Stone to Silicon

The index

Every technology in the tree

A living tech tree of civilization, from the first stone tools 3.3 million years ago to this morning's breakthroughs. Each of the 1,009 technologies has a page: when it first worked, what it stood on, and what it led to.

Open the living tree

Artificial intelligence 175

  1. Llull's Ars Magna 1305
  2. Jaquet-Droz automata 1774
  3. Lovelace on machine thought 1843
  4. McCulloch-Pitts neuron 1943
  5. Cybernetics 1948
  6. Hebbian learning 1949
  7. Turing test 1950
  8. Georgetown-IBM translation 1954
  9. Dartmouth AI workshop 1956
  10. Logic Theorist 1956
  11. Samuel's checkers learner 1956
  12. Perceptron 1958
  13. General Problem Solver 1959
  14. ADALINE 1960
  15. Dendral 1965
  16. ELIZA 1966
  17. Shakey the robot 1966
  18. A* search 1968
  19. Perceptrons (book) 1969
  20. SHRDLU 1970
  21. MYCIN 1972
  22. Prolog 1972
  23. First AI winter 1974
  24. Statistical speech recognition 1975
  25. Neocognitron 1980
  26. XCON 1980
  27. Hopfield network 1982
  28. Bayesian networks 1985
  29. Boltzmann machine 1985
  30. Backpropagation 1986
  31. Second AI winter 1987
  32. Temporal-difference learning 1988
  33. Convolutional neural network 1989
  34. Q-learning 1989
  35. Recurrent neural networks 1990
  36. Statistical machine translation 1990
  37. Mixture of experts 1991
  38. TD-Gammon 1992
  39. Support vector machine 1995
  40. Deep Blue 1997
  41. LSTM 1997
  42. LeNet-5 1998
  43. MNIST dataset 1998
  44. Neural language model 2003
  45. DARPA Grand Challenge 2005
  46. Deep belief networks 2006
  47. Monte Carlo tree search 2006
  48. GPU-trained neural nets 2009
  49. ImageNet 2009
  50. Siri 2011
  51. Watson wins Jeopardy! 2011
  52. Deep learning (AlexNet) 2012
  53. Deep speech recognition 2012
  54. Google Brain cat neuron 2012
  55. Deep Q-network (Atari) 2013
  56. Variational autoencoder 2013
  57. word2vec 2013
  58. Attention mechanism 2014
  59. Generative adversarial network 2014
  60. Sequence to sequence 2014
  61. Diffusion models 2015
  62. Knowledge distillation 2015
  63. ResNet 2015
  64. TensorFlow 2015
  65. AlphaGo 2016
  66. Google Neural Machine Translation 2016
  67. PyTorch 2016
  68. WaveNet 2016
  69. AlphaGo Zero 2017
  70. AlphaZero 2017
  71. Deepfakes 2017
  72. Libratus 2017
  73. Proximal policy optimization 2017
  74. RL from human preferences 2017
  75. Transformer 2017
  76. BERT 2018
  77. GPT-1 2018
  78. AlphaStar 2019
  79. GPT-2 2019
  80. MuZero 2019
  81. OpenAI Five 2019
  82. Denoising diffusion (DDPM) 2020
  83. Driverless robotaxi service 2020
  84. GPT-3 2020
  85. MMLU benchmark 2020
  86. Neural scaling laws 2020
  87. Retrieval-augmented generation 2020
  88. Vision transformer 2020
  89. CLIP 2021
  90. DALL-E 2021
  91. GitHub Copilot 2021
  92. Chain-of-thought prompting 2022
  93. ChatGPT 2022
  94. Chinchilla scaling 2022
  95. Constitutional AI 2022
  96. DALL-E 2 2022
  97. InstructGPT 2022
  98. LLM tool use 2022
  99. Midjourney 2022
  100. PaLM 2022
  101. Stable Diffusion 2022
  102. Whisper 2022
  103. AI music generation 2023
  104. AutoGPT 2023
  105. Claude 2023
  106. Claude 2 2023
  107. Commercial text-to-video 2023
  108. Gemini 1.0 2023
  109. GPT-4 2023
  110. Llama 2023
  111. Llama 2 2023
  112. llama.cpp 2023
  113. Mistral 7B 2023
  114. Mixtral 2023
  115. Vision-language-action models 2023
  116. AlphaGeometry 2024
  117. AlphaProof IMO silver 2024
  118. Claude 3 family 2024
  119. Claude 3.5 Sonnet 2024
  120. Computer use agents 2024
  121. DeepSeek-V3 2024
  122. Gemini 1.5 long context 2024
  123. GPT-4o 2024
  124. Llama 3 2024
  125. Model Context Protocol 2024
  126. o3 and ARC-AGI 2024
  127. Reasoning models (o1) 2024
  128. Scaling Monosemanticity 2024
  129. Sora 2024
  130. Test-time compute scaling 2024
  131. Veo video model 2024
  132. Claude 3.7 Sonnet 2025
  133. Claude 4 2025
  134. Claude Code 2025
  135. Claude Opus 4.5 2025
  136. Claude Sonnet 4.5 2025
  137. DeepSeek-R1 2025
  138. Gemini 2.5 Pro 2025
  139. Gemini 3 2025
  140. Gemini Robotics 2025
  141. GPT-5 2025
  142. Humanity's Last Exam 2025
  143. LLMs win IMO gold 2025
  144. Qwen3 2025
  145. Stargate compute build-out 2025
  146. Veo 3 with native audio 2025
  147. Grok 4 2025
  148. Kimi K2 open MoE 2025
  149. gpt-oss open-weight models 2025
  150. AI sweeps ICPC World Finals 2025
  151. DeepSeek sparse attention 2025
  152. Sora 2 2025
  153. OpenClaw personal agents 2025
  154. GPT-5.2 2025
  155. Claude Cowork 2026
  156. Claude Opus 4.6 2026
  157. GLM-5 2026
  158. Gemini 3 Deep Think 2026
  159. Qwen3.5 2026
  160. Gemini 3.1 Pro 2026
  161. GPT-5.4 2026
  162. Muse Spark 2026
  163. Claude Opus 4.7 2026
  164. GPT-5.5 2026
  165. DeepSeek-V4 2026
  166. Gemini 3.5 2026
  167. Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 2026
  168. GPT-5.6 2026
  169. Kimi K3 2026
  170. AI perfect scores at IMO 2026
  171. Claude Opus 5 2026
  172. Gemini Robotics 2 2026
  173. GPT-6 Astra 2026
  174. Claude Opus 5.5 2026
  175. GPT-6 Sol and Luna 2026

