Please note that the following table may well be missing some important developments. We would be pleased to receive comments, corrections and suggestions.
| Engineering Timeline AD | |||
| 00030 | Blast furnace developed during Han dynasty in China. Du Shi used a waterwheel to power bellows to blow air into the bottom of the furnace. | ||
| 0010-0070 | Hero (Heron) of Alexandria experiments with steam and wind power and devises some forms of steam power and writes a number of texts about mechanics, geometry, optics and measurement. | ||
| 0047 | Romans build Fosseway in England | ||
| 0100 | Pantheon built in Rome and Hadrian’s Wall in Britain | ||
| 0100 | Roman roads stretch from England to Egypt | ||
| 0105 | Paper making in China during Han dynasty | ||
| 0105 | Roman bridge built over River Tagus | ||
| 0150 | Galen wrote on anatomy, physiology, pharmacology and philosophy and his anatomy based on the dissection of monkeys was uncontested until by Vesalius in 1543 | ||
| 0220 | During Han dynasty Zhuge Liang designed hot air balloon to carry an oil lamp to confuse the enemy in war | ||
| 0350 | Coal rather than charcoal used to cast iron sparing so many trees from being felled during Song dynasty | ||
| 0400 | A Roman book De rebus bellicis (On the things of war) refers to an ox powered paddle wheel boat. | ||
| 0400 | Vegetius Renatus writes De Re Militari (Concerning Military Matters) with illustrations of catapults, rams, cannons, grenades, scaling ladders, water-raising machines, a clepsydra or water-clock, diving equipment, bridges, rafts and a pneumatic bed . | ||
| 0500 | The Avars of western Asia introduced metal stirrups into saddlery. | ||
| 0610 | The Grand Canal built to link the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers in China | ||
| 0675 | Bishop Biscop employed French workmen to glaze the windows of a monastery in Monkwearmouth, England | ||
| 0700 | First evidence of so-called wootz crucible steel in India | ||
| 0800 | First practical windmills developed in Persia | ||
| 0950 | Chinese Qiao Weiyue credited with devising the two level pound lock for canals. | ||
| 0950-1050 | Development of cannon by Song dynasty in China | ||
| 0960 – 1279 | Lodestone used as compass for navigation during Song dynasty | ||
| 100 | First known depiction of stern mounted rudder during Han dynasty, China | ||
| 1000 | |||
| 1000 | Arzachel was a Moor eminent in Spain produced astronomical tables using decimal fractions | ||
| 1041-49 | Movable type invented by Pi Sheng in China. Individual characters were in baked clay and set in a frame | ||
| 1050 | Alhazen (965-1040) an Arabic physicist made contributions to optics | ||
| 1065 | Eilmer of Malmesbury, an English monk, attempts flight by jumping off the top of the tower at Malmesbury Abbey and survived but broke both legs | ||
| 1085 | Paper made in Spain | ||
| 1088 | The first university established in Bologna, Italy | ||
| 1100s | During 12th century – Windmills used to pump water and grind grain. Military use of gunpowder in China. The magnetic compass, known to the Chinese 1160 B.C., comes into Europe, via the Arabs. | ||
| 1147 | Reported use of wood cuts for elaborate initial capital letters appeared in a Benedictine monastery at Engelberg | ||
| 1150 | Paper making firmly established in Spain. | ||
| 1176 | The first stone London Bridge built. | ||
| 1180 | Oldest known depiction of stern mounted rudder in Europe | ||
| 1185 | Windmill built in Weedley, Yorkshire, England | ||
| 1185 | Bridge at Avignon 900 m long, collapsed 40 years later, rebuilt with 22 stone arches, only four now remain | ||
| 1190 | First paper mill in France at Hérault. | ||
| 1195 | Reported use of magnetic compass in England | ||
| 1200 | Mechanical clocks invented | ||
| 1200s | During 13th century – Tempera method of painting using an emulsion of water and egg gradually superceded encaustic to become the principal medium for medieval religious paintings. | ||
| 1234-1280 | First spinning wheels developed in Baghdad, China and Europe | ||
| 1241 | Chinese hot-air lanterns used in the Battle of Legnica during the Mongol invasion of Poland. | ||
| 1247 | Earliest recorded use of gunpowder in west when cannon used in the siege of Seville | ||
| 1267 | Roger Bacon writes Opus Majus (Greater Work) on natural science from grammar and logic to physics and philosophy.
Describes recipe for gunpowder. |
||
| 1269 | Petrus Peregrinus, a French scholar, described the pivoted magnetic compass | ||
| 1270 | Vitellio,a Pole, wrote a treatise on lenses, Roger Bacon used parts of glass spheres to help people read | ||
| 1272 | Machines for twisting silk thread developed in Lucca and Bologna, Italy | ||
| 1285 | Spectacles developed in Italy first worn by monks and scholars – inventor unknown | ||
| 1289 | Block printing appeared in Ravenna, Italy | ||
| 1290 | More navigation in winter months due to use of magnetic compass and much more accurate portolan charts (Italian – related to ports) resulted in increasing movement of shipping both for trading and raiding. | ||
| 1290 | One of first paper mills north of Alps opened in Ravensburg, Germany | ||
| 1300s
|
During 14th century – Mechanical clock becomes common. Water-power used to create draft for blast furnace: makes cast iron possible. Treadle loom (inventor unknown) . Invention of rudder and beginning of canalization. Improved glass-making. | ||
| 1300 | Wooden type used in Turkey | ||
| 1309 | Petrus de Crescentiis wrote first printed text on agriculture | ||
| 1315 | Beginnings of scientific anatomy through dissection of dead human body by Raimondo de Luzzi of Bologna. | ||
| 1320 | Water-driven iron works, near Dobrilugk, Germany | ||
| 1322 | Sawmill at Augsburg, Germany | ||
| 1326 | Pictorial evidence of cannon used in or near Florence | ||
| 1328 | English cleric Thomas Bradwardine develops the idea of a ratio of unlike quantities such as velocity | ||
| 1330 | Wooden riverside crane built at Luneburg, Germany | ||
| 1338 | First known naval battle with cannon at start of Hundred Years War between England and France | ||
| 1345 | Public clocks began to appear with division of hours and minutes into sixties | ||
| 1350 | Beginnings of Italian Renaissance | ||
| 1350 | Rudolph of Nuremberg used water power and cam shaft driven benches to draw wire | ||
| 1370 | Heinrich von Wyck perfected a mechanical clock in Paris | ||
| 1373 | First pound lock in Europe built in the Netherlands at Vreeswijk. | ||
| 1375 | By this time the use of paper for most literary purposes was established | ||
| 1380 | Iron bloomeries become larger and hotter using waterwheels to power bellows | ||
| 1382 | A giant cannon firing 220 pound granite ball built by Philippe van Artevelle in Belgium and used in the siege of Audenarde | ||
| 1390 | Metal type developed in Korea | ||
| 1390 | Paper mill built in Nuremberg to meet growing demand | ||
| 1400s | During 15th century – Use of wind-mill for land drainage. Invention of turret windmill. lntroduction of knitting. Iron drill for boring cannon. Trip-hammer. Two-masted and three-masted ship. | ||
| 1402 | Flemish brothers Jan and Herbert van Eyck demonstrated that oil paints are superior to egg tempera (an emulsion of water and egg). | ||
| 1405 | German military engineer Konrad Kyeser von Eichstadt writes Bellifortis (War Fortifications), the first fully illustrated manual of military technology in which he describes weapons such as trebuchets, battering rams, movable portable bridges, cannons, rockets, chariots, ships, mills, scaling ladders, incendiary devices, crossbows, and instruments of torture and the diving suit. | ||
| 1409 | First book using movable type published in Korea. | ||
| 1418 | Earliest known wood engraving in Augsburg, Germany | ||
| 1420 | Ulugh Beg Observatory in Samarkand, Uzbekistan built – one of the finest in the Islamic world but destroyed in 1449 and rediscovered in 1908 | ||
| 1420 | Sawmill established in Madeira | ||
| 1420 | Italian engineer Giovanni de la Fontana constructed a velocipede (early pedal driven vehicle) with four wheels and a loop of rope connected by gears | ||
| 1420 | Giovanni de la Fontana publishes Bellicorum instrumentorum (War instruments) with descriptions of siege engines, fountains and pumps, lifting and transporting machines, defensive towers, dredges, combination locks, battering rams, scaling ladders, measuring instruments etc | ||
| 1423 | Earliest European woodcut or woodblock print made | ||
| 1430 | An unknown Hussite (Czech) engineer sketches the first windmill with a moveable turret and sails mounted on a fixed tower. | ||
| 1435 | The Italian Leon Battista Alberti writes about perspective using a mathematical approach. | ||
| 1436 | Italian sailor and cartographer Andreas Bianco produced navigation charts on ten leaves of vellum | ||
| 1436 | Florence Cathedral consecrated with its dome engineered by Filippo Brunellesco. | ||
| 1438 | Italian engineer Mariano Jacopo Taccola produces a vertical axis windmill. | ||
| 1439 | Johannes Guttenberg invented mass produced moveable type and used oil based ink to print books in a printing press that lead to mass communication. | ||
| 1446 | Earliest known copperplate engraving. | ||
| 1457 | First record in France of a wagon ‘hung on springs’ for personal transport. | ||
| 1471 | Cannon balls made of iron, sometimes red hot, were being used. | ||
| 1472 | A German merchant and astronomer Bernard Walther and Germa mathematician and astronomer Johannes Muller built an Observatory in Nuremberg. | ||
| 1472-1519 | Leonardo da Vinci made the following inventions, centrifugal pump, dredge for canal-building, polygonal fortress with outworks, breech-loading cannon, rifled firearms, antifriction roller bearing, universal joint, conical screw, rope-and-belt drive, link chains, submarine-boat, bevel gears, Spiral gears, Proportional and paraboloid Compasses, Silk doubling and winding apparatus, spindle and flyer, parachute, lamp-chimney, ship’s log, standardized mass-production house | ||
| 1475 | First matchlock for firing a hand held firearm | ||
| 1481 | Italians Dionisio and Petro Domenico build a canal with pound locks. | ||
| 1491 | First blast furnace in England on the Weald of Sussex | ||
| 1492 | German mariner and astronomer Martin von Behaim produced the oldest surviving globe of the world in Nuremberg | ||
| 1500 | Tinning for preservation of iron. Wind mills of 10 H.P. become common. Much technical progress and mechanization in mining industries, spread of blast-furnaces and iron-moulding. Introduction of domestic clock. | ||
| 1500s | During 16th century – German locksmith and watchmaker Peter Henlein made one of the first portable clocks often worn as pendants. It is not known who developed the mainspring that made watches possible | ||
