, showed 16 pictures a second, fast enough for the eye to see movement. One showed workers leaving a factory; a few weeks later, audiences watched a train pulling into a station.
For thousands of years, people chewed willow bark to ease pain and fever. Felix Hoffmann at the Bayer company in Germany made a pure form of its medicine that was gentler on the stomach. Aspirin is one of the most used medicines in the world.
Guglielmo Marconi, listening in Newfoundland, heard three faint clicks, the letter “S” in Morse code, sent by radio from England, more than 3,000 km away across the ocean. Many experts had said radio waves could not follow the curve of the Earth that far.
Willis Carrier built a machine to control the heat and dampness in a printing plant in New York, where paper swelled in the summer and colors printed out of line. Air conditioning later cooled homes, offices and hospitals, and made hot parts of the world much easier to live in. It also uses a lot of electricity.
On a windy beach in North Carolina, USA, Orville Wright flew the Wright Flyer for 12 seconds and 37 meters, less than the length of a modern passenger jet. Later that day his brother Wilbur flew 260 meters in 59 seconds. Sixty-six years later, people flew to the Moon.
Leo Baekeland made a hard material from two chemicals, phenol and formaldehyde, that could be molded into any shape and did not melt when heated. It was used for telephones, radios and electrical switches. It was the first of the plastics now found everywhere.
Robert Goddard launched a rocket burning gasoline and liquid oxygen from a farm in Massachusetts, USA. It flew for only 2.5 seconds and rose about 12 meters. Every rocket that has since carried people and satellites to space works on the same idea.
Philo Farnsworth, 21, sent the first all-electronic television picture, a single straight line, across his lab in San Francisco. A year before, John Logie Baird in London had shown moving faces with a spinning disc. Electronic television won, and by the 1950s it was in millions of homes. Nepal Television began in 1985.
Wallace Carothers’ team at DuPont made nylon from chemicals found in coal, water and air, not from plants or animals. It went into toothbrushes in 1938 and stockings in 1939. Today it is in clothes, ropes and fishing nets, and plastic like it is also a big pollution problem.
Robert Watson-Watt and Arnold Wilkins in Britain showed that radio waves bounced off an airplane could reveal where it was, even at night or in cloud. Radar helped defend Britain in World War II. Today it guides airplanes, tracks storms and catches speeding cars.
The Heinkel He 178 in Germany made the first flight powered by a jet engine, designed by Hans von Ohain. In Britain, Frank Whittle had patented his own jet engine in 1930. Jet engines suck in air, burn fuel in it and blast it out the back, and now carry passenger airplanes around the world.
In the Netherlands during World War II, Willem Kolff built a machine from sausage skins, orange-juice cans and a washing machine that cleaned the blood of patients whose kidneys had failed. In 1945 it saved its first patient. Dialysis keeps millions of people alive today.
Percy Spencer, working on radar equipment, noticed that a chocolate bar in his pocket had melted. He tried popcorn next, and it popped. The microwaves were making the water in the food vibrate and heat up. The first microwave oven was taller than a person.
ENIAC filled a large room, weighed about 30 tonnes and used about 18,000 glowing vacuum tubes. It could do 5,000 additions a second, far faster than any person. Its first programmers were six women who worked it out from the wiring diagrams.
John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley at Bell Labs made a small switch from a crystal of germanium that could replace bulky vacuum tubes. A phone today holds billions of transistors, each far smaller than a bacterium.
Scientists at Bell Labs showed a silicon cell that turned about 6% of sunlight into electricity. It was expensive and first used on satellites. Today’s panels turn more than 20% of sunlight into electricity, and solar is now among the cheapest ways to make it.
Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments built a whole electric circuit, with its transistors and other parts, on one small piece of germanium. Months later Robert Noyce made a better one in silicon. Putting more and more parts on a single chip is what made computers small and cheap.
In Sweden, surgeons put a small battery-powered device under the skin of Arne Larsson, whose heart beat too slowly, to give it a steady electric pulse. The first one lasted a few hours. He went on to have 26 pacemakers and lived to 86. Millions of people have them today.
Theodore Maiman flashed a bright lamp around a small ruby rod, and out came a narrow beam of red light all of one color. People called it “a solution looking for a problem.” Today lasers read barcodes, carry the internet through glass fibers and fix eyesight.
Nick Holonyak made the first LED that gave off visible red light. For 30 years LEDs were only small red and green lights on machines, until Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura made bright blue ones in the early 1990s. With blue, LEDs could make white light, and now light homes using a fraction of the electricity.
Telstar 1 was the first satellite to relay live television between America and Europe. It could only be used for about 20 minutes at a time as it passed overhead. Today satellites high above the equator carry TV, phone calls and internet to places with no cables, including remote parts of Nepal.
Doctors working in Dhaka, in today’s Bangladesh, and Kolkata, India, showed that water with the right amounts of salt and sugar lets the body take in water even during cholera. In 1971 Dilip Mahalanabis used it in refugee camps, and far fewer people died. Called Jeevan Jal in Nepal, it has saved tens of millions of lives.
A student at UCLA in the USA tried to send the word “LOGIN” to a computer 500 km away over a new network called ARPANET. The system crashed after “LO.” An hour later it worked. ARPANET grew into the internet.
Godfrey Hounsfield built a machine that took X-rays from many angles around a patient’s head and used a computer to combine them into a picture of a slice of the brain. For the first time, doctors could see inside the body without surgery. Allan Cormack had worked out the math on his own.
The Intel 4004 put the brain of a computer on a chip the size of a fingernail, with 2,300 transistors. It was made for a calculator. Chips today have tens of billions.
On a street in New York, Martin Cooper of Motorola called a rival company from a handheld phone that weighed over a kilogram. Its battery lasted about 30 minutes of talking and took 10 hours to charge.