Projections

  1. Autonomous AI researchers ~2029
  2. Artificial general intelligence ~2032
  3. Whole-brain emulation ~2060

Computing 118

  1. Abacus 500 BCE
  2. Antikythera mechanism 150 BCE
  3. Suanpan 1200
  4. Napier's bones 1617
  5. Slide rule 1622
  6. Pascaline 1642
  7. Stepped reckoner 1694
  8. Binary arithmetic 1703
  9. Bouchon's punched paper loom 1725
  10. Jacquard punched cards 1804
  11. Difference engine 1822
  12. Analytical Engine 1837
  13. Lovelace's Note G 1843
  14. Arithmometer 1851
  15. Hollerith tabulator 1890
  16. Vacuum tube 1904
  17. Flip-flop circuit 1918
  18. Differential analyzer 1931
  19. Turing machine 1936
  20. Switching circuit theory 1937
  21. Zuse Z3 1941
  22. Colossus 1944
  23. ENIAC 1945
  24. Stored-program architecture 1945
  25. Transistor 1947
  26. Manchester Baby 1948
  27. EDSAC 1949
  28. Magnetic tape data storage 1951
  29. UNIVAC I 1951
  30. A-0 compiler 1952
  31. Magnetic-core memory 1953
  32. Hard disk drive 1956
  33. FORTRAN 1957
  34. Photolithography 1957
  35. Integrated circuit 1958
  36. LISP 1958
  37. COBOL 1959
  38. MOSFET 1959
  39. Planar process 1959
  40. Time-sharing 1961
  41. CMOS 1963
  42. CDC 6600 1964
  43. IBM System/360 1964
  44. Moore's law 1965
  45. Virtual machines 1967
  46. Silicon-gate MOS 1968
  47. The Mother of All Demos 1968
  48. Unix 1969
  49. DRAM 1970
  50. Relational model 1970
  51. Microprocessor (Intel 4004) 1971
  52. C 1972
  53. Xerox Alto 1973
  54. Dennard scaling 1974
  55. Intel 8080 1974
  56. SQL 1974
  57. Altair 8800 1975
  58. Cray-1 1976
  59. Personal computer 1977
  60. Wafer stepper 1978
  61. x86 (Intel 8086) 1978
  62. RISC 1980
  63. IBM PC 1981
  64. Excimer laser lithography 1982
  65. Quantum computing proposal 1982
  66. GNU Project 1983
  67. Macintosh 1984
  68. ARM architecture 1985
  69. C++ 1985
  70. Flash memory 1987
  71. Pure-play foundry (TSMC) 1987
  72. Linux 1991
  73. Python 1991
  74. Shor's algorithm 1994
  75. Quantum error correction 1995
  76. Trapped-ion quantum gate 1995
  77. ASCI Red 1996
  78. Open source 1998
  79. GPU (GeForce 256) 1999
  80. Superconducting qubit 1999
  81. x86 virtualization 1999
  82. Programmable shaders 2001
  83. Multi-core processors 2005
  84. Cloud computing 2006
  85. Immersion lithography 2006
  86. CUDA 2007
  87. High-k metal gate 2007
  88. Roadrunner 2008
  89. RISC-V 2010
  90. Smartphone SoC (Apple A4) 2010
  91. FinFET 2012
  92. Containers (Docker) 2013
  93. High Bandwidth Memory 2013
  94. Tensor Processing Unit 2015
  95. Tensor Cores (Volta) 2017
  96. Chiplets 2019
  97. EUV lithography 2019
  98. Quantum advantage demo (Sycamore) 2019
  99. 5 nm process 2020
  100. Apple M1 2020
  101. 3 nm process 2022
  102. Frontier (exascale) 2022
  103. Gate-all-around transistor 2022
  104. Nvidia H100 2022
  105. High-NA EUV 2023
  106. Nvidia Blackwell 2024
  107. Post-quantum cryptography standards 2024
  108. Willow (below-threshold QEC) 2024
  109. 2 nm process 2025
  110. Verifiable quantum advantage 2025
  111. Quantinuum Helios 2025
  112. Ironwood TPU 2025
  113. IBM Nighthawk and Loon 2025
  114. 448-atom fault-tolerant architecture 2025
  115. Nvidia Vera Rubin 2026
  116. Intel 18A Panther Lake 2026
  117. Colossus 2 gigawatt cluster 2026
  118. HBM4 memory 2026

