
Energy comes in packets
December 14, 1900
Max Planck presents the quantum hypothesis to the German Physical Society.
These minutes are held permanently by the registry. They carry a date, a source, and nothing for sale.

December 14, 1900
Max Planck presents the quantum hypothesis to the German Physical Society.

December 12, 1901
Marconi reports receiving a wireless signal in Newfoundland sent from Cornwall.

December 17, 1903
Orville Wright leaves the ground at Kitty Hawk for twelve seconds.

September 26, 1905
Einstein's paper on the electrodynamics of moving bodies appears in Annalen der Physik.

December 14, 1911
Amundsen's party plants a flag at ninety degrees south.

April 15, 1912
The ship disappears beneath the North Atlantic two hours and forty minutes after striking ice.

June 28, 1914
The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand sets the summer of 1914 in motion.

March 4, 1918
A cook at Camp Funston reports sick, the earliest documented case of the 1918 influenza pandemic.

November 11, 1918
The armistice takes effect on the Western Front at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day.

November 26, 1922
Howard Carter opens a sealed doorway in the Valley of the Kings.

May 21, 1927
Charles Lindbergh lands in Paris after thirty-three hours alone over the Atlantic.

September 28, 1928
Alexander Fleming returns to a contaminated petri dish and sees a ring of cleared bacteria.

October 24, 1929
Panic selling on Wall Street begins the collapse that opens the Great Depression.

February 18, 1930
Clyde Tombaugh finds Pluto on photographic plates at Lowell Observatory.

May 21, 1932
Amelia Earhart completes the first solo transatlantic flight by a woman.

August 9, 1936
Berlin watches an American sprinter dismantle the theatre staged around him.

November 12, 1936
Alan Turing's paper describes the universal machine that every computer since has imitated.

August 6, 1945
The first atomic weapon used in war detonates above a city at 08:15 local time.

November 20, 1945
The International Military Tribunal opens, and international criminal law begins.

February 14, 1946
The first general-purpose electronic computer is unveiled in Philadelphia.

December 23, 1947
Bell Labs demonstrates the device that every later computer is built from.

December 10, 1948
The UN General Assembly adopts the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Paris.
October 1, 1949
Mao Zedong declares the founding of the People's Republic of China in Beijing.