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Birth of
Key People
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Significant
Events
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15,000
- 10,000 BC
- The world warms out of the latest Ice Age.
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8,000
BC - Pottery invented.
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3,500
BC - Invention of the wheel.
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3,000
BC - Pyramid of Giza and Stonehenge built.
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1,800
BC - Babylonian multiplication tables.
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1,200
BC - Iron working developed.
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625
BC - Thales of Miletus, Greek philosopher who
proposed that the Earth is a disc which floats on water.
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605
to 562 BC
- Nebuchadnezzar creates the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
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580
BC - Pythagoras, in addition to discovering the
famous property of right triangles, he proposed that the Earth is a
sphere and that planets move in circles.
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460
BC - Democritus of Abdera, suggested that the
world is made up of only vacuum and atoms - an infinite number of tiny,
hard, indestructible particles which combine in different ways to produce
the variety of everything in the world, both living and non-living.
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427
BC - Plato,
Greek philosopher who proposed that all objects in the Universe moved in
perfect circles around the Earth.
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388
BC - Heraklides of Pontus, Greek philosopher and
astronomer who taught that the Earth turns on its axis once every 24
hours.
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384
BC - Aristotle, Greek philosopher who taught
that everything in the material world is composed of four elements -
fire, earth, air, and water.
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312
BC - First
aqueduct built to bring water to Rome.
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306
BC - Euclid, established Euclidean geometry.
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265
BC - Archimedes discovers the law of specific
gravity.
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260
BC to 100 BC - Construction of the Great Wall of China.
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79
AD -
Pompeii and Herculaneum destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius.
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100
AD - Ptolemy, Greek astronomer who taught that
the stars were attached to a single crystal sphere surrounding the Earth.
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400
AD - The
term "chemistry" first used by scholars in Alexandria.
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500
AD - Invention of the abacus.
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525
AD - Introduction
of the Christian calendar.
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600
AD -
Chinese invent the block printing press.
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1100 - Chinese use magnetic compass.
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1250 - Invention of the quill pen.
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1285 - William of Ockham, the developer of
"Ockham's razor". This idea states that if there are two
possible explanations for something, and one explanation is simpler than
the other, then the simpler explanation should be preferred.
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1310 - First mechanical clocks in Europe.
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1350 - Jean Buridan developes the idea of
"impetus", a forerunner of the modern concept of inertia.
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1365 - First use of cannon
in warfare, in China.
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1440 - Gutenberg
developes the moveable type printing press.
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1452 - Leonardo da Vinci
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1473 - Nicolaus Copernicus, Polish astronomer who
proposed the idea that the Sun, not the Earth, is the center of the Solar
System.
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1492 - Columbus
discovers the islands off the east coast of Central America. A geographer
named Martin Behaim makes the first globe.
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1498 - Vasco de Gama voyages to India around the Cape of Good
Hope.
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1519 - Ferdinand Magellan completes the first circumnavigation
of the globe.
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1550 - Leonard
Digges develops the first reflecting telescope using a curved
mirror.
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1564 - Galileo
Galilei, could be considered the first scientist because of
his realization of the importance of actually carrying out experiments to
test theories.
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1571 - Johannes Kepler, discovered the three laws
of planetary motion.
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1592 - Pierre Gassendi, proved that motion is
relative by dropping a ball from the top of the mast of a moving ship and
showing that it landed at the foot of the mast.
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1596 - Tycho Brahe, made accurate measurements of
the positions of stars and the movements of planets.
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1605 - Sir Francis Bacon writes Advancement of
Learning, in which he encourages the scientific investigation of the
world.
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1610 - Galileo's book The Starry Messenger is published,
recording his observations of thousands of stars he observed with a
refracting telescope.
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1627 - Robert Boyle, English pioneer of chemistry,
best remembered for "Boyle's Law".
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1633 - Galileo tried for heresy because of his teaching that the Earth
moved around the Sun.
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1642 - Sir Isaac Newton, invented calculus,
discovered the three laws of motion, and spelled out the scientific
method if formulating hypotheses and testing them with experiments.
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1675 - Ole Romer measured the speed of light using
observations of eclipses of the moons of Jupite to reveal how long it
takes light to cross the orbit of Earth.
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1706 - Benjamin Franklin
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1714 - Gabriel Fahrenheit, devises a mercury
thermometer and uses the temperature scale that will later be named after
him.
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1729 - James Bradley uses the aberration of stars
to determine a more accurate speed of light.
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1736 - Charles Augustin Coulomb, French physicist
who proposed the relationship between charges now known as Coulomb's Law.
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1738 - Daniel Bernoulii describes the behavior of
a gas in terms of the motion of tiny particles.
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1742 - Anders Celsius invents the temperature
scale which now bears his name.
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1743 - Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, often called the
father of modern chemistry. Proved that burning involves combining oxygen
(which he named) from air with the substance being burned.