| 1500 | Italian Giovanni Cavallino invented the first sowing machine. | ||
| 1500 | First modern lock gates installed in a canal in Milan | ||
| 1500 | First wheel-lock possibly by an unknown German – a friction-wheel mechanism to cause spark to fire a firearm. | ||
| 1508 | The German Lucas Cranach the Elder developed the chiaroscuro (different colours) woodcut conceived for two blocks | ||
| 1518 | Anton Platner, a goldsmith, constructed a fire engine in Augsberg, Germany | ||
| 1524 | The earliest known depiction of a chaff-cutting machine for fodder is a woodcut from Augsberg | ||
| 1530 | Johan Jurgen of Germany invents a foot-driven spinning wheel | ||
| 1533 | Dutch mathematician and cartographer Gemma Frisius described the method of triangulation for surveying | ||
| 1534 | Spanish navy captain Blasco de Garay substituted a paddle wheel for oars | ||
| 1535 | Italians Guglielmo de Lorena and Francesco del Marchi develop the first one man diving bell | ||
| 1536 | German Daniel Hopfer was the first to use etching in printmaking. | ||
| 1539 | Alessandro Piccolomini produces first printed star atlas | ||
| 1540 | The snaplock used in Germany in which a spring-powered cock strikes a flint | ||
| 1543 | The Italian Andreas Vesalius publishes book on human anatomy – regarded as the father of the subject. | ||
| 1544 | German Sebastian Munster publishes Cosmographia an early description of the world including maps, geography, customs, flaura and fauna and was so popular it went through 24 editions. | ||
| 1544 | Michael Stifel, a German monk, elaborated on the use of algebraic symbols | ||
| 1545 | Amhroise Pare was French barber who became a surgeon with several innovations including ugature (tight compression then bound) for bleeding vessels after amputation | ||
| 1546 | Rail-way used in German mines | ||
| 1548 | Large hydraulic wheel raised river water to supply towns in Augsburg. | ||
| 1550 | A snaphance lock for firing a gun developed possibly Dutch. | ||
| 1551 | Plane table for surveying described by Abel Foullon in Paris. | ||
| 1552 | Frenchman Brulier develops a machine for rolling iron | ||
| 1553 | The idea of using a clock to determine longitude suggested by Dutchman Gemma Frisius although clocks at that time were not sufficiently accurate | ||
| 1558 | Venetian Cardinal Daniello Barbaro placed a lens in a camera obscura | ||
| 1560 | First scientific society Accademia Secretorum Naturae meets in Naples | ||
| 1565 | Conrad Gesner of Zurich describes a pencil of graphite in a wooden casing | ||
| 1569 | First industrial exhibition held at the Rathaus, Nuremberg | ||
| 1570 | The Miquelet lock for firing muskets | ||
| 1570 | Andrea Palladio publishes his four books of architecture and founded an architectural movement we call Palladianism. | ||
| 1571 | English mathematician and surveyor Leonard Digges first describes a theodolite | ||
| 1572 | Mercator’s map of the world begun | ||
| 1578 | Frenchman Jacques Besson creates a semi-automatic screw lathe in which the operator only had to pull and release a cord | ||
| 1582 | Pope Gregory XIII introduces the Gregorian calendar in Italy, Portugal and Spain (other coutries much later e.g. UK and America in 1752) | ||
| 1582 | Dutch engineer Peter Morice developed one of the first pumped water suppy systems for London powered by an undershot water wheel. | ||
| 1585 | Flemish mathematician and engineer Simon Stevin established the use of the decimal system but with an unwieldy notation | ||
| 1586 | A loom in which in which several webs could be woven at one time developed in Dantzig (now Gdansk Poland) by Anton Möller | ||
| 1586 | Simon Stevin develops the basis for the triangle of forces – the basis of statics | ||
| 1589 | Clergyman William Lee devised the first stocking frame knitting machine in Nottinghamshire, England | ||
| 1590 | Dutch spectacle maker Zacharius Jansen developed the first microscope | ||
| 1595 | Design for metal bridges-arch and chain (Veranzio) | ||
| 1595 | Venetian Fausto Veranzio publishes a book with drawings of both suspension and cable-stayed bridges | ||
| 1600s
|
During 17th century – Water wheels of 20 HP. introduced: transmission by means of reciprocating rods over distance of one-quarter mile. Glass hothouse comes into use. Foundations of modem scientific meth· od. Rapid developments in physics. | ||
| 1600 | Englishman William Gilbert publishes a treatise on magnetism and electricity | ||
| 1602 | Galileo Galilei discovers the usefulness of a swinging pendulum for keeping time | ||
| 1603 | The Italian science Accademia dei Lincei founded in Rome | ||
| 1605 | Galileo formulates the concept of inertia and the basis of what became Newton’s first law of physics | ||
| 1605 | Huntingdon Beaumont, an English aristocrat, used flanged wheels on rails to carry wagons of coal in Nottingham. | ||
| 1608 | The lens maker Hans Lippershey credited by some with making the first telescope | ||
| 1610 | Frenchman Marin le Bourgeoys made the first firearm with flintlock | ||
| 1610 | Flemish chemist Jan Baptist Van Helmont described the idea of gases as distinct from atmospheric air | ||
| 1614 | Scottish mathematician John Napier publishes the first table of logarithms. | ||
| 1615 | Dutch mathematician Willebrord Snell van Roijen was first to emply triangulation over distances of around 80 miles – the first geodetic or spherical surveying, | ||
| 1617 | English mathematician Henry Briggs converted Napier’s logarithms into base 10. | ||
| 1617 | John Napier creates an adding machine | ||
| 1618 | David Ramsay and Thomas Wildgoose obtain patent for a new engine to plough ground without horses or oxen. | ||
| 1619 | Englishman Dudd Dudley was one of the first to turn coal into coke and use it to smelt iron | ||
| 1619 | The first patent for clay-working machine to make bricks granted. | ||
| 1620 | English clergyman Edmund Gunter produces a surveyors chain for measuring distances. | ||
| 1620 | Dutchman Cornelius Drebbel built the first navigable submarine that stayed submerged for three hours at a depth of 4 to 5 metres and travelled from Westminster to Greenwich and back in London. | ||
| 1624 | The Statute of Monopolies was the first expression of English patent law though it was abused by monarchs | ||
| 1627 | Gunpowder first used for mine blasting in Hungary | ||
| 1628 | Englishman William Harvey established that blood circulates around the body pumped by the heart. | ||
| 1630 | Englishman David Ramsey is granted a patent for various applications of steam | ||
| 1632 | Construction of Taj Mahal begins – it took 20 years to complete | ||
| 1635 | The Banqueting House, Whitehall, London opened – designed by Inigo Jones on Palladian principles | ||
| 1636 | French lawyer and mathematician Pierre de Fermat publishes work that later leads to infinitesimal calculus. Fermat’s principle of least time later formed the basis of Hamilton’s principle of stationary action | ||
| 1636 | German Daniel Schwenter developed described a pen with two quills that later became the fountain pen and a scioptic ball which was a universal joint allowing swivelling anywhere is a wide arc. | ||
| 1636 | John Van Berg produced a thresher with several cranked flails. | ||
| 1636 | Austrian Joseph Locatelli developed the first European drill for sowing seeds a spoonful at a time. | ||
| 1642 | The Briare Canal opened – built to join the Seine and Loire in France. | ||
| 1643 | Italian Evangelista Torricelli invents the mercury barometer | ||
| 1645 | French mathematician Blaise Pascal presents his first calculating machine to the general public after testing many prototypes | ||
| 1646 | German priest Athanasius Kircher describes a magic lantern or image projector. | ||
| 1647 | Johannes Hevelius describes a military periscope in Danzig (Gdansk, Poland) | ||
| 1647 | Calculation of focusses of all forms of lenses | ||
| 1653 | Englishman Gabriel Plat describes dibbling as method of sowing wheat to increase yield. | ||
| 1654 | German Otto von Guericke described the physics of a vacuum and invented a vacuum pump | ||
| 1654 | Blaise Pascal laid the groundwork for the development of probability theory | ||
| 1657 | Robert Hooke and Christiaan Huygens separately develop the balance spring to control the balance wheel in clocks | ||
| 1658 | Dutchman Christiaan Huygens invents the pendulum clock | ||
| 1658 | Dutch naturalist, Jan Swammerdam is the first person to observe red blood cells under the microscope | ||
| 1660 | Royal Society founded in London | ||
| 1660 | A covered four wheeled horse drawn carriage called the Berlin designed and built | ||
| 1663 | English Marquis Edward Somerset invented a device that was a prototype for what would become a steam engine | ||
| 1665 | Englishman Robert Hooke describes a multitude of pores in cork which he called cells. He did not realise they were alive. | ||
| 1665 | The first introduction in England of strips of steel to act as springs on a wagon. | ||
| 1667 | Paris Observatory founded | ||
| 1668 | Sir Isaac Newton invented a reflecting mirror telescope | ||
| 1669 | John Worlidge suggested a seed drill later built by Jethro Tull in 1701 | ||
| 1671 | Dutch politician Jan de Witt uses probability in his treatise on life annuities | ||
| 1671 | Sir Isaac Newton set out his calculus of fluxions or infinitesimal calculus. But it was not published until 1736 | ||
| 1671 | Englishman Sir Samuel Morland developed a speaking trumpet – an early form of megaphone | ||
| 1672 | Flemish Father Ferdinand Verbiest experimented with steam and designed a small steam propelled trolley | ||
| 1674 | Dutchman Antonie van Leeuwenhoek was the first to observe microorganisms bacteria and protozoa. | ||
| 1675 | Royal Greenwich Observatory founded in London | ||
| 1675 | Gottfried Leibniz publishes his theory of infinitesimal calculus | ||
| 1676 | Danish astronomer Ole Røemer estimates the speed of light. | ||
| 1678 | M. de Gennes designed a power loom in Paris | ||
| 1678 | Robert Hooke defined the law of linear elasticity now known as Hooke’s Law which he stated rather briefly as ‘As the extension, so the force’. | ||
| 1679-1681 | The first modern tunnel constructed for commercial transportation was the Malpas tunnel on the Languedoc Canal in France – 515 feet long, 22 feet wide, and 27 feet high. | ||
| 1680 | Christiaan Huygens explores the idea of a gun powder engine – a type of internal combustion engine using gun powder at is fuel | ||
| 1680 | Horse drawn waggons on wooden railways used to transport coal on Tyneside England. | ||
| 1680 | Frenchman Denis Papin invented a steam digester – a type of pressure cooker with a safety valve in London | ||
