Inventions and Discoveries

From stone tools to the World Wide Web: when and where each of 291 inventions and discoveries first appeared, who is credited, and what each one led to.

Lanes

How to read the tree

Each card is an invention or discovery, placed at its first known date, the earliest firm evidence historians accept, which is often earlier than the version that spread. A line joins it to what it built on. The eleven lanes stand in five families, each with its own colour: making (tools, building, energy), living (farming, medicine), moving (transport, weapons), knowing (writing, science, chemistry) and connecting (communication). Time runs left to right, but not evenly: each age gets room by how many inventions it holds, so a few centuries of the industrial age are as wide as tens of thousands of years of prehistory; the strip above the tree shows all of history at that scale, with a window on the part in view. On a phone the tree becomes a timeline from top to bottom, and a tap on an invention lights the line it belongs to. “Credited to” names the society or state where it first appeared and the people the sources name; many inventions arose more than once, and where the record shows that, the card says so. Dates and credits come from the encyclopedia entry of each invention and the works it cites, and they are debated more often than textbooks suggest: the card says so where they are.

Every invention and discovery, by category

Tools and materials

Farming and food

Building and engineering

Transport and navigation

Weapons and war

Writing and counting

Science and discovery

Chemistry

Medicine and health

Energy and power

Communication and computing