Projections

  1. Fault-tolerant quantum computer ~2032
  2. Zettascale computing ~2035
  3. Orbital data centres ~2036

Communication 97

  1. Spoken language 150k BCE
  2. Engraved ochre (Blombos) 98k BCE
  3. Cave art 66k BCE
  4. Tally marks (Lebombo bone) 41k BCE
  5. Clay accounting tokens 8000 BCE
  6. Cylinder seal 3500 BCE
  7. Proto-cuneiform 3350 BCE
  8. Egyptian hieroglyphs 3250 BCE
  9. Writing (cuneiform) 3200 BCE
  10. Papyrus 2900 BCE
  11. Alphabet (Proto-Sinaitic) 1850 BCE
  12. Oracle bone script 1250 BCE
  13. Phoenician alphabet 1050 BCE
  14. Aramaic alphabet 800 BCE
  15. Greek alphabet 800 BCE
  16. Latin alphabet 700 BCE
  17. Library of Ashurbanipal 650 BCE
  18. Persian royal post 550 BCE
  19. Maya script 300 BCE
  20. Library of Alexandria 285 BCE
  21. Brahmi script 260 BCE
  22. Parchment 200 BCE
  23. Cursus publicus 20 BCE
  24. Codex (bound book) 100
  25. Paper 105
  26. Woodblock printing 700
  27. House of Wisdom 830
  28. Diamond Sutra (dated print) 868
  29. Camera obscura 1021
  30. Movable type (Bi Sheng) 1040
  31. Water-powered paper mill 1276
  32. Metal movable type (Jikji) 1377
  33. Movable-type printing press 1440
  34. Imperial post (Thurn und Taxis) 1490
  35. Printed newspaper 1605
  36. Scientific journal 1665
  37. Optical telegraph 1794
  38. Lithography 1796
  39. Continuous paper machine 1803
  40. Steam-powered press 1814
  41. Electric telegraph 1837
  42. Photography 1839
  43. Uniform Penny Post 1840
  44. Morse code 1844
  45. Transatlantic telegraph cable 1858
  46. Typewriter 1868
  47. Telephone 1876
  48. Phonograph 1877
  49. Telephone exchange 1878
  50. Linotype machine 1886
  51. Roll film camera (Kodak) 1888
  52. Cinema 1895
  53. Radio 1895
  54. Broadcast radio 1920
  55. Sound film 1927
  56. Television 1927
  57. Magnetic tape recording 1935
  58. Memex (As We May Think) 1945
  59. Information theory 1948
  60. TAT-1 telephone cable 1956
  61. Modem 1958
  62. Telstar communications satellite 1962
  63. Geostationary satellite (Syncom) 1964
  64. Packet switching 1964
  65. Hypertext 1965
  66. ARPANET 1969
  67. Low-loss optical fiber 1970
  68. Email 1971
  69. Ethernet 1973
  70. TCP/IP 1974
  71. Digital camera 1975
  72. Public-key cryptography 1976
  73. Cellular phone network 1983
  74. Domain Name System 1983
  75. NSFNET backbone 1986
  76. TAT-8 fiber cable 1988
  77. GSM (2G digital cellular) 1991
  78. World Wide Web 1991
  79. Text messaging (SMS) 1992
  80. Mosaic web browser 1993
  81. MP3 audio compression 1993
  82. SSL/TLS encryption 1995
  83. Wi-Fi 1997
  84. Web search (Google PageRank) 1998
  85. 3G mobile data 2001
  86. Wikipedia 2001
  87. Social networking (Facebook) 2004
  88. Online video (YouTube) 2005
  89. Smartphone 2007
  90. App Store 2008
  91. 4G LTE 2009
  92. End-to-end encrypted messaging 2013
  93. Algorithmic short video (TikTok) 2016
  94. 5G 2019
  95. Direct-to-cell satellite service 2025
  96. Streaming overtakes broadcast TV 2025
  97. Amazon Leo broadband 2026

Projections

  1. Universal real-time translation ~2028
  2. Satellite broadband to every phone ~2029
  3. Brain-computer interfaces restore speech ~2032
  4. Continental quantum networks ~2040

