Science History Timeline Before 1900

A List of Science History Sites | Timeline after 1900

Birth of Key People

Significant Events
15,000 - 10,000 BC - The world warms out of the latest Ice Age. 8,000 BC - Pottery invented. 3,500 BC - Invention of the wheel. 3,000 BC - Pyramid of Giza and Stonehenge built. 1,800 BC - Babylonian multiplication tables. 1,200 BC - Iron working developed.

625 BC - Thales of Miletus, Greek philosopher who proposed that the Earth is a disc which floats on water. 605 to 562 BC - Nebuchadnezzar creates the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. 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. 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. 427 BC - Plato, Greek philosopher who proposed that all objects in the Universe moved in perfect circles around the Earth. 388 BC - Heraklides of Pontus, Greek philosopher and astronomer who taught that the Earth turns on its axis once every 24 hours. 384 BC - Aristotle, Greek philosopher

who taught that everything in the material world is composed of four elements - fire, earth, air, and water. 312 BC - First aqueduct built to bring water to Rome. 306 BC - Euclid, established Euclidean geometry. 265 BC - Archimedes discovers the law of specific gravity. 260 BC to 100 BC - Construction of the Great Wall of China. 79 AD - Pompeii and Herculaneum destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius. 100 AD - Ptolemy, Greek astronomer who taught that the stars were attached to a single crystal sphere surrounding the Earth. 400 AD - The term "chemistry" first used by scholars in Alexandria. 500 AD - Invention of the abacus. 525 AD - Introduction of the Christian calendar. 600 AD - Chinese invent the block printing press. 1100 - Chinese use magnetic compass. 1250 - Invention of the quill pen. 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. 1310 - First mechanical clocks in Europe. 1350 - Jean Buridan developes the idea of "impetus", a forerunner of the modern concept of inertia. 1365 - First use of cannon in warfare, in China.

1440 - Gutenberg developes the moveable type printing press. 1452 - Leonardo da Vinci 1473 - Nicolaus Copernicus, Polish astronomer who proposed the idea that the Sun, not the Earth, is the center of the Solar System. 1492 - Columbus discovers the islands off the east coast of Central America. A geographer namedMartin Behaim makes the first globe. 1498 - Vasco de Gama voyages to India around the Cape of Good Hope. 1519 - Ferdinand Magellan completes the first circumnavigation of the globe. 1550 - Leonard Digges develops the first reflecting telescope using a curved mirror. 1564 - Galileo Galilei, could be considered the first scientist because of his realization of the importance of actually carrying out experiments to test theories. 1571 - Johannes Kepler, discovered the three laws of planetary motion. 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. 1596 - Tycho Brahe, made accurate measurements of the positions of stars and the movements of planets. 1605 - Sir Francis Bacon writes Advancement of Learning, in which he encourages the scientific investigation of the world. 1610 - Galileo's book The Starry Messenger is published, recording his observations of thousands of stars he observed with a refracting telescope. 1627 - Robert Boyle, English pioneer of

chemistry, best remembered for "Boyle's Law". 1633 - Galileo tried for heresy because of his teaching that the Earth moved around the Sun. 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. 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. 1706 - Benjamin Franklin 1714 - Gabriel Fahrenheit, devises a mercury thermometer and uses the temperature scale that will later be named after him. 1729 - James Bradley uses the aberration of stars to determine a more accurate speed of light. 1736 - Charles Augustin Coulomb, French physicist who proposed the relationship between charges now known as Coulomb's Law. 1738 - Daniel Bernoulii describes the behavior of a gas in terms of the motion of tiny particles. 1742 - Anders Celsius invents the temperature scale which now bears his name. 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. 1756 - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart 1758 - The "Imperial" system of weights and measures formally established in