| 1682 | The Canal du Midi opened in France after 15 years work | ||
| 1683 | Louis XIV’s military engineer and a Marshall of France Marquis de Vauban publishes a practical manual on fortifications. | ||
| 1683 | Ashmolean Museum founded in Oxford, England | ||
| 1684 | The Machine de Marly was a large pumping system of 14 large waterwheels built to take water from the Seine and deliver to the Palace of Versailles | ||
| 1685 | Cornelius Meyer invents a power dredge used to construct canals and dykes in Holland | ||
| 1687 | Sir Isaac Newton laid the foundations for classical mechanics with his three laws of motion and universal gravitation | ||
| 1687 | Second world International Exposition held in Paris | ||
| 1688 | John Clayton distilled gas from coal. | ||
| 1697 | Johan van Hoorn published one of the first text books on obstetrics in Sweden | ||
| 1698 | Thomas Savery creates the first practical steam engine to pump water from mines. | ||
| 1700s | During 18th century – Rapid improvements in mining and textile machinery. Foundation of modern chemistry | ||
| 1700 | Christopher Polhem of Sweden founded a factory for mass production of simple articles (such as pans, bowls, scissors as well as some more sophisticated items,) based on water power. | ||
| 1701 | Jethro Tull invents the seed drill to drill holes and plant seeds all at once | ||
| 1701 | Johannes Muller in Holland used moveable type and then cemented it into a solid plate using a mastic to create a technique call sterotyping | ||
| 1707 | Denis Papin develops an improved steam engine | ||
| 1707 | English physician Sir John Floyer developed a pulse watch to measure pulse rate more accurately | ||
| 1708 | English Quaker Abraham Darby I uses wet sand for iron casting. | ||
| 1709 | Abraham Darby I uses coke rather than charcoal in a blast furnace | ||
| 1710 | Sir Christopher Wren rebuilt 52 London churches after the Great Fire and designed St Paul’s Cathedral on Ludgate Hill. | ||
| 1712 | English iron maker Thomas Newcomen creates a steam engine to pump water from flooded mines in Devon | ||
| 1714 | Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit develops a mercury thermometer. | ||
| 1714 | Englishman Henry Mill patents the first typewriter. | ||
| 1715 | The first revolving stages called bun-mawashi, were developed by Denshichi Nakamura in Japan | ||
| 1715 | Swiss mathematician Johann Bernoulli formalised the treatment of virtual work | ||
| 1717 | German Johan Schulze discovered that that light not heat was the reason why substances mixed with silver nitrate darkened – thus he laid the foundations for photography. | ||
| 1719 | Jacob Christoph Le Blon invented a system for three and four colour printing from metal plates (one per colour). | ||
| 1720 | The post-chaise four wheeled closed carriage provided the first mode of reasonably comfortable travel overland in France | ||
| 1724 | General Wade begins building roads in the Scottish Highlands. | ||
| 1725 | Scottish goldsmith William Ged invented stereotype which is a printing plate cast in a mould | ||
| 1725 | Basile Bouchon in Lyon, France invented a way of controlling a loom with a perforated paper tape. | ||
| 1725 | Scottish goldsmith William Gled invented a stereotyping process in which a whole page of type is cast in a single mould. | ||
| 1727 | English clergyman Stephen Hales was the first person to measure blood pressure | ||
| 1730 | Joseph Foljambe of Rotherham invented the iron mouldboard and landside plough in Nottingham, England. | ||
| 1733 | Englishman John Kay invented the flying shuttle for a weaving loom. | ||
| 1733 | Abraham de Moivre produced the first version of the central limit theorem of probability theory. | ||
| 1736 | Clockmaker John Harrison developed a chronometer to determine longitude | ||
| 1736 | Joshua Ward began to manufacture sulphuric acid in London | ||
| 1738 | Englishmen Lewis Paul and John Wyatt patented the first roller spinning machine to draw wool before spinning. | ||
| 1738 | Possible first cast iron rails used at Whitehaven, England. | ||
| 1738 | Daniel Bernoulli set out his principle that the speed of a incompressible fluid results in a decrease in potential energy. | ||
| 1739 | David Hume introduced the ‘is/ought’ problem – that fact doesn’t tell us what ought to be done – and argued that induction cannot be justified rationally but results from ‘constant conjunction’. | ||
| 1740 | Benjamin Huntsman first European casting of steel in a crucible in Sheffield, England. | ||
| 1742 | Swedish astronomer proposed 100 degrees between freezing and boiling points of water. | ||
| 1743 | Jean-Baptiste le Rond d’Alembert describes the dynamic analogue to the principle of virtual work | ||
| 1745 | First technical school at Braunschweig, Germany | ||
| 1748 | Lewis Paul of Birmingham, England invented a carding machine for disentangling, cleaning and intermixing wool. | ||
| 1749 | Leonhard Euler provides an analysis of the resistance of water to ships | ||
| 1750 | The Westminster Bridge opened – the second bridge over the River Thames in London – designed by Swiss engineer Charles Labelye. | ||
| 1752 | American Benjamin Franklin demonstrated that lightening is electricity by flying a kite in a thunderstorm. | ||
| 1756 | John Smeaton experimented with limestone and additives to lay the basis for the later development of Portland cement. | ||
| 1757 | Leonhard Euler analysed the instability of a strut and defined the maximum load at which buckling occurs – we now call the Euler load. | ||
| 1757 | Sankey Canal opened – principle engineer Henry Berry | ||
| 1759 | John Smeaton designed and built the Eddystone Lighthouse just off Plymouth, England – modelled on the shape of an oak with dovetailed granite blocks and his new concrete. | ||
| 1759 | Jedediah Strutt invented the Derby Rib machine to knit ribbed stockings. | ||
| 1760 | First wooden railways reinforced with iron bars in Coalbrookdale, England. | ||
| 1761 | John Smeaton first used air pumps with pistons worked by water wheels to considerably increase blast furnace production of pig iron. | ||
| 1761 | The Bridgewater Canal, the first ‘pure’ canal (i.e. where needed rather than extending a river) in England, connecting Runcorn and Leigh opened – designed by James Brindley. | ||
| 1763 | Slide rest lathe to produce precision parts developed by Jacques de Vaucanson | ||
| 1763 | Englishman Richard Price presented the work of clergyman Thomas Bayes and what we now call Bayes Theorem for updating probabilities. | ||
| 1764 | James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny. | ||
| 1765 | James Watt improved the Newcomen steam pumping engine with separate condenser. | ||
| 1766 | Pierre Le Roy made the first modern chronometer | ||
| 1766 | Leonhard Euler introduces a version of Young’s modulus 80 years before Thomas Young | ||
| 1767 | Cast iron rails produced at Coalbrookdale, England | ||
| 1769 | Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot built the first self-propelled steam powered vehicle | ||
| 1769 | Richard Arkwright and John Kay develop the spinning frame which became the water frame in Cromford, England when powered by a water wheel | ||
| 1770 | Cast iron wheels used for coal wagons. | ||
| 1770 | Last bloomery for smelting iron in England closes | ||
| 1770 | Richard Edgeworth anticipates the caterpillar track ‘a cart that carries its own road’ but didn’t develop it successfully. | ||
| 1775 | John Wilkinson designs a water powered machine to bore cast iron cylinders | ||
| 1776 | Thomas and George Cranege used a reverberatory furnace to convert pig iron into wrought iron. | ||
| 1776 | Marquis de Jouffroy d’Abbans invented the first steamboat in France | ||
| 1778 | Joseph Bramah obtained a patent for a water closet. | ||
| 1778 | Wolfgang von Kempelem developed a machine that could reproduce the sounds of words. | ||
| 1778 | Antoine Lavoisier recognised and named oxygen and hydrogen and provided the fisrst formulation of the law of conservation of mass | ||
| 1779 | Abraham Darby and John Wilkinson make and build the first cast iron bridge at Coalbrookdale, England | ||
| 1779 | Samuel Crompton invented the spinning mule a machine to spin cotton and other fibres. | ||
| 1780 | Luigi Galvani discovered that when copper and zinc are connected to different parts of a frogs leg then the leg contracts. He called it ‘animal electricity’ | ||
| 1781-1786 | James Watt patented a steam engine that produced continuous rotatory motion. | ||
| 1782 | The Montgolfier brothers invent the hot air balloon in France | ||
| 1783 | Henry Cort patents the puddling process for refining iron ore | ||
| 1784 | James Small developed the modern style iron swing plough in Scotland | ||
| 1784 | Joseph Bramah designed a security lock resistant to picking and tampering | ||
| 1784 | The first mail coach in England leaves Bristol for London – a new era of quicker transport. | ||
| 1784 | The Eider canal connecting the North and Baltic Seas constructed | ||
| 1785 | Honore Blanc pioneered the use of interchangeable parts for muskets. | ||
| 1785 | First steam engine powered a spinning mill at Papplewick, near Nottingham, England | ||
| 1785 | Edmund Cartwright developed a power loom | ||
| 1785 | Frenchman Claude Louis Berthollet developed sodium hypochlorite as a bleaching agent. | ||
1785 |
Joseph Bramah proposed the idea of moving ships by a propeller but did not use it | ||
| 1785 | Charles Augustin de Coulomb publishes his discoveries about electricity and magnetism | ||
| 1786 | Andrew Meikle in Scotland, designed and built the first successful threshing machine | ||
| 1787 | John Wilkinson built the first iron boat. | ||
| 1787 | John Fitch tested a steamboat on the Delaware River, USA | ||
| 1787 | Pont de la Concorde opened in Paris designed by Jean-Rodolphe Perronet | ||
| 1788 | Ricard Edgeworth design smaller railway wagons and made cast iron plates on wooden rails practicable. | ||
| 1788 | Joseph Lagrange published a comprehensive reformation of mechanics – now termed Lagrangian mechanics.. | ||
| 1789 | William Jessop appointed chief engineer to Cromford Canal Company in Derbyshire England and in 1790 he helped form the Butterley Iron Works in Derbyshire | ||
| 1790 | Nicolas Le Blanc produced sodium carbonate from sodium chloride | ||
| 1790 | Thomas Saint invented the first sewing machine with a chain stitch. | ||
| 1791 | John Barker described the principle of gas turbine and took out a patent. | ||
| 1792 | Scotsman William Murdoch used gas for domestic lighting. | ||
| 1792 | Frenchman Claude Chappe developed a semaphore systems based on shutter positions of inter-visible towers | ||