Transport & space 106

  1. Dugout canoe 8000 BCE
  2. Sailing ships 3500 BCE
  3. The wheel 3500 BCE
  4. Ox-drawn wagon 3000 BCE
  5. Domestic horse and riding 2200 BCE
  6. Chariot 2000 BCE
  7. Spoked wheel 2000 BCE
  8. Outrigger canoe 1500 BCE
  9. Trireme 700 BCE
  10. Roman roads 312 BCE
  11. Sternpost rudder 100
  12. Lateen sail 200
  13. Stirrup 322
  14. Grand Canal of China 609
  15. Pound lock 984
  16. Polynesian wayfinding 1000
  17. Magnetic compass 1040
  18. Gunpowder rocket 1232
  19. Portolan chart 1275
  20. Carrack 1400
  21. Mariner's astrolabe 1481
  22. First circumnavigation 1522
  23. Fluyt 1595
  24. Sextant 1757
  25. Bridgewater Canal 1761
  26. Marine chronometer 1761
  27. Hot air balloon 1783
  28. Steam locomotive 1804
  29. Steamboat 1807
  30. Draisine 1817
  31. Macadam road 1820
  32. Intercity railway 1830
  33. Screw propeller 1839
  34. Iron screw steamship 1843
  35. Clipper ship 1845
  36. Cayley's crewed glider 1853
  37. Underground railway 1863
  38. Suez Canal 1869
  39. Transcontinental railroad 1869
  40. Internal combustion engine 1876
  41. Safety bicycle 1885
  42. Automobile 1886
  43. Electric streetcar 1888
  44. Pneumatic tire 1888
  45. Lilienthal's gliders 1891
  46. Diesel engine 1897
  47. La Jamais Contente 1899
  48. Rigid airship 1900
  49. Powered flight 1903
  50. Rocket equation 1903
  51. Ford Model T 1908
  52. Panama Canal 1914
  53. Liquid-fuel rocket 1926
  54. Douglas DC-3 1936
  55. Jet engine 1939
  56. Practical helicopter 1939
  57. V-2 rocket 1944
  58. Bell X-1 breaks sound barrier 1947
  59. Jet airliner 1952
  60. Nuclear submarine 1955
  61. Containerization 1956
  62. Interstate Highway System 1956
  63. Sputnik 1957
  64. Boeing 707 1958
  65. Transit navigation satellite 1960
  66. Gagarin orbits Earth 1961
  67. Shinkansen high-speed rail 1964
  68. High-bypass turbofan 1965
  69. Saturn V 1967
  70. ISO standard container 1968
  71. Apollo 11 Moon landing 1969
  72. Boeing 747 1969
  73. Concorde 1969
  74. GPS 1978
  75. Space Shuttle 1981
  76. Airbus A320 fly-by-wire 1987
  77. Hubble Space Telescope 1990
  78. Predator UAV 1995
  79. GM EV1 1996
  80. International Space Station 1998
  81. Ultra-large container ship 2006
  82. Falcon 1 reaches orbit 2008
  83. Tesla Roadster 2008
  84. Tesla Model S 2012
  85. Consumer quadcopter 2013
  86. Reusable orbital rocket 2015
  87. Tesla Model 3 2017
  88. Starlink 2019
  89. Crew Dragon 2020
  90. Driverless robotaxi service 2020
  91. Ingenuity Mars helicopter 2021
  92. Certified passenger eVTOL 2023
  93. EV tops global car sales 2023
  94. Starship flight tests 2023
  95. Super Heavy booster catch 2024
  96. Starship Flight 10 2025
  97. X-59 quiet supersonic jet 2025
  98. Driverless robotaxis on freeways 2025
  99. New Glenn booster landing 2025
  100. Mengzhou max-Q abort test 2026
  101. Artemis II crewed lunar flyby 2026
  102. Starship V3 debut 2026
  103. Booster caught by a sea net 2026
  104. Vikram-1 reaches orbit 2026
  105. Starship deploys working satellites 2026
  106. Zhuque-3 booster landing 2026

Projections

  1. Driverless taxis in most big cities ~2030
  2. Electric regional airliners ~2034
  3. Permanent lunar base ~2035
  4. Crewed Mars landing ~2038

