The timelineTech Timelines
Five and a half centuries of invention, from movable type to the computer in your pocket.
Four ages
The mechanical age
The press, the steam engine and the factory.
1830–1940The electric age
The telegraph, the telephone, the light bulb and radio.
1940–1990The electronic age
The computer, the transistor and the microchip.
1969–NowThe networked age
The internet, the web and the computer in every pocket.
Milestones
- c.1450Mechanical
The printing press
Gutenberg's movable-type press in Mainz made books cheaper and faster to produce, and printing spread across Europe within decades.
- 1769Mechanical
Watt's separate condenser
James Watt patented a separate condenser that made the steam engine far more efficient, a key step toward industrial power.
- 1837–44Electric
The telegraph
Cooke and Wheatstone patented a telegraph in Britain in 1837; in 1844 Samuel Morse sent "What hath God wrought" from Washington to Baltimore.
- 1876Electric
The telephone
Alexander Graham Bell's patent of March 1876 began the telephone age, though the question of who got there first was argued in court for years.
- 1879Electric
The incandescent lamp
Thomas Edison in the United States and Joseph Swan in Britain each developed practical light bulbs around 1879 and 1880.
- 1903December 17
Powered flight
Orville and Wilbur Wright flew the first powered, controlled aeroplane flights at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
- 1936Theory
Turing's universal machine
Alan Turing's paper "On Computable Numbers" described a theoretical machine that could carry out any computation that can be written as steps.
- 1945Electronic
ENIAC
The ENIAC, built for the US Army at the University of Pennsylvania, was completed in 1945 and unveiled to the public in February 1946.
- 1947Electronic
The transistor
Bell Labs' transistor replaced the fragile vacuum tube, making electronics smaller, cooler and more reliable.
- 1958–59Electronic
The integrated circuit
Kilby and Noyce put whole circuits on one piece of semiconductor, the foundation of the microchip.
- 1969Networked
ARPANET
The first link of the network that became the internet carried its first message from UCLA in October 1969.
- 1971Electronic
The microprocessor
Intel's 4004 put a computer's central processor on a single chip.
- 1981August
The IBM PC
IBM's Personal Computer, built largely from off-the-shelf parts, set a standard that other makers soon copied.
- 1989Networked
The World Wide Web
Tim Berners-Lee's proposal at CERN led to the web, opened to the world royalty-free in 1993.
- 2007Networked
The smartphone era
The iPhone was unveiled in January 2007; touchscreen phones running app stores soon became the most widely used computers on Earth.
- Next
What comes next
Each stop on this line was once the future. The next one is being built somewhere now.