| 1793 | American Eli Whitney patented a cotton gin which greatly speeded up removing seeds from cotton fibre. | ||
| 1794 | The Ecole Polytechnique founded in Paris | ||
| 1794 | Philip Vaughan created the first design for a ball bearing in Carmarthen, Wales. | ||
| 1794 | Conservatoire Nationale des Arts et Metiers founded in Paris | ||
| 1795 | Joseph Bramah patents the hydraulic press – the hydraulic equivalent of a lever | ||
| 1795-1809 | Nicolas Appert invented airtight preserving of food in Paris. | ||
| 1796 | German Johann Senefelder developed the printing technique of lithography | ||
| 1796 | James Parker patented a method for making cement. | ||
| 1799 | Sir George Cayley set out the principles of a fixed wind flying machine and designed the first glider to carry a human being aloft. | ||
| 1799 | Humphry Davy noted the anaesthetic effects of nitrous oxide | ||
| 1799 | Charles Tennant discovered and took out a patent for bleaching powder. | ||
| 1800 | Henry Maudslay develops the screw-cutting lathe. | ||
| 1800s | During 19th century – Enormous gains in power conversion. Mass-production of textiles, iron, steel, machinery. Railway building era. Foundations of modern biology and sociology. | ||
| 1800 | Alessandro Volta developed the Voltaic pile from the Galvanic cell – the basis of an electrical battery. | ||
| 1801 | The Charlotte Dundas designed by William Symington and built at Grangemouth, England was the first practical steamboat | ||
| 1801 | Irishman James Finley designed and built the first modern suspension Bridge in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, USA | ||
| 1802 | Public horse drawn rail-way opened to transport goods between Wandsworth and Croydon, England | ||
| 1802 | Joseph Bramah invents a planing machine | ||
| 1803 | William Horrocks improves the Cartwright power loom. | ||
| 1804 | Richard Trevithick developed the first high pressure steam engine and built the first full scale steam locomotive in Wales. | ||
| 1804 | Joseph Jacquard developed a loom for complex patterns using punched cards based on the 1725 method introduced by Bouchon. | ||
| 1804 | American Oliver Evans designed and built an amphibious steam powered vehicle | ||
| 1804 | John Stevens tests a steamboat with the first twin screw propellers in USA | ||
| 1807 | American engineer Robert Fulton designed a side-paddle steamboat built in New York | ||
| 1807 | Isaac de Rivaz in Paris invented a hydrogen powered internal combustion engine and fitted it into a vehicle. | ||
| 1807 | Englishman Thomas Young recorded the movements of a tuning fork on a kymograph – the forerunner of the phonograph. | ||
| 1807 | The world’s first horse drawn rail-way or tramway opened in Swansea, Wales. | ||
| 1809 | Joseph Bramah invents a fountain pen | ||
| 1809 | Carl Friedrich Gauss introduced the statistical method of least squares, maximum likelihood and the normal distribution. | ||
| 1813 | William Hedley designed and built his Puffing Billy an early steam locomotive running on smooth rails at Wylam Colliery near Newcastle upon Tyne, England | ||
| 1814 | Friedrich Koenig and Andreas Bauer invented a steam powered printing press in London | ||
| 1814 | George Stephenson introduces the first practical steam locomotive | ||
| 1814 | Pierre Simon Laplace set out the basics of a theory of probability | ||
| 1816 | Robert Salmon patented a tedder for spreading the grass during hay making. | ||
| 1816 | Rene Laennec invents the stethoscope in France. | ||
| 1816 | John McAdam built the first roadway with a camber which became known as ‘macadam’. | ||
| 1817 | The German draisine (or dandy-horse) developed as the archetype for a bicycle with the two in-line wheels propelled by the rider by pushing along the ground | ||
| 1818 | American Eli Whitney invents a milling machine. | ||
| 1819 | John Rennie completed a cast iron bridge over the River Thames at Vauxhall London. | ||
| 1820 | Englishman Warren de la Rue developed an incandescent lamp. | ||
| 1820 | Englishman George Rennie built a planer with a moveable bed. | ||
| 1820 | Andre Ampere researched the link between electricity and magnetism. | ||
| 1820 | American Ithiel Town patented a wooden lattice truss bridge in Connecticut. | ||
| 1821 | Aaron Manby constructs the first sea going iron steam boat in England | ||
| 1821 | Frenchman Claude Louis Navier formulated a general theory of elasticity. In 1826 he formulated the concept of the statical indeterminacy of structures. | ||
| 1822 | Scientific Congress at Leipzig | ||
| 1822 | Michael Faraday and James Stodart made small quantities of alloy steel. | ||
| 1822 | Charles Babbage publishes a proposal for difference engine – a mechanical forerunner of the computer but strictly for calculating with numbers. | ||
| 1822 | American Jacob Perkins made an experimental high pressure steam engine but it wasn’t practical at that time. | ||
| 1822 | The Caledonian canal opened – linking the east and west coasts of Scotland, designed by English engineer Thomas Telford. | ||
| 1822 | Frenchman Joseph Fourier introduced observed that some functions can be represented by a series of sines of multiples of a variable – we now call Fourier series | ||
| 1823 | Claude Navier introduced viscosity into fluid flow equations first presented by Leonhard Euler | ||
| 1824 | Joseph Aspdin patented Portland cement. | ||
| 1824 | William Sturgeon made the first electromagnet | ||
| 1824 | Frenchman Sadi Carnot publishes his ideal cycle of expansion and contraction of a gas such as steam – we now know as the Carnot Cycle | ||
| 1825 | The 363 mile Erie Canal linking the Hudson River to Lake Erie opened. | ||
| 1825-1843 | Marc Isambard Brunel and Thomas Cochrane build the first tunnel under a navigable river – the River Thames in London | ||
| 1825-1863 | The Stockton and Darlington Railway was the world’s first public railway. | ||
| 1826 | Scottish engineer Thomas Telford completes two suspension bridges in Wales over the Menai Straits and at Conwy | ||
| 1826 | Menai Bridge opened designed by Thomas Telford with William Provis as site engineer – who then wrote an extensive account of the works | ||
| 1827 | Walter Hancock built a small ten-seater steam bus. | ||
| 1827 | William Tierney Clark designed the first suspension bridge over the River Thames at Hammersmith. | ||
| 1827 | Georg Ohm formulated his law relating the current flowing in a resistor to the voltage. | ||
| 1827 | French mathematician Augustin Louis Cauchy wrote a rigorous definition of stress. | ||
| 1827 | Siméon Poisson describes the ratio of transverse to axial strain now known as Poisson’s ratio | ||
| 1827 | William and Thomas Cubitt established their building contracting company that built Covent Garden in 1830 and many other notable buildings in London | ||
| 1828 | Patrick Bell a Scottish minister invented a reaping machine. | ||
| 1828 | James Nielson, a Scot, invented a hot-blast process to increase the efficiency of smelting iron. | ||
| 1828 | The Institution of Civil Engineers founded in 1818 given a Royal Charter in which Civil Engineering was first formerly defined by Thomas Tredgold | ||
| 1829 | Englishman Sir Goldsworthy Gurney ran his steam powered road vehicle from London to Bath and back. | ||
| 1829 | The locomotive designed and built by George and Robert Stephenson called The Rocket defeated rivals in trials in Rainhill, near Liverpool, England | ||
| 1829 | Louis Braille published his first book of raised dots for the blind. | ||
| 1829 | The first UK water filtration plant built for the Chelsea Waterworks, Company, London. | ||
| 1829 | Barthelemy Thimonnier invented a sewing machine that became widely used. | ||
| 1829 | Frenchman Claude Genoux invented the papier mache method of stereotyping for printing. | ||
| 1830 | Liverpool and Manchester Railway opened. | ||
| 1830 | Thomas Cochrane patented a technique of using compressed air in tunnels and caissons to exclude water. | ||
| 1830 | The cottage industry could no longer compete with factory production | ||
| 1830 | Isambard Kingdom Brunel wins the design competition for a bridge over the River Avon at Clifton, Bristol, England. | ||
| 1831 | Michael Faraday discovers electromagnetic induction – the basis for electrical motors. | ||
| 1831 | Joseph Gillot patents a process for making steel pens in large quantities. | ||
| 1831 | Chloroform synthesised | ||
| 1832 | New York had its first horse drawn rail-way or tramway | ||
| 1832 | The Göta Canal designed by English engineer Thomas Telford opened allowing ships between Gothenberg on the North Sea and the Baltic. | ||
| 1832 | Benoit Fourneyron developed the waterwheel into a more efficient water turbine | ||
| 1832 | Hippolyte Pixii, a Frenchman, builds the first primitive dynamo. | ||
| 1833 | The first long distance railway in the USA opened in South Carolina. | ||
| 1833 | Friedrich Gauss and Wilhelm Weber created the first electromagnetic telegraph | ||
| 1833 | Irishman William Hamilton reformulated Newtonian mechanics. | ||
| 1834 | Cyrus McCormick granted a patent for a reaping machine in USA | ||
| 1834 | Michael Faraday publishes the laws of electrolysis. | ||
| 1834 | German Moritz Hermann von Jacobi used battery cells to power a boat carrying 14 passengers in Russia | ||
| 1834 | Friedlieb Runge identified aniline dye in coal tar. | ||
| 1834 | Jacob Perkins made a workable refrigerator | ||
| 1834 | William Horner produces the Zoetrope – a toy with a rotating drum that appeared to make moving pictures. | ||
| 1834 | American Thomas Davenport developed a battery powered small model car. | ||
| 1834-1840 | Charles Babbage conceives an analytical engine which is the basis of a more general purpose computing engine – one seventh of the engine was built. | ||
| 1835 | Frost and Stutt develop an elevator or lift for a factory. | ||
| 1835 | Belgian Adolphe Quetelet applies statistical method to social sciences. | ||
| 1836 | American Samuel Colt patents a revolver mechanism that enables a gun to be fired multiple times without reloading. | ||
| 1837 | Godefroy Engelmann of France awarded a patent for chromolithography in which a picture is printed in tints and colours by repeated impressions. | ||
| 1837 | Samuel Morse patented a code signalling system | ||
| 1837 | Thomas Davenport obtained a patent for an electric machine | ||
| 1837 | William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone patent a telegraph system which used a number of needles on a board to point to letters. The first system was installed on a London railway | ||
| 1837 | Scottish inventor Robert Davidson built the first electric locomotive | ||
| 1837 | The first trains run between London and Birmingham designed by Robert Stephenson. | ||