Tools & manufacturing 69

  1. First stone tools 3.3M years ago
  2. Acheulean hand axe 1.8M years ago
  3. Hafting 500k BCE
  4. Levallois technique 300k BCE
  5. Clothing 170k BCE
  6. Microliths 71k BCE
  7. Bow and arrow 64k BCE
  8. Cordage and rope 50k BCE
  9. Eyed needle 50k BCE
  10. Ground stone axes 46k BCE
  11. Monumental stone building 9500 BCE
  12. Mudbrick 8500 BCE
  13. Weaving and the loom 7000 BCE
  14. Lever 3000 BCE
  15. Great Pyramid of Giza 2560 BCE
  16. True arch 2500 BCE
  17. Pulley 1500 BCE
  18. Lathe 1300 BCE
  19. Crane 515 BCE
  20. Roman aqueduct 312 BCE
  21. Gear train 300 BCE
  22. Screw 250 BCE
  23. Pantheon dome 125
  24. Spinning wheel 1000
  25. Gothic architecture 1144
  26. Mechanical clock 1280
  27. Brunelleschi dome 1436
  28. Flying shuttle 1733
  29. Spinning jenny 1765
  30. Water frame 1769
  31. Factory system 1771
  32. Cylinder boring machine 1774
  33. Iron Bridge 1779
  34. Power loom 1785
  35. Screw-cutting lathe 1800
  36. Portsmouth Block Mills 1803
  37. Milling machine 1818
  38. Interchangeable parts 1824
  39. Electric motor 1834
  40. Steam hammer 1840
  41. Standard screw thread 1841
  42. Sewing machine 1846
  43. Micrometer caliper 1848
  44. Safety elevator 1853
  45. Steel-frame skyscraper 1885
  46. Scientific management 1911
  47. Moving assembly line 1913
  48. Toyota Production System 1950
  49. Numerical control 1952
  50. Unimate industrial robot 1961
  51. Computer-aided design 1963
  52. 3D printing (stereolithography) 1984
  53. Fused filament fabrication 1989
  54. ASIMO 2000
  55. RepRap 2005
  56. Collaborative robot 2008
  57. Burj Khalifa 2010
  58. Atlas humanoid (hydraulic) 2013
  59. Tesla Optimus 2022
  60. Digit in commercial logistics 2024
  61. Electric Atlas 2024
  62. Figure humanoids at BMW 2024
  63. Low-cost humanoid (Unitree G1) 2024
  64. World Humanoid Robot Games 2025
  65. Figure 03 humanoid 2025
  66. 1X NEO home humanoid 2025
  67. Salt-grain autonomous robots 2025
  68. Production Atlas 2026
  69. Robot beats human half-marathon record 2026

Projections

  1. General-purpose factory robots ~2030
  2. Humanoid robots in homes ~2036
  3. Atomically precise manufacturing ~2058

Materials 74

  1. Birch tar adhesive 200k BCE
  2. Fired clay figurines 29k BCE
  3. Pottery 18k BCE
  4. Lime plaster 14k BCE
  5. Native copper working 8500 BCE
  6. Copper smelting 5000 BCE
  7. Lost-wax casting 4700 BCE
  8. Bronze 4650 BCE
  9. Potter's wheel 4500 BCE
  10. Faience 4000 BCE
  11. Silk 3500 BCE
  12. Glass 2500 BCE
  13. Iron smelting (bloomery) 2000 BCE
  14. Mesoamerican rubber 1600 BCE
  15. Cast iron (China) 500 BCE
  16. Crucible (wootz) steel 300 BCE
  17. Roman concrete 200 BCE
  18. Glassblowing 50 BCE
  19. Distillation 100
  20. Porcelain 100
  21. Gunpowder 850
  22. Blast furnace (Europe) 1200
  23. Venetian clear glass 1450
  24. Coke-fired iron smelting 1709
  25. Huntsman crucible steel 1740
  26. Sulfuric acid (lead chamber) 1746
  27. Hydraulic lime 1756
  28. Puddling 1784
  29. Leblanc soda process 1791
  30. Portland cement 1824
  31. Hot blast 1828
  32. Vulcanization 1839
  33. Nitroglycerin 1847
  34. Bessemer steel 1856
  35. Synthetic dye (mauveine) 1856
  36. Parkesine 1862
  37. Solvay process 1864
  38. Open-hearth steel 1865
  39. Dynamite 1867
  40. Reinforced concrete 1867
  41. Aluminum (Hall-Heroult) 1886
  42. Liquid air (Linde) 1895
  43. High-speed steel 1898
  44. Electric arc furnace 1900
  45. Synthetic plastic (Bakelite) 1907
  46. Synthetic rubber 1909
  47. Stainless steel 1913
  48. Czochralski crystal pulling 1916
  49. Cemented carbide 1923
  50. Plasticized PVC 1926
  51. Glass fiber 1932
  52. High-pressure polyethylene 1933
  53. Nylon 1935
  54. Kroll process (titanium) 1937
  55. Basic oxygen steelmaking 1948
  56. Zone refining 1950
  57. Float glass 1952
  58. High-pressure synthetic diamond 1953
  59. Ziegler-Natta catalysts 1953
  60. Carbon fiber 1958
  61. Kevlar 1965
  62. Buckminsterfullerene 1985
  63. High-temperature superconductors 1986
  64. Carbon nanotubes 1991
  65. Metal-organic frameworks 1999
  66. Metamaterials 2000
  67. Graphene 2004
  68. Gorilla Glass 2007
  69. Composite airliner (787) 2011
  70. Magic-angle graphene 2018
  71. Hydrogen-reduced steel 2021
  72. AI materials discovery (GNoME) 2023
  73. Wafer-scale 2D InSe 2025
  74. First commercial furnace in orbit 2025

Projections

  1. AI-driven materials discovery ~2030
  2. Hydrogen-reduced green steel ~2033
  3. Gigatonne-scale carbon removal ~2045
  4. Room-temperature superconductor ~2055

