| Year |
Event |
| 1900 |
Herman Hollerith introduces an automatic card feed into his information
machine to process the 1900 census data. |
| 1900 |
The entire civilized world is connected by telegraph, and in the United
Sates there are more than 1.4 million telephones, 8,000 registered automobiles, and 24
million electric light bulbs. Edison's promise of "electric bulbs so cheap that only
the rich will be able to afford candles" is thus realized. In addition, the
Gramophone Company is advertising a choice of five thousand recordings. |
| 1900 |
More than one third of all American workers are involved in the
production of food. |
| 1900 |
David Hilbert introduces the "direct method" in the calculus
of variations and presents an agenda for twentieth-century mathematics that includes a
list of the 23 most pressing problems at the International Mathematics Conference in
Paris. He predicts that these problems will occupy the attention of mathematicians for the
next century. |
| 1901 |
Marconi in Newfoundland receives the first transatlantic telegraphic
radio transmission. |
| 1901 |
Sigmund Freud publishes The Interpretation of Dreams, which, along with
his other works, illuminates the workings of the mind. |
| 1904 |
John Ambrose Fleming files a patent for the first vacuum tube, a diode. |
| 1906 |
Reginald Aubrey Fessenden invents AM radio and transmits by radio waves
to wireless operators on U.S. ships off the Atlantic Coast a Christmas carol, a violin
trill, and for the first time the sound of a human voice. |
| 1907 |
Lee De Forest and R. von Lieben invent the amplifier vacuum tube, known
as a triode, which greatly improves radio. |
| 1908 |
Orville Wright makes his first hour-long airplane flight. |
| 1910-1913 |
Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead publish their three-volume
Principia Mathematica, a seminal work on the foundations of mathematics that provides a
new methodology for all mathematics. |
| 1911 |
Herman Hollerith's Tabulating Machine Company acquires several other
companies and changes its name to Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR). In 1914
Thomas J. Watson is appointed president. |
| 1913 |
Henry Ford introduces the first true assembly-line method of automated
production. |
| 1913 |
A. Meissner invents a radio transmitter with vacuum tubes.
Radio-transmitter triode modulation is introduced the following year, and in 1915 the
radio-tube oscillator is introduced. |
| 1915 |
The first North American transatlantic telephone call is made between
Thomas A. Watson in San Francisco and Alexander Graham Bell in New York. |
| 1915 |
Albert Einstein completes his theory of gravitation known as the
general theory of relativity. |
| 1921 |
Czech dramatist Karel Capek popularizes the term "robot," a
word he coined in 1917 to describe the mechanical people in his science fiction drama
R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots). His intelligent machines, intended as servants for
their human creators, end up taking over the world and destroying all mankind. |
| 1921 |
Ludwig Wittgenstein, often referred to as the first logical positivist,
publishes Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, regarded by some as perhaps the most influential
philosophical work of the twentieth century. |
| 1923 |
Vladimir Kosma Zworkin, the father of television, gives the first
demonstration of an electronic television-camera tube, using a mechanical transmitting
device. He develops the iconoscope, an early type of television system, the following
year. |
| 1924 |
Thomas J. Watson becomes the chief executive officer of CTR and renames
the company International Business Machines (IBM). IBM will become the leader of the
modern industry and one of the largest industrial corporations in the world. |
| 1925 |
Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg lay the foundations for quantum
mechanics. |
| 1925 |
Vannevar Bush and his coworkers develop the first analog computer, a
machine designed to solve differential equations. |
| 1926 |
The era of talking motion pictures is introduced by The Jazz Singer,
starring Al Jolson. |
| 1927 |
Charles Lindbergh makes the first solo nonstop flight across the
Atlantic Ocean. |
| 1927 |
Martin Heidegger publishes Sein und Zeit, vol. 1, which is rooted in
the work of Soren Kirkegaard and greatly influences the future development of
existentialism. |
| 1927 |
The Powers Accounting Machine Company goes through a series of mergers
to become the Remington Rand Corporation. |
| 1927 |
Werner Heisenberg postulates his uncertainty principle, which says that
electrons have no precise location but rather probability clouds of possible locations. He
wins a Nobel Prize five years later for his discovery of quantum mechanics. |
| 1928 |
John von Neumann presents the minimax theorem, which will be widely
used in game-playing programs. |
| 1928 |
Philo T. Farnsworth demonstrates the world's first all-electronic
television, and Vladimir Zworkin receives a patent for a color television system. |
| 1929 |
FM radio is introduced. |
| 1930 |
Paul Adrian Maurice Dirac publishes his Principles of Quantum
Mechanics, in which he formulates a general mathematical theory. |
| 1930 |
Vannevar Bush's analog computer, the Differential Analyzer, is built at
MIT. It will be used to calculate artillery trajectories during World War II. |
| 1930s |
Music has shifted from the romantic style of Brahms and the early
Mahler to the atonality of Schoenberg, art to the cubism and expressionism of Picasso, and
poetry to the minimalism of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and William Carlos Williams. |
| 1931 |
Kurt Gödel publishes his incompleteness theorem, which has been called
the most important in all mathematics. |
| 1932 |
RCA demonstrates a television receiver with a cathode-ray picture tube.
