
Movable type in Mainz
January 1, 1440
Johannes Gutenberg begins printing with movable metal type, and the cost of a page collapses.
These minutes are held permanently by the registry. They carry a date, a source, and nothing for sale.

January 1, 1440
Johannes Gutenberg begins printing with movable metal type, and the cost of a page collapses.

October 12, 1492
A Spanish expedition under Columbus reaches an island in the Bahamas, opening four centuries of contact and conquest.

October 31, 1517
Martin Luther circulates his objections to indulgences in Wittenberg.

September 6, 1522
The Victoria reaches Sanlucar de Barrameda with eighteen survivors, the first ship to circle the world.

May 24, 1543
Copernicus receives the printed De revolutionibus on the day he dies.

July 5, 1687
Newton sets out the laws of motion and universal gravitation.

July 4, 1776
The Second Continental Congress adopts the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia.

July 14, 1789
A Paris crowd takes the fortress, and the French Revolution has its symbol.

July 1, 1826
Nicephore Niepce fixes a view from his window at Le Gras after hours of exposure.

November 24, 1859
Darwin publishes, and the first print run sells out the same day.

January 1, 1863
Lincoln declares enslaved people in the rebelling states to be free.

November 17, 1869
Two seas are joined and the route to Asia is cut by thousands of miles.

March 10, 1876
Alexander Graham Bell speaks the first words transmitted by telephone to Thomas Watson in Boston.

October 22, 1879
Edison and his team run a carbon filament lamp long enough to make electric light practical.

March 31, 1889
Gustave Eiffel raises the French flag at the top of the tallest structure in the world.

December 28, 1895
The Lumiere brothers show paying audiences moving pictures at the Grand Cafe in Paris.

April 6, 1896
The Games open in Athens with fourteen nations.

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.

February 28, 1953
Watson and Crick settle on the double helix in Cambridge.

May 29, 1953
Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay stand on the highest point on Earth.

April 18, 1955
The physicist dies in Princeton, having declined surgery the day before.

December 1, 1955
A refusal in Montgomery, Alabama begins a 381-day bus boycott.

October 4, 1957
The first artificial satellite begins transmitting its signal from low Earth orbit.

November 3, 1957
The first living passenger reaches orbit aboard Sputnik 2 and does not return.

September 12, 1958
Jack Kilby demonstrates a working circuit built on a single piece of semiconductor.

May 16, 1960
Theodore Maiman gets coherent light out of a ruby rod at Hughes Research Laboratories.

April 12, 1961
Yuri Gagarin lifts off from Baikonur for a single orbit of the planet.

October 27, 1962
Vasili Arkhipov refuses to authorise a nuclear torpedo aboard B-59 at the height of the Cuban missile crisis.

June 16, 1963
Valentina Tereshkova lifts off aboard Vostok 6.

August 28, 1963
Martin Luther King Jr. speaks from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

November 22, 1963
Dallas time 12:30. The announcement follows from Parkland Memorial Hospital.
November 23, 1963
The first episode airs on the BBC the day after Kennedy is killed.
February 9, 1964
The Beatles play The Ed Sullivan Show and American music changes key.

December 3, 1967
Christiaan Barnard performs the first human-to-human heart transplant in Cape Town.

December 24, 1968
Apollo 8 rounds the Moon and Bill Anders photographs the Earth coming up over the limb.

July 20, 1969
The lunar module touches down in the Sea of Tranquility.

August 15, 1969
Half a million people arrive at a dairy farm in Bethel, New York.

April 14, 1970
An oxygen tank ruptures on Apollo 13 two hundred thousand miles from home.

October 29, 1971
Ray Tomlinson sends a message between two machines standing side by side.

December 7, 1972
The crew of Apollo 17 photographs the whole lit face of the Earth.

April 3, 1973
Martin Cooper calls a rival lab from a handheld phone on Sixth Avenue.
April 4, 1975
Two programmers in Albuquerque bet that software, not hardware, is the business.

July 20, 1976
The first successful landing on Mars sends back a picture of its own footpad.

September 5, 1977
The probe leaves Earth on a trajectory that will carry it out of the solar system.

April 12, 1981
The first Space Shuttle flight launches twenty years to the day after Gagarin.

September 26, 1983
A Soviet duty officer judges a missile-attack alert to be a false alarm, and is right.

September 1, 1985
Robert Ballard's team locates Titanic on the seabed after seventy-three years.

January 28, 1986
The shuttle breaks apart seventy-three seconds after launch with seven aboard.

April 26, 1986
A test at the Chernobyl plant ends in the worst nuclear accident on record.

June 4, 1989
The protests in Beijing are cleared by force; the number of dead has never been established.

November 9, 1989
A misread statement at a press conference sends Berliners to the Wall.

November 17, 1989
A student march is broken up and the Velvet Revolution begins.

April 24, 1990
The telescope leaves the shuttle payload bay and begins thirty years of looking outward.

August 6, 1991
Tim Berners-Lee posts a short summary of the World Wide Web project to Usenet.
December 25, 1991
Gorbachev resigns and the Soviet Union ceases to exist.

May 10, 1994
South Africa inaugurates its first president elected by all its citizens.

July 5, 1996
A lamb cloned from an adult cell is born at the Roslin Institute.

May 11, 1997
A machine takes a match from a reigning world chess champion for the first time.

September 4, 1998
Two Stanford students file the paperwork for a search company.

November 20, 1998
Zarya launches from Baikonur and the International Space Station begins.

January 15, 2001
An encyclopedia anyone can edit goes live and is not expected to work.

April 14, 2003
The international sequencing consortium declares the reference genome complete.

February 4, 2004
A directory for one campus goes online in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
March 21, 2006
The first post on a service that will rewrite how news travels.
January 9, 2007
Steve Jobs introduces the iPhone at Macworld in San Francisco.
June 29, 2007
The first iPhone goes on sale and the pocket computer becomes ordinary.

January 3, 2009
The first Bitcoin block is mined with a newspaper headline written into it.

October 13, 2010
The last of the trapped miners at San Jose reaches the surface after sixty-nine days.

July 4, 2012
CERN announces the observation of a boson consistent with the Higgs.

August 6, 2012
The rover lands in Gale Crater after the seven minutes of terror.

December 21, 2015
A Falcon 9 first stage lands upright at Cape Canaveral.

February 11, 2016
LIGO announces the first direct detection of gravitational waves.

April 10, 2019
The Event Horizon Telescope releases an image of the shadow at the centre of M87.

March 11, 2020
The World Health Organization uses the word for COVID-19.

May 30, 2020
Crew Dragon Demo-2 launches from Kennedy Space Center.

February 18, 2021
The rover reaches Jezero Crater carrying a helicopter under its belly.

December 25, 2021
The James Webb Space Telescope launches on an Ariane 5 from Kourou.

July 12, 2022
The first full-colour images from Webb are released.

April 8, 2024
The Moon's shadow crosses Mexico, the United States and Canada.