Energy 101

  1. Control of fire 1M years ago
  2. Oil lamp 15k BCE
  3. Charcoal making 6000 BCE
  4. Draft animal power 4000 BCE
  5. Watermill 300 BCE
  6. Sichuan gas wells 100 BCE
  7. Tide mill 619
  8. Windmill 700
  9. Coal as industrial fuel 1000
  10. Post mill 1185
  11. Savery steam pump 1698
  12. Newcomen steam engine 1712
  13. Watt steam engine 1776
  14. Coal gas lighting 1792
  15. High-pressure steam engine 1800
  16. Voltaic battery 1800
  17. Water turbine 1827
  18. Fuel cell 1839
  19. Photovoltaic effect 1839
  20. Kerosene 1846
  21. Francis turbine 1849
  22. Heat pump 1856
  23. Oil refinery 1856
  24. Lead-acid battery 1859
  25. Oil drilling 1859
  26. Self-excited dynamo 1866
  27. Electric arc lighting 1876
  28. Hydroelectric power 1878
  29. Incandescent light bulb 1879
  30. Electric power grid 1882
  31. Fritts selenium solar cell 1883
  32. Steam turbine 1884
  33. Transformer 1885
  34. AC power system 1886
  35. Wind electricity 1887
  36. AC induction motor 1888
  37. Three-phase transmission 1891
  38. Niagara Falls power plant 1895
  39. Spindletop gusher 1901
  40. Geothermal power 1904
  41. Pumped-storage hydro 1907
  42. Solar thermal engine 1913
  43. Thermal cracking 1913
  44. Fischer-Tropsch process 1925
  45. National grid 1933
  46. Rural electrification 1936
  47. Nuclear fission 1938
  48. Gas turbine power plant 1939
  49. Smith-Putnam turbine 1941
  50. Fluid catalytic cracking 1942
  51. Nuclear reactor 1942
  52. Hydraulic fracturing 1947
  53. Offshore oil drilling 1947
  54. First nuclear electricity 1951
  55. Stellarator 1951
  56. First thermonuclear fusion 1952
  57. HVDC transmission 1954
  58. Obninsk grid reactor 1954
  59. Silicon solar cell 1954
  60. Gedser wind turbine 1956
  61. Pressurized water reactor 1957
  62. Tokamak 1958
  63. Liquefied natural gas shipping 1959
  64. Boiling water reactor 1960
  65. Combined-cycle gas plant 1960
  66. Tidal barrage 1966
  67. Binary-cycle geothermal 1967
  68. Pebble-bed reactor 1967
  69. Ethanol fuel program 1975
  70. Intercalation cathodes 1976
  71. Commercial fast breeder 1980
  72. Concentrated solar power 1982
  73. Joint European Torus 1983
  74. Vanadium flow battery 1986
  75. Nickel-metal hydride battery 1989
  76. PERC solar cell 1989
  77. Lithium-ion battery 1991
  78. Offshore wind farm 1991
  79. Lithium iron phosphate battery 1996
  80. Shale gas revolution 1998
  81. Perovskite solar cell 2009
  82. Ultra-high-voltage DC lines 2010
  83. Three Gorges Dam 2012
  84. Floating offshore wind 2017
  85. Grid-scale battery storage 2017
  86. Generation III+ reactors 2018
  87. Gigawatt-scale offshore wind 2019
  88. Small modular reactor 2020
  89. Solar becomes cheapest power 2020
  90. High-temperature superconducting magnet 2021
  91. Fusion ignition (NIF) 2022
  92. Terawatt of solar 2022
  93. Enhanced geothermal systems 2023
  94. HTR-PM pebble-bed plant 2023
  95. Perovskite-silicon tandem record 2023
  96. Sodium-ion battery 2023
  97. Terawatt of wind 2023
  98. Long-pulse fusion plasmas 2025
  99. Renewables overtake coal 2025
  100. Mass-production sodium-ion car 2026
  101. First private D-T fusion 2026

Projections

  1. Small modular reactors in service ~2031
  2. Cheap long-duration grid storage ~2032
  3. Enhanced geothermal at scale ~2034
  4. Commercial fusion electricity ~2045
  5. Space-based solar power ~2045