In a supermarket in Ohio, USA, a pack of chewing gum became the first product sold by scanning its barcode, the stripes that a laser reads as a number. Checkouts got faster and shops could keep track of everything they sold. QR codes, invented in Japan in 1994, are a square kind of barcode.
Three small computers that came ready to use, with a keyboard and a screen, went on sale in the USA: the Apple II, the Commodore PET and the TRS-80. Computers had filled rooms and belonged to governments and big companies; now families and schools could have one.
Chuck Hull invented a way to build solid objects layer by thin layer, using a beam of light to harden a liquid plastic, following a design on a computer. 3D printers now make machine parts, models, false teeth and prosthetic hands.
Tim Berners-Lee at CERN proposed a way to link documents on different computers with clickable links. The first website went online in 1991, and in 1993 CERN made the Web free for anyone to use, which is a big reason it spread so fast.
Sony began selling a rechargeable battery that stored much more energy for its weight than older ones, based on work by John Goodenough, Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino. It powers phones, laptops and electric cars, and stores solar power for the night.
With 24 satellites in orbit, the GPS system could tell anyone with a receiver where they were, anywhere on Earth, at any time. Each satellite carries very precise atomic clocks, and the receiver works out its position from how long the signals took to arrive. It even has to correct for Einstein’s relativity.
IBM’s Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in a six-game match, the first time a computer had beaten a reigning world champion at standard chess. It won by checking about 200 million positions a second, not by thinking like a person.
Phones that could also send email and browse the Web already existed, but the iPhone, and the Android phones that followed, put almost everything on a big touch screen used with the fingers. Within ten years, smartphones were the way most people in the world, including most Nepalis, went online.
After sending satellites to space, the first stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket flew back and landed upright on a landing pad. Before, rocket boosters were always thrown away. Reusing them has made getting to space much cheaper.
DeepMind’s AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol, one of the world’s best players, four games to one at Go, a game with far more possible positions than chess. It learned largely by playing against itself, and some of its moves surprised the best human players.
OpenAI released ChatGPT, a program that answers questions and writes essays, poems and computer code in ordinary language. It learned from huge amounts of text, and within two months it had 100 million users. Programs like it are useful but can state wrong things confidently, so their answers need checking.
An entry makes this timeline when it is something people made that changed what people can do, usually the first that worked. Many inventions grew from many hands over time; the entry says when the date is only roughly known. Discoveries are on the Science timeline.
Farming: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 · The wheel: Petar Milošević, CC BY-SA 4.0 · Drains and toilets in Indus cities: Saqib Qayyum, CC BY-SA 3.0 · Shadow clocks and water clocks: Marsyas, CC BY-SA 2.5 · Roman concrete: Jean-Christophe BENOIST, CC BY 2.5 · The Antikythera mechanism: No machine-readable author provided. Marsyas assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY 2.5 · Glassblowing: KamauxKamau, CC BY-SA 4.0 · Paper: Bipinganesh, CC BY 4.0 · Sugar crystals: Romain Behar, Public domain · Gunpowder: Lord Mountbatten, CC BY-SA 3.0 · The oldest printed book with a date: The colophon, at the inner end, reads: Reverently [caused to be] made for universal…, Public domain · Movable type: Popolon, CC BY-SA 4.0 · The printing press: NYC Wanderer (Kevin Eng), CC BY-SA 2.0 · The telescope: Adriaen van de Venne, Public domain · A machine that adds: David.Monniaux, CC BY-SA 3.0 · The mercury thermometer: Anonimski, CC BY-SA 3.0 · A clock for finding your way at sea: Colonel Warden at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0 · James Watt’s better steam engine: Nicolás Pérez, CC BY-SA 3.0 · The first vaccine: Photo Credit: James Gathany Content Providers(s): CDC, Public domain · The battery: GuidoB, CC BY-SA 3.0 · Punched cards control a machine: Michel Marie Carquillat (tisseur) d'après Claude Bonnefond, Public domain · The bicycle’s ancestor: ...some guy, CC BY 2.0 · Braille: reading by touch: Stefan Malmesjö, CC BY 2.0 · The first photograph: Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, Public domain · A computer on paper: Charles Babbage, CC BY-SA 2.0 · Messages by electric wire: Geni, CC BY-SA 4.0 · Cheap steel: Wikimedia Commons, Public domain · Pasteurization: Chicago Department of Health artist, Public domain · Recorded sound: Levin C. Handy (per http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cwpbh.04326 ), Public domain · The light bulb: KMJ , alpha masking by Edokter, CC BY-SA 3.0 · The car: Supplied by Benz to William Worby Beaumont and used in his book Motor Vehicles and…, Public domain · The first powered airplane flight: John T. Daniels, Public domain · Electronic television: Evert F. Baumgardner, Public domain · The jet engine: Shelley Gill, Public domain · ENIAC, one of the first electronic computers: U.S. Army, Public domain · The microchip: Zephyris, CC BY-SA 3.0 · The heart pacemaker: Steven Fruitsmaak, CC BY 3.0 · The first laser: ESO/G. Hüdepohl, CC BY 4.0 · The LED: PiccoloNamek, CC BY-SA 3.0 · TV by satellite: This file comes from Science Museum Collections , a website operated by Science Museum…, CC BY 4.0 · The first message on the internet’s ancestor: ARPANET, Public domain · A whole computer processor on one chip: Thomas Nguyen, CC BY-SA 4.0 · The first barcode scan: toguro, CC0 · GPS is fully working: U.S. Air Force, Public domain · A computer beats the world chess champion: James the photographer, CC BY 2.0 · The touch-screen smartphone: Sage Ross, CC BY-SA 4.0 · A rocket booster lands itself: SpaceX, CC0