In 1933 Zworkin produces a cathode-ray tube, called the iconoscope, that makes
high-quality television almost a reality. |
| c. 1935 |
Albert Einstein's quest for a unified field theory occupies most of the
last two decades of his life. |
| 1936 |
Regular public television transmission begins in Great Britain. |
| 1937 |
Building on the work of Bertrand Russell and Charles Babbage, Alan
Turing publishes "On Computable Numbers", his now celebrated paper introducing
the Turing machine, a theoretical model of a computer. |
| 1937 |
The Church-Turing thesis, independently developed by Alonzo Church and
Alan Turing, states that all problems solvable by a human being are reducible to a set of
algorithms, or more simply, that machine intelligence and human intelligence are
essentially equivalent. |
| 1937 |
Frank Whittle builds the first working jet engine. |
| 1939 |
The first regularly scheduled flights begin crossing the Atlantic
Ocean. |
| 1940 |
John V. Atanasoff and Clifford Berry build an electronic computer known
as ABC. This is the first electronic computer, but it is not programmable. |
| 1941 |
Konrad Zuse, a German, completes the world's first fully programmable
digital computer, the Z-3, and hires Arnold Fast, a blind mathematician, to program it.
Fast becomes the world's first programmer of an operational programmable computer. |
| 1943 |
Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts write their influential "Logical
Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity," which discusses neural-network
architectures for intelligence. |
| 1943 |
Jean-Paul Sartre, a modern existentialist, publishes L'Etre et le
Néant and later works that incorporate the ideas of Soren Kierkegaard and Martin
Heidegger while emphasizing the role of free will in an apparently purposeless world. The
spiritual and emotive world, which is meaning less to logical positivists is to
existentialists the seat of true meaning. |
| 1944 |
Howard Aiken completes the first American programmable computer, the
Mark I. It uses punched paper tape for programming and vacuum tubes to calculate problems. |
| 1945 |
Konrad Zuse develops Plankalkul, the first high-level language. |
| 1946 |
John von Neumann publishes the first modern paper on the stored-program
concept and starts computer research at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. |
| 1946 |
John Presper Eckert and John W. Mauchley develop ENIAC, the world's
first fully electronic, general-purpose (programmable) digital computer. |
| 1946 |
Television enters American life even more rapidly than radio did in the
1920s. The percentage of American homes having sets jumps from 0.02 percent in 1946 to 72
percent in 1956 and more than 90 percent by 1983. |
| 1947 |
William Bradford Schockley, Walter Hauser Brittain, and John Ardeen
invent the transistor, a minute device that functions like a vacuum tube but switches
current on and off at much faster speeds. It launches a revolution in microelectronics,
bringing down the cost of computers and leading to the development of minicomputers and
powerful new main frame computers. |
| 1947 |
An airplane flies at supersonic speed for the first time, in the United
States. |
| 1948 |
Norbert Wiener publishes Cybernetics, a seminal book on information
theory. |
| 1949 |
Maurice Wilkes, influenced by Eckert and Mauchley, builds EDSAC, the
world's first stored-program computer. Eckert and Mauchley's new U.S. company brings out
BINAC, the first American stored-program computer, soon after. |
| 1949 |
George Orwell's novel 1984 envisions a chilling world in which very
large bureaucracies employ computers to enslave the population. |
| 1950 |
The U.S. census is first handled by a programmable computer, UNIVAC,
developed by Eckert and Mauchley. It is the first commercially marketed computer. |
| 1950 |
Alan Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intelligence"
describes a means for determining whether a machine is intelligent known as the Turing
test. |
| 1950 |
Commercial color television begins in the U.S. Transcontinental
black-and-white television is inaugurated the following year. |
| 1950 |
Claude Elwood Shannon writes a proposal for a chess program. |
The Age of Spiritual Machines - by
Raymond Kurzweil © 1990,