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51133279_c.gif (5853 bytes)The Age of Spiritual Machines  
 - by Raymond Kurzweil © 1990, MIT Press

Part X - "Chronology"

Excerpts from his book:

"The world has changed less since Jesus Christ than it has in the last thirty years." - Charles Peguy, 1913

Part 1 - The First 190 million years...

Links to Chronology, Parts 1, 2, 3 and 4

Year  Event
140-190 million years ago Dinosaurs roam the earth.
Less than 100,000 years ago Homo sapiens begin using intelligence to further their goals
More than 5,000 years ago The abacus, which resembles the arithmetic unit of a modern computer, is developed in the Orient.
3000-700 B.C. Water clocks are built in China in 3000 B.C., in Egypt c. 1500 B.C. and in Assyria 700 B.C.
2500 B.C. Egyptians invent the idea of thinking machines: citizens turn for advice to oracles, which are statues with priests hidden inside.
b. 469 B.C. Socrates, the mentor of Plato, is the first Western thinker to assert that mental activities occur in the unconscious.
469-322 B.C. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle establish the essentially rationalistic philosophy of Western culture.
427 B.C. In the Phaedo and later works Plato expresses ideas, several millennia before the advent of the computer, that are relevant to modern dilemmas regarding human thought and its relation to the mechanics of the machine.
c. 420 B.C. Archytas of Tarentum, a friend of Plato, constructs a wooden pigeon whose movements are controlled by a jet of steam or compressed air.
b. 415 B.C. Theaetetus, a member of Plato's Academy, creates solid geometry.
387 B.C. Plato founds the Academy for the pursuit of science and philosophy in a grove on the outskirts of Athens. It results in the fertile development of mathematical theory.
343-334 B.C. Aristotle carries on the Platonic tradition by becoming the teacher of Alexander the Great in 343 B.C. and founding the Lyceum, also known as the peripatetic school of philosophers, in 334 B.C.
293 B.C. Euclid, also a member of Plato's Academy, is the expositor of plane geometry. He writes the Elements, a basic mathematics textbook for the next 2,000 years.
c. 200 B.C. In China artisans develop elaborate automata, including an entire mechanical orchestra.
c. 200 B.C. An Egyptian engineer improves the water clock, making it the most accurate timekeeping device for nearly 2,000 years.
A.D. 529 Plato's Academy and Aristotle's Lyceum are closed by the emperor Justinian.
c. 600 The earliest works mentioning the game of chess appear in India.
725 A Chinese engineer and a Buddhist monk build the first true mechanical clock, a water-driven device with an escapement that causes the clock to tick.
c. 1310 The first mechanical clocks appear in Europe, apparently stemming from stories about the existence of mechanical clocks in China.
1494 Leonardo da Vinci draws a clock with a pendulum.
1530 The spinning wheel is in use in Europe.
1540, 1772 The technology of clock and watch making results in the production of more elaborate automata during the European Renaissance. Gianello Toriano's mandolin-playing lady (1540) and P. Jacquet-Droz's child (1772) are famous examples.
1543 Nicolaus Copernicus publishes De Revolutionibus, in which he states that the earth and the other planets revolve around the sun, thereby changing humankind's relationship with God.
17th-18th
centuries		 This is the age of the Enlightenment, a philosophical movement to restore the supremacy of human reason, knowledge, and freedom, with parallel developments in science and theology. It had its roots in the European Renaissance and the Greek philosophy of twenty centuries earlier and constitutes the first systematic reconsideration of the nature of human thought and knowledge since the Platonists.
1617 John Napier invents Napier's Bones, of significance to the future development of calculating engines.
1637 Rene Descartes, who formulated the theory of optical refraction and developed the principles of modern analytic geometry, pushes rational skepticism to its limits in his most comprehensive work, Discours de la Methode. His conclusion was, "I think, therefore I am."
1642 Blaise Pascal perfects the Pascaline, a machine that can add and subtract. It is the world's first automatic calculating machine.
c. 1650 Otto von Guericke perfects the air pump and uses it to produce vacuums.
1670 Pensees, by Blaise Pascal, is published posthumously.
1687 Isaac Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, known as Principia, established his three laws of motion and the law of universal gravitation.
1694 Gottfried Wilhelm Liebniz, an inventor of calculus, perfects the Liebniz Computer, a machine that multiplies by performing repetitive additions, an algorithm still used in modern computers.
1719 What appears to be the first factory, an English silk-thread mill, employs 300 workers, mostly women and children.
1726 Jonathan Swift describes a machine that will automatically write books in Gulliver's Travels.
1733 John Kay paves the way for much faster weaving by patenting his New Engine for Opening and Dressing Wool, laster known as the flying shuttle.
1760 Benjamin Franklin, in Philadelphia, erects lightning rods after having found, through his famous kite experiment in 1752, that lightning is a form of electricity.
c. 1760 Life expectancy at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution is about 37 years in North America and northwestern Europe.
1764 James Hargreaves invents the spinning jenny, which is able to spin eight threads at once.
1769 Richard Arkwright, the founder of the modern factory system, patents a hydraulic spinning machine that is too large and expensive to use in family dwellings. He builds a factory for his machine in 1781, thereby paving the way for many of the economic and social changes that will characterize the Industrial Revolution.
1781 Immanuel Kant publishes his Critique of Pure Reason, which expresses the philosophy of the Enlightenment while deemphasizing the role of metaphysics. He sets the stage for the emergence of twentieth-century rationalism.
1792 Edmund Cartwright devises the first machine to comb wool to feed the new mechanized spinning machines.
1792 William Murdock invents coal-gas lighting. The streets of London will be illuminated by 1802.