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1756 - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
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1758 - The "Imperial"
system of weights and measures formally established in
Britain.
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1766 - John Dalton, English chemist who pioneered
the use of the atomic theory to explain chemical reactions.
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1769 - The automibile,
powered by steam, was invented by Nicholas Cugnot.
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1770 - Ludwig van Beethoven
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1776 - Amedeo
Avogadro, showed that the chemical formula for water is H2O,
not HO.
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1777 - Hans Christian Oersted, German mathematician
who pioneered the development of non-Euclidean geometry.
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1787 - Joseph von Fraunhofer, discovered that there are many
dark lines in the spectrum of white light from the Sun.
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1788 - Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac, made an important
contribution to the understanding of gas behavior.
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1791 - Michael Faraday, English chemist
responsible for introducing the concepts of magnetic fields.
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1796 - Edward Jenner develops a vaccination for
smallpox.
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1798 - Henry Cavendish determines the mass of the
Earth, establishing that it has an average density 5.5 times that of
water.
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1801 - Jean
Lamarck publishes his ideas on evolution.
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1803 - Christian Johann Doppler, predicted what is
now known as the Doppler effect.
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1803 - Successful trials of Robert Fulton's steamboat.
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1807 - Thomas Young, English physicist introduces
the concept, and word, "energy".
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1809 - Charles Darwin
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1814 - Leon Foucault, inventor of the gyroscope.
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1820 - John Tyndall - Popularized science and
discovered the Tyndall effect, which helps explain why the sky is blue.
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1821 - Catholic Church lifts
its ban on teaching the Copernican theory.
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1824 - William Thomson (Baron Kelvin of Largs) -
devised the temperature scale now named after him.
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1830 - Julius Lothar Meyer, discovered the
periodic pattern of the chemical elements, independently of Mendeleyev.
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1830 - English-speaking
Americans begin to spread West.
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1831 - Darwin begins his voyage
on the HMS Beagle.
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1834 - Dmitri Mendeleyev, developer of a periodic
table that correctly predicted the existence of unknown elements.
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1834 - Louis Braille perfects a system of reading
for the blind.
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1837 - Samuel Morse patents his electric
telegraph.
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1839 - Charles Goodyear develops a technique for
"vulcanizing" rubber.
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1844 - Coast to coast telegraph in USA.
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1845 - Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen, discoverer of X-rays.
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1846 - Foundation of the Smithsonian
Institution.
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1849 - California
gold rush. Lord Kelvin coins the term
"thermodynamics".
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1851 - Leon Foucault makes use
of a long pendulum to demonstrate the rotation
of the Earth.
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1852 - Antoine Henri Becquerel, discoverer of
radioactivity.
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1852 - William Ramsay, discoverer of the inert gases.
The only person to discover an entire group of elements in the periodic
table in 1904.
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1856 - J. J. Thomson, discovered the electron in
1906.
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1858 - Max Ernst Karl Ludwig Planck, proposed the
foundations of the quantum theory in 1900.
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1859 - Svante August Arrhenius, explained that
when a chemical compound dissolves in water, it dissociates into
electrically charged ions.
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1859 - Publication of the Origin of species. First internal
combustion engine developed by Jean Lenoir. First oil well drilled in
Titusville, PA.
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1862 - Richard Gatling invents the machine gun.
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1867 - Marie
Curie, received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1911 for her
discovery of radium and polonium.
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1868 - Robert Andrews Millikan, received the Nobel
Prize for Chemistry in 1923 for measuring the charge on the electron.
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1869 - First periodic table
published by Dmitri Mendeleyev.
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1871 - Ernest
Rutherford, received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1908 for
describing the atomic nucleus.
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1875 - Gilbert Newton Lewis, invented the idea of
the covalent bond.
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1878 - Telephone invented.
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1879 - Albert
Einstein
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1879 - Thomas Edison invents the electric light
bulb.
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1884 - The meridian through the
Royal
Greenwhich Observatory established as the "prime
meridian" from which longitude is to be measured.
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1885 - Niels Hendrik David Bohr, received the
Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922 for his theoretical model of atomic
structure.
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1885 - Automobile
invented. Sir Sanford Fleming, chief engineer of the
Canadian Pacific Railway, devised time zones.
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1887 - Henry Gwyn Mosley,
defined the atomic number of an element as a measure of the charge on the
nucleus of an atom of the element.
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1887 - Alternating current
electric motor invented by Nikola Tesla.
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1889 - Edwin Powell Hubble, proved that many
objects classified as nebulae are other galaxies.
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1889 - Eiffel
Tower completed. Oklahoma land run.
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1891 - James Chadwick, discoverer of the neutron.
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1895 - Guglielmo Marconi invents the radio.
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1898 - Leo
Szilard, played a major part in the development of the atomic
bomb.
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1899 - Aspirin
marketed.
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Continue to 1900s
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