Food & agriculture 57

  1. Wild cereal harvesting 21k BCE
  2. Domestic dog 15k BCE
  3. Agriculture 9500 BCE
  4. Domesticated wheat 9000 BCE
  5. Livestock domestication 8500 BCE
  6. Cattle 8000 BCE
  7. Dairying 7000 BCE
  8. Domesticated maize 7000 BCE
  9. Domesticated rice 7000 BCE
  10. Fermented drinks 7000 BCE
  11. Domesticated potato 6000 BCE
  12. Irrigation 6000 BCE
  13. Ard plough 4000 BCE
  14. Qanat 800 BCE
  15. Crystalline sugar 350
  16. Horse collar 480
  17. Heavy mouldboard plough 600
  18. Arab Agricultural Revolution 800
  19. Three-field rotation 800
  20. Columbian exchange 1492
  21. Seed drill 1701
  22. Norfolk four-course rotation 1730
  23. Scientific livestock breeding 1760
  24. Canning 1810
  25. Mechanical reaper 1831
  26. Mechanical refrigeration 1834
  27. Combine harvester 1835
  28. Steel plough 1837
  29. Agricultural chemistry 1840
  30. Guano fertilizer 1840
  31. Pasteurization 1864
  32. Refrigerated shipping 1882
  33. Gasoline tractor 1892
  34. Haber-Bosch process 1910
  35. Quick-frozen food 1925
  36. Hybrid corn 1926
  37. Home refrigerator 1927
  38. Hydroponics 1929
  39. Norin 10 dwarf wheat 1935
  40. DDT insecticide 1939
  41. Center-pivot irrigation 1948
  42. Green Revolution 1961
  43. Drip irrigation 1965
  44. IR8 miracle rice 1966
  45. First transgenic plant 1983
  46. Flavr Savr tomato 1994
  47. Bt and herbicide-tolerant crops 1996
  48. Precision agriculture 1996
  49. Golden rice 2000
  50. Vertical farming 2012
  51. Lab-grown burger 2013
  52. Heme plant-based meat 2016
  53. Cultivated meat approved 2020
  54. CRISPR-edited food 2021
  55. Autonomous tractor 2022
  56. Cultivated meat in a grocery store 2025
  57. England's gene-edited crop pathway 2025

Projections

  1. Precision-fermented dairy at parity ~2031
  2. Cultivated meat at price parity ~2038
  3. C4 photosynthesis in rice ~2040
  4. Nitrogen-fixing cereals ~2042

Health & biology 92

  1. Trepanation 7000 BCE
  2. Edwin Smith Papyrus 1600 BCE
  3. Hippocratic medicine 400 BCE
  4. Galenic medicine 170
  5. Canon of Medicine 1025
  6. Vesalius's anatomy 1543
  7. Microscope 1620
  8. Blood circulation 1628
  9. Cells observed 1665
  10. Microorganisms discovered 1676
  11. Variolation 1721
  12. Controlled clinical trial 1747
  13. Vaccination 1796
  14. Cell theory 1839
  15. Surgical anesthesia 1846
  16. Handwashing in hospitals 1847
  17. Theory of evolution 1859
  18. Germ theory of disease 1861
  19. Mendelian inheritance 1865
  20. Antiseptic surgery 1867
  21. Nucleic acid discovered 1869
  22. Koch's bacteriology 1876
  23. Rabies vaccine 1885
  24. X-rays 1895
  25. Mosquito transmits malaria 1897
  26. Blood types 1901
  27. Chromosome theory 1902
  28. Hormones discovered 1902
  29. Genes on chromosomes 1910
  30. Salvarsan 1910
  31. Insulin 1922
  32. Electroencephalography 1924
  33. Penicillin 1928
  34. Sulfa drugs 1935
  35. Mass-produced penicillin 1943
  36. Streptomycin 1943
  37. DNA carries genes 1944
  38. HeLa cell line 1951
  39. DNA double helix 1953
  40. Organ transplant 1954
  41. Polio vaccine 1955
  42. Oral contraceptive pill 1960
  43. Genetic code cracked 1961
  44. Heart transplant 1967
  45. Oral rehydration therapy 1968
  46. Restriction enzymes 1970
  47. CT scanning 1971
  48. Protein Data Bank 1971
  49. Magnetic resonance imaging 1973
  50. Recombinant DNA 1973
  51. Monoclonal antibodies 1974
  52. Sanger DNA sequencing 1977
  53. In vitro fertilisation 1978
  54. Recombinant insulin 1978
  55. Smallpox eradicated 1980
  56. PCR 1983
  57. AZT, first HIV drug 1987
  58. GLP-1 insulin action 1987
  59. Gene therapy 1990
  60. CASP 1994
  61. Combination HIV therapy 1996
  62. RNA interference 1998
  63. Human Genome Project 2003
  64. BrainGate implant 2004
  65. Modified mRNA 2005
  66. Next-generation sequencing 2005
  67. CRISPR bacterial immunity 2007
  68. CRISPR gene editing 2012
  69. Base editing 2016
  70. AAV gene therapy approved 2017
  71. CAR-T cell therapy 2017
  72. Semaglutide 2017
  73. Prime editing 2019
  74. AlphaFold 2 2020
  75. mRNA vaccines 2020
  76. AlphaFold Protein Database 2021
  77. Tirzepatide 2022
  78. Casgevy, first CRISPR therapy 2023
  79. AlphaFold 3 2024
  80. Gene-edited pig kidney 2024
  81. Neuralink first implant 2024
  82. Twice-yearly HIV prevention 2025
  83. AI-designed viable genomes 2025
  84. Gene therapy slows Huntington's 2025
  85. PRIMA retinal implant 2025
  86. One-shot CRISPR lowers cholesterol 2025
  87. GLP-1 pill for obesity 2025
  88. AlphaGenome 2026
  89. Orforglipron 2026
  90. Implanted speech BCI trial 2026
  91. Pan-RAS inhibitor for pancreatic cancer 2026
  92. Pig kidney bridges to transplant 2026