| 1838 | Scottish engineer James Naysmyth sketches an idea for a steam hammer. Francois Bourdon builds a steam hammer of similar design in France. | ||
| 1838 | German Carl von Steinheil used the ground as a return conductor of an above ground telegraph and reduced the cost of wire by a factor of two. | ||
| 1838 | Welsh physicist William Gove wrote about his first fuel cell. | ||
| 1838 | William Barnett patents a two-cycle gas engine. | ||
| 1838 | John Ericsson designed the US Navy’s first screw propelled steam frigate. | ||
| 1838 | The first steam ship crossed the Atlantic taking 19 days | ||
| 1839 | German physicist Christian Schönbein also invents a fuel cell | ||
| 1839 | Josiah Heath patented the use of manganese and carbon in steel to make it more malleable. | ||
| 1839 | Prussian Moritz von Jacobi develops electrotype to form metal parts to reproduce a model. | ||
| 1839 | In Paris Louis Daguerre produced images on silver palted sheets of copper called daguerreotype. | ||
| 1840 | Sir William Grove invented one of the first incandescent electric lights. | ||
| 1841 | William Fox Talbot developed callotype – an early photographic process. | ||
| 1841 | Julius von Mayer, a German and one of the founders of thermodynamics enunciated a version of the first law of thermodynamics – that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. | ||
| 1841 | Englishman Sir Joseph Whitworth developed a standard system for screw threads | ||
| 1842 | Scottish engineer James Nasmyth patented and built a steam hammer | ||
| 1843 | H. R. Palmer, the inventor and patentee of corrugated iron assists the building of a corrugated iron roof for a station on the East Counties Railway | ||
| 1843 | Englishmen William Henson and John Stringfellow invented a flying machine they called the Aerostat. | ||
| 1843 | Charles Thurber invented and patented a typewriter. | ||
| 1843 | Dr Montgomery reports on gutta percha as a substitute for rubber | ||
| 1843 | Elijah Galloway patented Kamptulicon a floor covering made from powdered cork and natural rubber. | ||
| 1843 | John Bodmer patented a mechanical stoker to feed fuel into a furnace of a locomotive which was an improvement of an earlier version patented in 1934.. | ||
| 1843 | The steamship the Great Britain launched – the first iron steam ship designed for transatlantic passenger crossings by English engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel. | ||
| 1844 | Charles Goodyear patented a process for producing vulcanised rubber. | ||
| 1844 | Alfred Donne embraced the daguerreotype and created microphotographs. | ||
| 1844 | John Roebling designed and built the first suspension bridge with steel cables in Pittsburgh | ||
| 1844 | American Horace Wells pioneered the use of nitrous oxide as a dental anaesthetic. | ||
| 1844 | In Germany Friedrich Keller patented a wood-pulp grinding machine | ||
| 1845 | Austrian Michael Thonet made the first bentwood chairs. | ||
| 1845 | William Miller presents diagrams of flame spectra. | ||
| 1845 | Thomas Wright devised an arc lamp in which carbon flat discs rotated by clockwork. | ||
| 1845 | Elias Howe creates a high speed sewing machine. | ||
| 1845 | Robert Thomson patented the pneumatic tyre in the UK | ||
| 1845 | The Hungerford Railway Bridge over the River Thames opened in London – designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel. | ||
| 1845 | Englishman Thomas Young defined the linear ratio of stress to strain for a material – now known as Young’s modulus. | ||
| 1845 | Sir George Stokes began to develop Navier’s work on the viscous flow of a fluid – we know as the Navier-Stokes Equations. | ||
| 1845 | Julius Weisbach proposed the basis of what we now call the Darcy-Weisbach equation for flow in pipes. | ||
| 1845 | German Gustav Kirchoff formulated his electrical circuit laws | ||
| 1845 | Auguste Fabry fan used a lobe pump with two interlocking sets of blades rotating in opposite directions to ventilate a mine in Belgium | ||
| 1846 | Richard Hoe designed rotary printing press. In New York | ||
| 1846 | John Warren, an American surgeon allowed William Morton to provide ether anaesthesia during a minor operation. | ||
| 1846 | Italian chemist Ascanio Sobrero invents nitroglycerine. | ||
| 1846 | Christian Schönbein discovers gun-cotton or nitrocellulose. | ||
| 1847 | Scottish medical doctor James Young Simpson uses chloroform as an anaesthetic | ||
| 1847 | American Moses Farmer constructed an electro-magnetic locomotive | ||
| 1847 | American James Bogardus patents the use of cast iron for buildings | ||
| 1847 | German Hermann von Helmholtz formulated the law of the conservation of energy now known as the first law of thermodynamics. | ||
| 1847 | The Dee Bridge collapsed designed by Robert Stephenson due to a phenomenon, unknown at the time, of lateral torsional buckling of the bridge beams | ||
| 1847-1849 | Charles Babbage produces difference engine number 2 with an output device. | ||
| 1848 | German chemist Rudolph Böttger developed the safety match. | ||
| 1848 | William Thomson proposed and absolute scale of temperature. | ||
| 1849 | Leon Foucault makes an arc light in Paris. | ||
| 1849 | The Széchenyi Chain Bridge in Budapest, Hungary, designed by the English engineer William Tierney Clark opened. | ||
| 1849-1860 | Scot William Macquorn Rankine developed the theory of thermodynamics | ||
| 1850 | The Britannia Bridge opened – a box girder railway bridge built over the Menai Straits in Wales designed by Robert Stephenson | ||
| 1850 | German Rudolf Clausius stated the first and second laws of thermodynamics | ||
| 1850 | The Angers Bridge in France due to resonance caused by marching soldiers | ||
| 1851 | Hermann von Helmholtz developed an ophthalmoscope. | ||
| 1851 | Crystal Palace. First International Exhibition of Machines and the Industrial Arts (Joseph Paxton) | ||
| 1851 | American Charles Page develops an electric motor capable of powering a 10 ton locomotive at 30 km/h. | ||
| 1851 | Isaac Singer granted a USA patent for an improved sewing machine | ||
| 1851 | Sir Joseph Paxton designed the Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition in London. | ||
| 1852 | Charles Shepard constructed an electric clock at Greenwich | ||
| 1852 | American clock makers Aaron Dennison and Edward Howard mass produced watches with interchangeable parts. | ||
| 1852 | Elisha Otis develops the first safety elevator | ||
| 1852 | William Thomson formulated the second law of thermodynamics | ||
| 1853 | Julius Gintl in Vienna found a way to send two telegraph messages in opposite directions down the same wire | ||
| 1853 | The hypodermic syringe invented | ||
| 1855 | David Hughes telegraph allowed messages to be sent as text rather than Morse code. | ||
| 1855 | 800 H.P. water turbine installed in Paris | ||
| 1855 | Sir William Armstrong developed a breech-loaded heavy gun | ||
| 1855 | Barré de Saint Venant stated what we now call Saint-Venant’s Principle regarding the different effects of statically equivalent loads at large distances from the load in a structure | ||
| 1856 | French chemist Henri Deville produced the first industrially made aluminium. | ||
| 1856 | Henry Bessemer invented the Bessemer process for the mass production of steel from pig iron | ||
| 1857 | Science Museum founded in London. | ||
| 1857 | Henry Darcy formulated what we now call Darcy’s law to describe flow through sand. | ||
| 1858 | Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s ship the Great Eastern launched. | ||
| 1858 | Britain and North America linked by the first telegraph cable | ||
| 1858-1863 | Belgian engineer Etienne Lenoir developed the internal combustion engine and patented it in 1860 – it was the first to be a commercial success – he sold about 350 Hippomobiles that ran on hydrogen gas for the first time in 1863 | ||
| 1859 | English engineer Joseph Bazalgette, as chief engineer of the London Metropolitan Board of Works designed the underground sewerage system for the city. | ||
| 1859 | The first steam propelled iron clad warship launched by the French Navy. | ||
| 1859 | Edwin Drake drills the first oil well in Pennsylvania. | ||
| 1859 | French physicist Gaston Plante invents a rechargeable lead-acid battery. | ||
| 1859 | The first refrigeration system using gaseous ammonia developed by Ferdinand Carré of France. | ||
| 1860 | Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville invents the phonautograph and records the human voice for the first time. | ||
| 1860 | Italian Antonio Pacinnotti developed a dynamo with a smooth current using a commutator of many segments. | ||
| 1860s | A velocipede bicycle created from a draisine or dandy-horse | ||
| 1861 | Mechanical ship’s log (recording the distance sailed) patented by Thomas Walker | ||
| 1861 | American Richard Gatling invents the machine gun. | ||
| 1862 | The ironclad USS Monitor launched – designed by John Ericsson for the US Navy. | ||
| 1862 | Austrian Christian Reithmann filed a patent for an internal combustion engine which may have been four-stroke. | ||
| 1862 | Frenchman Alphonse Eugene Beau de Rochas originated the principle of the four-stroke internal combustion engine. | ||
| 1863 | The Metropolitan railway opens the first underground railway in London | ||
| 1864 | Belgian chemist Ernest Solvay developed an ammonia-soda process for the industrial production of sodium carbonate | ||
| 1864 | French physicist Louis Ducos du Hauron patented but did not build a device for taking and projecting motion pictures and then developed a process for colour photography in 1869 | ||
| 1864 | Louis Pasteur pasteurized wine to kill bacteria. | ||
| 1864 | A Frenchman possible Ernest Michaux or Pierre Lallemant) attaches pedals to the front wheels of a velocipede. | ||
| 1864 | The Clifton Suspension Bridge, Bristol, England opened. Initially designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel but redesigned and built after his death by English engineers William Barlow and John Hawkshaw. | ||
| 1864 | Karl Culmann describes the methods of graphical statics | ||
| 1865 | Linus Yale created the Yale cylinder lock. | ||
| 1865 | German Carl Siemens developed the open hearth furnace to produce steel. | ||
| 1865 | Scottish scientist James Clerk Maxwell developed Maxwell’s equations for electromagnetism and unified the models of electricity magnetism and light. | ||
| 1865 | Aime and Rene Olivier travelled from Paris to Avignon in eight days on a velocipede with pedals | ||
| 1866 | Werner von Siemens, Sir Charles Wheatstone and Samuel Varley all independently developed and announced their electrical generator or dynamo. | ||
| 1867 | Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel invented dynamite. | ||