1800 All aspects of the production of cloth are automated.
1805 Joseph-Marie Jacquard devises a method for automating weaving with a series of punched cards. This invention will be used many years later in the development of early computers.
1811 Ned Ludd founds the Luddite movement in Nottingham over the issue of jobs versus automation.
1821 Charles Babbage is awarded the first gold medal by the British Astronomical Society for his paper "Observations on the Application of Machinery to the Computation of Mathematical Tables."
1821 Michael Farraday, widely recognized as the father of electricity, reports his discovery of electromagnetic rotation and builds the first two motors powered by electricity.
1822 Charles Babbage develops the Difference Engine, but its technical complexities exhaust his financial resources and organizational skills. He eventually abandons it to concentrate his efforts on a general-purpose computer.
1829 The first electromagnetically driven clock is constructed.
1832 Charles Babbage develops the principle of the Analytical Engine, which is the worlds's first computer and can be programmed to solve a wide variety of logical and computational problems.
1835 Joseph Henry invents the electrical relay, a means of transmitting electrical impulses over long distances that serves as the basis for the telegraph.
1837 Samuel Finley Breese Morse patents his more practical version of the telegraph, which sends letters in codes consisting of dots and dashes.
1843 Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron's only legitimate child and the world's first computer programmer, publishes her own notes with her translation of L.P. Menabrae's paper on Babbage's Analytical Machine.
1843 Søren Kierkegaard, who will greatly influence the ideas of modern existentialists, publishes Either-Or, his major work, followed by other writings that denounce the state-organized church on grounds that religion is a matter for the individual soul.
1846 Alexander Bain uses punched paper tape to send telegraphed messages, greatly improving the speed of transmission.
1847 George Boole published his first ideas on symbolic logic. He will develop these ideas into his theory of binary logic and arithmetic that is still the basis for modern computation.
1851 An exhibition in London promotes the application of science to technology and focuses world attention on British progress in both fields.
1854 An electric telegraph is installed between Paris and London.
1855 Heinrich Geissler Igeshieb develops his mercury pump, used to produce the first good vacuum tubes. These will lead to the development of cathode rays and eventually to the discovery of the electron.
1855 William Thomson develops a successful theory of transmission of electrical signals through submarine cables.
1859 Charles Darwin, in The Origin of Species, explains his principle of natural selection and its influence on the evolution of various species.
1861 San Francisco and New York are connected by a telegraph line.
1864 Ducos de Harron develops a primitive motion-picture device in France.
1866 Cyrus West Field lays a telegraph cable across the Atlantic Ocean.
1870 GNP on a per capita basis and in constant 1958 dollars is $530. Twelve million Americans, or 31 percent of the population, have jobs, and only 2 percent of adults have high school diplomas.
1871 Charles Babbage dies, leaving more than 400 square feet of drawings for his Analytic Engine.
1873 Melvil Dewey develops for the Amherst College Library a plan for 999 categories of materials that becomes known as the Dewey Decimal System. It is refined over time to provide a virtually unlimited number of subdivisions.
1876 Alexander Graham Bell's telephone receives U.S. Patent 174,465, the most lucrative patent ever granted.
1879 G. Frege, one of the founders of modern symbolic language, proposes a notational system for mechanical reasoning. This work is a forerunner to the predicate calculus, which will be used for knowledge representation in artificial intelligence.
1879 Thomas Alva Edison invents the first incandescent light bulb that can burn for a significant length of time.
1880 Frederich Nietzsche writes Morgenrote and later works opposing romanticism and holding up art, philosophy and religion as illusions. These ideas will strongly influence modern existentialism.
1882 Thomas Alva Edison's design for New York City's Pearl Street station on lower Broadway brings lighting to the United States.
1885 Boston is connected to New York by telephone.
1886 Alexander Graham Bell, with a modified version of Thomas Alva Edison's phonograph, uses wax discs for recording sound.
1887 The first gasoline-engine automobile is sold in Germany.
1888 William S. Burroughs patents an adding machine. This machine is modified, four years later to include subtraction and printing. It is the world's first dependable key-driven calculator and will soon gain widespread acceptance.
1888 Heinrich Hertz experiments with the transmission of what are now known as radio waves.
1888 The first commercial roll-film camera is introduced.
1890 Herman Hollerith, incorporating ideas from Jacquard's loom and Babbage's Analytical Engine, patents an electromechanical information machine that uses punched cards. It wins the 1890 U.S. Census competition, with the result that electricity is used for the first time in a major data-processing project.
1894 Guglielmo Marconi builds his first radio equipment, which rings a bell from 30 feet away.
1894 Niagara Falls is harnessed for electricity.
1896 A sound film is first shown before a paying audience in Berlin.
1896 Herman Hollerith forms the Tabulating Machine Company, which will become IBM.
1897 Joseph John Thomson, with better vacuum pumps than previously available, discovers the electron, the first known particle smaller than an atom.
1897 Alexander Popov, a Russian, uses an antenna to transmit radio waves, and Guglielmo Marconi, an Italian, receives the first patent ever granted for radio. Marconi helps organize a company to market his system.
1899 The first recording of sound occurs magnetically on wire and on a thin metal strip.
1899 David Hilbert consolidates the accomplishments of nineteenth-century mathematics with such publications as The Foundations of Geometry.

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