Projections

  1. Personalised cancer vaccines ~2029
  2. Routine in-body gene editing ~2032
  3. Routine pig-organ transplants ~2035
  4. Therapies that slow ageing ~2040

Math & science 120

  1. Tally marks 20k BCE
  2. Numerals and arithmetic 3000 BCE
  3. 365-day civil calendar 2800 BCE
  4. Babylonian mathematics 1800 BCE
  5. Babylonian astronomy 700 BCE
  6. Greek natural philosophy 585 BCE
  7. Pythagorean mathematics 530 BCE
  8. Atomism 420 BCE
  9. Aristotelian logic 350 BCE
  10. Euclid's Elements 300 BCE
  11. Archimedes' statics and buoyancy 250 BCE
  12. Earth's circumference measured 240 BCE
  13. Trigonometry 140 BCE
  14. Julian calendar 45 BCE
  15. Ptolemy's Almagest 150
  16. Decimal place value 458
  17. Zero as a number 628
  18. Algebra 820
  19. Book of Optics 1021
  20. Liber Abaci 1202
  21. Heliocentrism 1543
  22. Tycho's precision astronomy 1576
  23. Decimal fractions 1585
  24. De Magnete 1600
  25. Telescope 1608
  26. Kepler's laws 1609
  27. Sidereus Nuncius 1610
  28. Logarithms 1614
  29. Scientific method 1620
  30. Analytic geometry 1637
  31. Galileo's laws of motion 1638
  32. Barometer and vacuum 1643
  33. Probability theory 1654
  34. Royal Society 1660
  35. Boyle's law 1662
  36. Finite speed of light 1676
  37. Calculus 1680
  38. Newtonian mechanics 1687
  39. Halley's life table 1693
  40. Bayes' theorem 1763
  41. Deep time 1788
  42. Conservation of mass 1789
  43. Metric system 1795
  44. Wave theory of light 1803
  45. Least squares 1805
  46. Atomic theory 1808
  47. Current deflects a compass 1820
  48. Fourier analysis 1822
  49. Carnot's heat engine theory 1824
  50. Non-Euclidean geometry 1829
  51. Electromagnetic induction 1831
  52. Conservation of energy 1847
  53. Laws of thermodynamics 1850
  54. Boolean logic 1854
  55. Spectroscopy 1859
  56. Maxwell's equations 1865
  57. Periodic table 1869
  58. Set theory 1874
  59. Statistical mechanics 1877
  60. Predicate logic 1879
  61. Michelson-Morley experiment 1887
  62. Radio waves detected 1887
  63. Greenhouse effect quantified 1896
  64. Radioactivity 1896
  65. Electron 1897
  66. Planck's quantum 1900
  67. Light quanta 1905
  68. Special relativity 1905
  69. Atomic nucleus 1911
  70. Superconductivity 1911
  71. Continental drift 1912
  72. Bohr atom 1913
  73. General relativity 1915
  74. Stimulated emission 1917
  75. Modern statistics 1925
  76. Quantum mechanics 1925
  77. Dirac equation and antimatter 1928
  78. Expanding universe 1929
  79. Godel's incompleteness 1931
  80. Neutron 1932
  81. Particle accelerator 1932
  82. Radio astronomy 1932
  83. Game theory 1944
  84. Monte Carlo method 1946
  85. Big Bang nucleosynthesis 1948
  86. Quantum electrodynamics 1948
  87. Radiocarbon dating 1949
  88. Atomic clock 1955
  89. Age of the Earth 1956
  90. Keeling curve 1958
  91. International System of Units 1960
  92. Laser 1960
  93. Chaos theory 1963
  94. Quarks 1964
  95. Cosmic microwave background 1965
  96. Plate tectonics 1967
  97. Electroweak unification 1968
  98. Evidence for dark matter 1970
  99. NP-completeness 1971
  100. Standard Model 1974
  101. Bell tests of entanglement 1982
  102. Hubble Space Telescope 1990
  103. Exoplanets around Sun-like stars 1995
  104. Accelerating universe 1998
  105. Large Hadron Collider 2008
  106. Higgs boson 2012
  107. Gravitational waves detected 2015
  108. First black hole image 2019
  109. SI redefined by constants 2019
  110. James Webb Space Telescope 2021
  111. Rubin Observatory first images 2025
  112. Black hole area theorem confirmed 2025
  113. AI starts solving Erdős problems 2026
  114. Migdal effect observed 2026
  115. Erdős unit distance conjecture refuted 2026
  116. Cycle double cover proof 2026
  117. Jacobian conjecture disproved 2026
  118. Two thirds of zeta zeros on the line 2026
  119. Roman Space Telescope launches 2026
  120. Fermat's Last Theorem machine-checked 2026

Projections

  1. AI proves a major open conjecture ~2033
  2. Space gravitational-wave observatory ~2037
  3. Biosignature on an exoplanet ~2042
  4. Dark matter identified ~2045