| 1867 | French gardener Joseph Monier made pots and troughs with iron mesh embedded in concrete – one of the first examples of reinforced concrete. | ||
| 1867 | Christopher Sholes with Samuel Soule and Carlos Glidden and later James Denmore developed a typewriter which when marketed in 1874 had most of the features we associate with a modern typewriter. | ||
| 1867 | Germans Nikolaus Otto and Eugen Langen improved on the Lenoir engine | ||
| 1868 | Wilhelm Zenker explained how light falling on silver chloride produced wave patterns of colour. | ||
| 1868 | A company called Micaux et Cie started mass producing bicycles. | ||
| 1868 | Robert Mushet invented tungsten steel – the first steel hard enough for machine tools. | ||
| 1869 | The Suez Canal opened linking the Mediterranean sea to the Red Sea developed by Ferdinand Vicomte de Lesseps a French diplomat. | ||
| 1869 | Russian Dmitri Mendeleev and German Lothar Meyer independently set out the basic ideas for the periodic table. | ||
| 1869 | American John Wesley Hyatt simplified the production of celluloid. | ||
| 1869 | William Perkin filed a patent to produce alizarin a madder lake pigment | ||
| 1870 | Edmund DeSmedt laid the first true asphalt paving in Newark, USA | ||
| 1870 | Austrian Siegfried Marcus used a gasoline powered engine in a simple handcart. | ||
| 1870 | Austrian Julius Hock built a gasoline fuelled engine. | ||
| 1870 | Frenchman Jean Martin Charcot used hypnotism in neurology. | ||
| 1870 | German Carl Linde discovered a refrigeration cycle and invented the first industrial air separation and gas liquefaction processes. | ||
| 1871 | German Karl Weigert was the first to stain bacteria with dyes. | ||
| 1871 | Frenchman Alphonse Penaud used twisted rubber to power a model aircraft. | ||
| 1872 | Brooklyn Bridge opened in New York but not to traffic until 1883 | ||
| 1872 | George Brayton introduced the constant pressure engine and the Brayton thermodynamic cycle for gas turbine engines. | ||
| 1872 | The first modern stadium built for the Lansdowne Football Club in Dublin, Ireland – the brainchild of Henry Dunlop | ||
| 1872 | Marie Celeste found abandoned in the Atlantic Ocean off the Azores. | ||
| 1873 | George Westinghouse patents his air brake for trains. | ||
| 1873 | Italian Carlo Castigliano writes his dissertation in which he sets out his theorems to determine the internal forces in a linear statically indeterminate structure which we now call Castigliano’s theorems. | ||
| 1873 | Gabriel Lippmann, born in Luxembourg, developed a capillary electrometer which was used as the first ECG machine | ||
| 1874 | H Solomon introduces pressure cooking. | ||
| 1875 | John Wright installs America’s first electric arc street light in Philadelphia | ||
| 1876 | Franz Rings and Herman Schumm developed the Otto Silent engine based on the Otto Cycle of four strokes. | ||
| 1876 | A new building designed by Gustave Eiffel and Louis Boileau was built for Le Bon Marche in Paris. This was a shop founded by Aristide Boucicaut in 1852 which eventually became the first ever modern department store. | ||
| 1876 | Otto and Langen produced a four-cycle internal combustion engine. | ||
| 1876 | Alexander Graham Bell aided by Thomas Watson, developed and patented the electric telephone. | ||
| 1876 | A swing bridge over the River Tyne connecting Newcastle upon Tyne and Gateshead with machinery produced by Sir William Armstrong. | ||
| 1877 | Thomas Edison patented the microphone. | ||
| 1877 | Englishmen Arthur Downes and Thomas Blunt showed that sunlight could prevent the growth of bacteria. | ||
| 1877 | Joseph Coleman designed a compressed air machine for use in refrigeration based on the Brayton cycle in reverse. | ||
| 1877 | Thomas Edison creates the first phonograph. | ||
| 1877 | Austrian Wilhelm Kress designs a model flying machine. | ||
| 1877 | Emile Reynaud introduces his praxinoscope for motion pictures. | ||
| 1878 | Englishman Eadweard Muybridge captures moving pictures on an adapted version of Horner’s zoetrope which he called a zoopraxinoscope | ||
| 1878-9 | Sir William Siemens took out patents for electric arc furnaces for making steel. | ||
| 1879 | Werner von Siemens presented the first electric railway in which power was supplied through the rails. | ||
| 1879 | Thomas Edison experimented to find the carbon filament for a light bulb. | ||
| 1879 | Karl Benz built a stationary single cylinder two stroke engine | ||
| 1879 | The Tay Railway Bridge in Scotland designed by Sir Thomas Bouch collapsed | ||
| 1879 | The first automatic telephone patented by brothers Daniel and Thomas Connolly and Thomas Tighe in North America. | ||
| 1880 | Standard time (GMT) received Royal assent in UK to be followed by USA in 1883. | ||
| 1880 | Cup and cone ball-bearings used in bicycles in USA | ||
| 1880 | Wener von Siemens develops the first electric elevator for an exhibition in Mannheim, Germany. | ||
| 1880 | Joseph Swan patenets his first incandescent electric light bulb. | ||
| 1881 | Werner von Siemens introduced the Elektromote, an electric bus powered by an overhead power line | ||
| 1881 | French brothers Albert and Gaston Tissandier demonstrated the world’s first electric powered flight by attaching an electric motor to a dirigible balloon. | ||
| 1882 | Thomas Edison builds the first central power station in the USA. | ||
| 1882 | Frenchman Etienne Marey developed a chronophotographic gun that could take 12 consecutive frames a second recorded on the same picture. | ||
| 1882 | German Christian Otto Mohr devised a graphical method for representing stress in there dimensions which we now call Mohr’s Circle. | ||
| 1883 | Nikola Tesla conceived the poly-phase induction motor | ||
| 1883 | Brooklyn Bridge opened in New York – designed and constructed initially by John Roebling, then after an accident with the help of his wife Emily and after his death by his son Washington Roebling. | ||
| 1883 | Osborne Reynolds popularised the use of a ratio first introduced by Sir George Stokes to characterise different flow regimes which we now call Reynolds number. | ||
| 1884 | Austrian Carl Koller discovered that a few drops of cocaine in a patients cornea made it immobile and insensitive to pain. | ||
| 1884 | German Ottmar Mergenthaler invented a linotype machine to set up complete lines of type for printing. | ||
| 1884 | American Lester Pelton invented the Pelton water wheel as an impulse water turbine. | ||
| 1884 | German Max Duttenhofer invented smokeless gunpowder | ||
| 1884 | Sir Charles Parsons invented the steam turbine | ||
| 1884 | German Paul Nipkow developed a way of rotating a disc and transmitting pictures over a wire | ||
| 1884 | American George Eastman patented the first film in roll form. | ||
| 1884 | Emil Berliner,a German working in USA patented a hard rubber disc for recording sound | ||
| 1884 | Sir Hiram Maxim developed the recoil operated first machine gun – the Maxim Gun. | ||
| 1885 | Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach designed the pre-cursor of the modern petrol (gasoline) engine which they fitted to a two wheeler (the first motor cycle) then to a stagecoach and a boat. | ||
| 1885 | The first steel framed skyscraper built in Chicago. | ||
| 1885 | Karl Benz created a two seater vehicle with single cylinder four stroke engine using petrol. | ||
| 1885 | Isaac Singer patents the Singer Vibrating Shuttle which was the world’s really practical machine for domestic use | ||
| 1886 | America Charles Hall and, independently, Frenchman Paul Heroult developed an electrolysing process for the large scale production of aluminium. | ||
| 1886 | Ernst von Bergmann pioneered aseptic (disease free, sterile) surgery | ||
| 1886 | Herbert Akroyd Stuart invented the hot bulb or heavy oil engine. | ||
| 1886 | Heinrich Muller-Breslau develops a method for finding the influence of a structural beam | ||
| 1886 | William Ayreton and John Perry relate the elastic critical stress of a buckling beam to the failure stress allowing for a lack of straightness | ||
| 1886 | The Severn Tunnel linking the South West of England with Wales opened to carry the railway. | ||
| 1887 | Construction of Kiel Canal linking the North and Baltic Seas began – opened in 191895 | ||
| 1887 | Gustav de Laval patented a centrifugal milk-cream separator and an early milking machine in 1894. | ||
| 1887 | Gustav de Laval built an impulse steam turbine based on an hourglass shaped nozzle. | ||
| 1887 | Heinrich Hertz demonstrated the existence of electro-magnetic waves | ||
| 1887 | American Tolbert Lanston demonstrated his monotype machine for printing – a key board produced punched cards which controlled an associated machine for fashioning types from strips of metal. | ||
| 1887 | Scottish born John Dunlop developed the pneumatic tyre for bicycles. | ||
| 1888 | George Eastman developed the Kodak camera based on roll film. | ||
| 1888 | Austrian Siegfried Marcus built his second car with an internal combustion engine. | ||
| 1888 | Thomas Edison and William Dickson start to develop a moving picture camera. | ||
| 1889 | Comte de Chardonnet developed artificial silk. | ||
| 1889 | Gustave Eiffel built the Eiffel Tower in Paris | ||
| 1889 | Singer produce the first electric sewing machines. | ||
| 1889 | Friedrich Engesser published his modified Euler formula for the buckling of a strut. | ||
| 1890 | The first AC power station opened in Deptford, London – designed by Englishman Sebastian Ziani de Ferranti. | ||
| 1890 | German Ludwig Brieger names poisons from organisms as toxins. | ||
| 1890 | Edouard Branly developed the first radio wave detector. | ||
| 1890 | Large cantilever suspended span railway bridge over the Firth of Forth near Edinburgh, Scotland opened – designed by English engineers Sir John Fowler and Sir Benjamin Baker. | ||
| 1891 | Thomas Edison and William Dickson produce the kinetograph a forerunner of the modern film projector. | ||
| 1891 | Frenchman Edouard Michelin produced a detachable tyre for bicycles. | ||
| 1891 | The first submerged oil wells drilled in Ohio, USA. | ||
| 1892 | Frenchman Leon Bouly develops the cinematograph a motion picture camera and projector. | ||
| 1892 | American William Burroughs invented a ‘calculating machine’. | ||
| 1892 | Thomas Willson discovered a process for making calcium carbide used to make acetylene and calcium cyanamide. | ||
| 1892 | Edward Bevan, Charles Cross and Clayton Beadle took out a patent for rayon – the first manufactured fibre dubbed an artificial silk. | ||
| 1892 | Rudolf Diesel patents his internal combustion engine. | ||
| 1892 | Herbert Akroyd Stuart builds a diesel engine. | ||
| 1894 | Charles Jenkins created the phantoscope the first moving picture of the modern type | ||
| 1894 | London’s Tower bridge opened – designed by English engineer Sir John Wolfe Barry. | ||
| 1895 | French brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière took over Bouly’s cinema tograph and patented their own version. | ||
| 1895 | Otto Hoffman by-product coke oven plant constructed in Germany | ||
| 1895 | The first kinetoscope parlour or movie theatre opened in New York. | ||
| 1895 | Wilhelm Roentgen produced and detected X Rays | ||
| 1896 | Siemens completed an underground railway in Budapest | ||
| 1896 | Siemens AEG a three phase express railcar reached 206 km/h | ||
| 1896 | American Samuel Langley designed and flew briefly a steam-driven unmanned flying machine called the aerodrome | ||
| 1896 | French scientist Antoine Becquerel discovered radio activity in which atoms emit radiation | ||
| 1896 | The first revolving stage in Europe in Munich | ||
| 1897 | Marconi sends Morse code wireless signals | ||
| 1897 | German Walther Nernst invented an electric lamp known as the Nernst lamp | ||
| 1897 | Frenchman Joseph Boussinesq published his theory of swirling fluids which laid the basis for the study of turbulence. | ||
| 1898 | Disc records were first made of ‘shellac’ | ||
| 1898 | Carl Auer von Welsbach develops a electric light bulb with a metal osmium filament. | ||
| 1898 | Marie and Pierre Curie discover radium and coined the term radioactivity. | ||
| 1898 | Sir Ebenezer Howard founded the garden city movement – a method of urban planning. | ||
| 1899 | Serbian American Mihajlo Pupin greatly extended the range of long distance telephone communication using loading coils. | ||
| 1899 | Max Planck laid the foundations of quantum theory | ||
| 1900s | During the 20th century – General introduction of scientific and technical research laboratories | ||
| 1900 | Frederick Taylor and Maunsel White invented a high-impact tungsten carbide tool steel. | ||
| 1900 | German Ferdinand Zeppelin first tested a dirigible air ship. | ||
| 1901 | National Bureau of Standards founded in the United States | ||
| 1901 | The Engineering Standards Committee set up – became the British Standards Institution (BSI) in 1931. | ||
| 1901 | USA National Bureau of Standards set up. | ||
| 1902 | The Aswan Dam opened in Egypt across the River Nile – designed by English engineer Sir William Willcocks. | ||
| 1903 | Charles Manly modified an engine developed by Stephen Balzer to create the first purpose built aeroengine. | ||
| 1903 | Dutchman Willem Einthoven invents a electrocardiograph for recording electrical impulses within the heart muscle. | ||
| 1903 | Brothers Orville and Wibur Wright made the world’s first successful controlled, powered and sustained heavier-than-air human flight. | ||
| 1903 | American Michael Owens opens his company for making glass bottles automatically. | ||
| 1904 | American Benjamin Holt develops the first crawler tractor with a caterpillar tread | ||
| 1904 | Charles Rolls and Henry Royce meet in Manchester and launch their first car. | ||
| 1906 | The Simplon tunnel opened between Switzerland and Italy. | ||
| 1906 | Reginald Fessenden made first transatlantic two way transmission of Morse code | ||
| 1906 | Reginald Fessenden broadcast the human voice. | ||
| 1906 | Leo Baekeland first patents Bakelite and the age of plastic begins | ||
| 1907 | Rolls Royce build their most famous car, the Silver Ghost, in Derby, England. | ||
| 1907 | The first Quebec Bridge collapsed designed by Theodore Cooper. In 1916 a second accident occurred as the central suspended span was being lifted into place. | ||
| 1908 | The first Model T Ford rolled off the production line in Detroit, USA. | ||
| 1909 | Charles Saunders distributes Marquis wheat to farmers on the norther great plains | ||
| 1909 | Louis Blériot is the first to fly across the English Channel. | ||
| 1911 | Ukrainian Stephen Timoshenko publishes his first of many books on structural mechanics. | ||
| 1913 | Henry Ford designed his first assembly line for making automobiles | ||
| 1913 | Richard von Mises formulates what we now call the von Mises yield criteria for materials | ||
| 1914 | The Panama Canal connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans opened in Panama – with chief engineer John Stevens. | ||
| 1914 | First working Sonar (Sound navigation and ranging) systems developed by Reginald Fessenden in USA | ||
| 1914 | Panama Canal opened | ||
| 1916 | American William Boeing flew an aircraft built by himself and then set up his own company in Seattle, USA with George Westervelt. | ||
| 1917 | Frenchman Paul Langévin invented the quartz sandwich transducer for transmitting sound underwater | ||
| 1917 | Austrian Johann Radon describes a transform which later became important in tomography – the creation of an image from cross sectional scans of an object. | ||
| 1919 | First aeroplane crash in Italy killing all people on board. | ||
| 1920 | First scheduled radio broadcasts take place in USA. | ||
| 1920s | First suggestions of a quantitative approach to risk assessment at Bell Telephone Systems. | ||
| 1921 | Frank Knight publishes his book Risk, Uncertainty and Profit | ||
| 1924-1960 | Hungarian-American Theodore von Kármán developed the theory of fluid flow | ||
| 1925 | Werner Heisenberg publishes his theory of quantum mechanics | ||
| 1925 | Austrian Karl von Terzhagi lays down the foundations for soil mechanics. | ||
| 1925 | Andrew Robertson modified the Ayrton Perry formula of 1886 to create the Perry-Robertson formula for the buckling of struts | ||
| 1926 | Scottish engineer John Logie Baird demonstrates colour television. | ||
| 1926 | South African statesman Jan Smuts proposes a theory of holism | ||
| 1927 | American Charles Lindbergh fliew solo across the Atlantic | ||
| 1927 | Werner Heisenberg publishes his uncertainty principle | ||
| 1928 | George Eastman exhibits the first colour motion pictures | ||
| 1928 | French engineer Eugene Freyssinet pioneered pre-stressed concrete. | ||
| 1928 | Russian Sergei Sokolov first suggested that flaws in metal could be detected by variations in ultrasonic energy | ||
| 1929 | Kodak introduce 16mm colour film | ||
| 1929 | Sir Alexander Fleming accidentally discovered penicillin. | ||
| 1929 | HM Airship R100 first flew but later scrapped after R101 crashed. | ||
| 1929 | Mark Lidwell described an electrical apparatus to drive the heart for use during emergencies | ||
| 1930 | English woman Amy Johnson flies from England to Australia in 19 days | ||
| 1930 | Swiss engineer Robert Maillart designed the innovative reinforce concrete arch Salginatobel Bridge | ||
| 1930 | HM Airship R101 crashed in France on its maiden flight to India. | ||
| 1930 | Hardy Cross published the moment distribution method for finding the internal bending moments in a statically indeterminate structural framework | ||
| 1930-1937 | Sir Frank Whittle developed the turbojet engine | ||
| 1931 | Englishman Geoffrey De Havilland designed the Tiger Moth | ||
| 1931 | The George Washington Brisge is opened in New York – designed by | ||
| 1931 | Kurt Gödel published his incompleteness theorems of mathematics. | ||
| 1932 | John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton became the fisrt to split an atom | ||
| 1932 | The Sydney Harbour Bridge is opened – designed by | ||
| 1932 | John Von Neumann laid down the foundations of ergodic theory, a framework for quantum mechanics and of cellular automata. | ||
| 1932 | Albert Hyman in New York developed a heart pacemaker weighing 7.2 kg | ||
| 1935 | First practical Radar (Radio detection and ranging) systems developed by Englishman Robert Watson-Watt. | ||
| 1936 | Hoover Dam opened in Arizona, designed by a joint venture called Six Companies Inc. | ||
| 1936 | The Spitfire has its first test flight | ||
| 1937 | Alan Turing described the properties of a logically possible computer known as the Turing Machine | ||
| 1937 | The Golden Gate Bridge opened in San Francisco | ||
| 1938 | Hungarian Lajos Biro invented and patented the ball point pen | ||
| 1939 | The first practical helicopter tested – designed by American Igor Sikorsky | ||
| 1939-1945 | Construction in USA of all welded Liberty Ships for the war effort but many broke up at anchor through brittle fracture. | ||
| 1940 | John Fleetwood Baker designed the Morrison (sometimes Anderson) shelter used in the UK during WWII to shelter people from bomb explosions. | ||
| 1940 | The Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapsed dramatically – nick-named ‘Galloping Gertie’ because of it violent oscillations. | ||
| 1941 | Howard Florey developed and used penicillin as an antibiotic | ||
| 1941 | Sir William Halcrow set up an engineering consultancy in transport, water, tunnelling and maritime engineering. | ||
| 1942 | German engineer Fritz Pfleumer invented magnetic recording tape. | ||
| 1942 | First man made nuclear reactor built in the USA. | ||
| 1942 | Enrico Fermi and team achieve the first nuclear chain reaction. | ||
| 1942 | Karl Dussik in Vienna began to detect brain tumours using ultrasound with a through-transmission technique – a first attempt at scanning. | ||
| 1943 | The world’s first programmable, electronic digital computer used for wartime coding at Bletchley Park, England. | ||
| 1943 | Sir Barnes Wallis developed a bouncing bomb used on air raid on dams in Germany | ||
| 1943 | Americans Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts laid the foundations for the development of neural nets | ||
| 1944 | The Gloster Meteor flies with a jet engine developed by Sir Frank Whittle | ||
| 1944 | The Messerschmitt fighter bomber introduced the jet engine into combat | ||
| 1945 | Nuclear weapons dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. | ||
| 1945 | Wernher von Braun moves to the USA to develop the German V2 rocket into an intercontinental ballistic missile | ||
| 1945 | Dorothy Hodgkin described the molecular structure of penicillin. | ||
| 1946 | Ove Arup & partners formed | ||
| 1947 | William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain developed the transistor at Bell Laboratories, USA. | ||
| 1947 | Denis Gabor created the first hologram | ||
| 1947 | Polish American Alfred Freudenthal laid the basis for a theory of structural reliability | ||
| 1948 | Norbert Wiener introduced Cybernetics as the control of systems | ||
| 1949 | Technique of radio carbon dating is developed. | ||
| 1950 | Austrian Ludwig von Bertalanffy publishes his general systems theory | ||
| 1950 | George Ludwig in New York made a ultrasonic locator available commercially. | ||
| 1950-60 | Jon Turner at Boeing USA and then John Argyris, Ray Clough, Harold Martin, L J Topp and Olgierd Zienkiewicz developed and promoted the finite element method of structural analysis. | ||
| 1951 | John Hopps designed a heart pacemaker | ||
| 1952 | Daniel Drucker and William Prager formulated the Drucker-Prager yield criterion for plastic yielding of a material. | ||
| 1952 | Englishman John Wild and John Reid publish techniques to determine the structure of biological tissue using echo-ranging | ||
| 1953 | Francis Crick and James Watson discover the double helix structure of DNA | ||
| 1953 | First hydrogen bomb is exploded | ||
| 1953 | Ultrasound used to treat rheumatic arthritis in Colorado, USA. | ||
| 1953 | B Pollak first describes tomography which he called planography. | ||
| 1953 | The ferry MV Princess Victoria sank in the North Channel after leaving Stranraer, Scotland. | ||
| 1954 | Nuclear power first used to generate electricity in the USSR | ||
| 1954 | John Fleetwood Baker (later Lord Baker), Michael Horne, Jacques Heyman publish a plastic theory of structural collapse | ||
| 1954 | Americans Theodore Hueter and Richard Bolt publish a book on ultrasonic engineering. | ||
| 1954 | A de Havilland Comet crashes due to metal fatigue. | ||
| 1955 | Swiss Heinz Isler designs his first thin concrete shell roof. | ||
| 1956 | Calder Hall nuclear power station opened in England. | ||
| 1956 | The first transatlantic telephone cable laid | ||
| 1956 | Artificial Intelligence became an academic discipline of computer science with work by Americans Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy, Claude Shannon and Nathan Rochester. | ||
| 1957 | USSR spacecraft puts a dog into space | ||
| 1957 | American Earl Bakken produced the first battery operated wearable heart pacemaker. | ||
| 1957 | American Walton Lillehei implanted the first myocardial wire but still needed mains supply. That year a little girl dies due to a power supply failure. | ||
| 1957 | Earl Bakken adapted a transistorised metronome invented at MIT Radiation Labs during WW2. Lillehei used it on a small girl immediately | ||
| 1958 | Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments USA made the first integrated circuit. | ||
| 1958 | Suede Ake Senning implanted the first heart pacemaker in a patient | ||
| 1958 | Scotsmen Ian Donald, John McVicar and Tom Brown publish a paper on investigating abdominal masses by pulsed ultrasound. The next year they started to detect fetal heads and then the study of fetal growth. | ||
| 1959 | The first Hovercraft crosses the English Channel | ||
| 1959 | USSR spacecraft orbits the moon. | ||
| 1959 | American Daniel Drucker proposed mathematical criteria that restrict possible non-linear stress-strain relations for a solid material | ||
| 1959 | American William Greatbach patented the implantable pacemaker. | ||
| 1959 | First unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs or drones) of the modern era developed. | ||
| 1961 | Yuri Gagarin became the first man to travel in space. | ||
| 1964 | The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge opnes in New York | ||
| 1965 | Soviet cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov walks in space for more than 10 minutes | ||
| 1965 | Iranian/American Lotfi Zadeh published his first paper proposing fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic | ||
| 1965 | BP Sea Gem was the first British offshore oil rig and the first disaster when it collapsed | ||
| 1965 | Three out of a group of eight cooling towers collapsed at Ferrybridge, England. | ||
| 1966 | A USSR spacecraft achieved a soft landing on the moon. | ||
| 1967 | Jack Kilby files for a patent of the first hand held electronic calculator. | ||
| 1968 | One of the first skyscrapers with a trussed ‘tube’ structure opened – the John Hancock Centre in Chiacago – designed by structural engineer Fazlur Khan | ||
| 1968 | A block of flats (apartments) at Ronan Point in London partially collapsed. The technical enquiry lead by Sir Alfred Pugsley produced far reaching changes for the treatment of wind loads and for the robust design of buildings in the UK | ||
| 1968 | Stuart Campbell described fetal cephalometry (measurement of growth). | ||
| 1969 | The Anglo-French airliner Concorde made its first test flight | ||
| 1969 | Neil Armstrong sets foot on the moon | ||
| 1970 | The Cleddau Bridge at Milford Haven, Wales and the Westgate Bridge in Melbourne Australia collapsed – two of the three box girder bridges designed by Freeman Fox and Partners with Chief Engineer Oleg Kerensky. | ||
| 1970 | Stephen Wiesner laid out ideas that could lead to quantum computing | ||
| 1971 | Jack Benjamin and Allin Cornell wrote the first comprehensive text on probability and statistics for civil engineers | ||
| 1971 | Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanning developed by American Paul Lauterbur and Englisman Peter Mansfield. | ||
| 1971 | CT (X ray computed tomography) scanner invented by Sir Geoffrey Hounsfield and Allan Cormack introduced into medical practice for the first time. | ||
| 1972 | German Frei Otto designed the membrane structure for the roof of the Munich Olympic Arena. | ||
| 1973 | The first mobile cellular phone demonstrated | ||
| 1973 | Sydney Opera House opened – engineering design by Ove Arup | ||
| 1975 | Rasmussen Reactor Safety study published based on probabilistic risk assessment. | ||
| 1975 | Bill Gates founded Microsoft with Paul Allen | ||
| 1976 | The first Apple personal computer launched. | ||
| 1976 | Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs found Apple Computers | ||
| 1976 | The CN Tower Toronto opened. Wind effects were engineered by Alan Davenport who went on to be responsible for analysing the wind effects on many tall buildings and bridges | ||
| 1976 | MV Derbyshire sank south of Japan due to structural failure. | ||
| 1976 | The earthen Teton Dam in Idaho, USA failed as it was being filled | ||
| 1979 | A DC 10 aircraft crashed minutes after take-off due to faulty maintenance. | ||
| 1979 | The nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, USA suffered meltdown. | ||
| 1980 | The Society for Risk Analysis formed. | ||
| 1980 | Russian Yuri Manin proposed the idea of a quantum computer | ||
| 1980 | Structural failure of ship tanker Energy Concentration in Rotterdam. | ||
| 1981 | The Humber Bridge opened in England | ||
| 1981 | A footbridge in the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Kansas City collapsed. | ||
| 1984 | The Carsington Dam in Derbyshire failed partially. | ||
| 1984 | One of the world’s worst man-made disasters occurred in Bhopal India when a gas explosion caused the leak of noxious chemicals | ||
| 1984 | A methane gas explosion destroyed a waterworks valve house at Abbeystead, Lancashire, England – the gas had seeped from coal deposits. | ||
| 1986 | US Space Shuttle Challenger explodes less than two minutes after takeoff. | ||
| 1986 | The nuclear reactor at Chernobyl in Ukraine exploded | ||
| 1986 | Patent for 3D printing granted to Charles Hull in USA | ||
| 1987 | The first virtual reality machines developed | ||
| 1987 | Capsize of ferry Herald of Free Enterprise soon after leaving Zebrugge harbour, Belgium – bow doors not properly closed | ||
| 1988 | Oil Rig Piper Alpha destroyed by fire in the North Sea. | ||
| 1989 | The oil tanker Exxon Valdiz ran aground spilling devastating amount of oil. | ||
| 1989 | An earthquake caused a section of the upper deck of the Oakland Bay Bridge, in San Francisco to collapse onto the lower section. | ||
| 1990 | Logitech introduce first digital camera | ||
| 1990 | The first world wide web site published. | ||
| 1990 | The Leaning Tower of Pisa closed. It was opened again in 2008 after an international team of experts including English Engineer John Burland made it safe from collapse. | ||
| 1992 | The Puente del Alamillo bridge in Seville opened – concept design by Spanish engineer and architect Santiago Calatrava | ||
| 1993 | Work begins in China on the Three Gorges Dam. | ||
| 1994 | The first DVD introduced | ||
| 1994 | The tunnel under the English Channel linking England and France is opened | ||
| 1994 | Bluetooth wireless communication conceived for short distances | ||
| 1995 | GPS (Global Positioning Systems) became operational for civilian use | ||
| 1997 | Train crash at Southall, London after train passed a signal. | ||
| 1998 | Construction of the International space station begins | ||
| 1998 | The Akashi Kaikyo Bridge opened in Japan | ||
| 1998 | Google founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin | ||
| 1999 | Train crash at Ladbroke Grove London after train passed a signal. | ||
| 2000 | The Millennium Dome (really a tent) opened the structure designed by Buro Happold lead by English engineer William Liddell | ||
| 2000 | Toyota released the Prius the first hybrid saloon car in USA | ||
| 2001 | Construction of The Palm Islands of Dubai on reclaimed land | ||
| 2001 | Eric Schmidt becomes CEO of Google | ||
| 2001 | The World Trade Centre collapsed after an attack by terrorists now well known as 9/11. The structure was designed by American engineer Leslie Robertson. | ||
| 2004 | The Millau Viaduct France opened – designed by French structural engineer Michel Virlogeux | ||
| 2004 | Launch of Facebook social networking service | ||
| 2004 | Researchers extract single atom thick graphene | ||
| 2004 | Opportunity robotic rover lands on Mars and still active in 2017 | ||
| 2005 | Airbus A380 made a first test flight | ||
| 2005 | Nanotechnology | ||
| 2005 | Researchers develop a semi-conductor chip that may pave the way for quantum computing | ||
| 2006 | China’s Three Gorges Dam is completed | ||
| 2006 | Launch of Twitter news and social networking service | ||
| 2007 | I-35 bridge in Minneapolis, USA collapsed | ||
| 2009 | CERN restarts the Hadron Collider | ||
| 2010 | An explosion destroyed BP’s Deepwater Horizon Oil rig | ||
| 2010 | Burj Khalifa building in Dubai opened. It is 828 meters high with 163 floors. | ||
| 2011 | Swedish surgeons use a patients stem cells to coat a plastic replica of his wind pipe and transplant it. | ||
| 2011 | The nuclear power station at Fukushima, Japan was severely damaged by a tsunami. | ||
| 2012 | NASA landed science laboratory on Mars | ||
| 2012 | London 2012 Olympics building programme on time and on budget using new thinking about explicit collaboration. | ||
| 2012 | 3D printing became widely available | ||
| 2012 | The Shard skyscraper opened in London | ||
| 2014 | The European Space Agency’s Philae lander leaves the spaceship Rosetta and lands on the surface of a comet | ||
| 2016 | MIT creates first five-atom quantum computer | ||
| 2016 | Drones with GPS trackers become available for hobbyists | ||
| 2016 | Virtual reality headsets become widely available |