Britain. 1766 - John Dalton, English chemist who pioneered the use of the atomic theory to explain chemical reactions. 1769 - The automibile, powered by steam, was invented by Nicholas Cugnot. 1770 - Ludwig van Beethoven 1776 - Amedeo Avogadro, showed that the chemical formula for water is H2O, not HO. 1777 - Hans Christian Oersted, German mathematician who pioneered the development of non-Euclidean geometry. 1787 - Joseph von Fraunhofer, discovered that there are many dark lines in the spectrum of white light from the Sun. 1788 - Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac, made an important contribution to the understanding of gas behavior. 1791 - Michael Faraday, English chemist responsible for introducing the concepts of magnetic fields. 1796 - Edward Jenner develops a vaccination for smallpox. 1798 - Henry Cavendish determines the mass of the Earth, establishing that it has an average density 5.5 times that of water. 1801 - Jean Lamarck publishes his ideas on evolution. 1803 - Christian Johann Doppler, predicted what is now known as the Doppler effect. 1803 - Successful trials of Robert Fulton's steamboat. 1807 - Thomas Young, English physicist introduces the concept, and word, "energy". 1809 - Charles Darwin 1814 - Leon Foucault, inventor of the gyroscope. 1820 - John Tyndall - Popularized science

and discovered the Tyndall effect, which helps explain why the sky is blue. 1821 - Catholic Church lifts its ban on teaching the Copernican theory. 1824 - William Thomson (Baron Kelvin of Largs) - devised the temperature scale now named after him. 1830 - Julius Lothar Meyer, discovered the periodic pattern of the chemical elements, independently of Mendeleyev. 1830 - English-speaking Americans begin to spread West. 1831 - Darwin begins his voyage on the HMS Beagle. 1834 - Dmitri Mendeleyev, developer of a 1834 - Louis Braille perfects a system of periodic table that correctly predicted reading for the blind. the existence of unknown elements. 1837 - Samuel Morse patents his electric telegraph. 1839 - Charles Goodyear develops a technique for "vulcanizing" rubber. 1844 - Coast to coast telegraph in USA. 1845 - Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen, discoverer of X-rays. 1846 - Foundation of the Smithsonian Institution. 1849 - California gold rush. Lord Kelvin coins the term "thermodynamics". 1851 - Leon Foucault makes use of a long pendulum to demonstrate the rotation of the Earth. 1852 - Antoine Henri Becquerel, discoverer of radioactivity. 1852 - William Ramsay, discoverer of the inert gases. The only person to discover an entire group of elements in the periodic table in 1904. 1856 - J. J. Thomson, discovered the electron in 1906. 1858 - Max Ernst Karl Ludwig Planck, proposed the foundations of the quantum

theory in 1900. 1859 - Svante August Arrhenius, explained that when a chemical compound dissolves in water, it dissociates into electrically charged ions. 1859 - Publication of the Origin of species. First internal combustion engine developed by Jean Lenoir. First oil well drilled in Titusville, PA. 1862 - Richard Gatling invents the machine gun. 1867 - Marie Curie, received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1911 for her discovery of radium and polonium. 1868 - Robert Andrews Millikan, received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1923 for measuring the charge on the electron. 1869 - First periodic table published by Dmitri Mendeleyev. 1871 - Ernest Rutherford, received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1908 for describing the atomic nucleus. 1875 - Gilbert Newton Lewis, invented the idea of the covalent bond. 1878 - Telephone invented. 1879 - Albert Einstein 1879 - Thomas Edison invents the electric light bulb. 1884 - The meridian through the Royal Greenwhich Observatory established as the "prime meridian" from which longitude is to be measured. 1885 - Niels Hendrik David Bohr, received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922 for his theoretical model of atomic structure. 1885 - Automobile invented. Sir Sanford Fleming, chief engineer of the Canadian Pacific Railway, devised time zones.

1887 - Henry Gwyn Mosley, defined the atomic number of an element as a 1887 - Alternating current electric motor measure of the charge on the nucleus of an invented by Nikola Tesla. atom of the element. 1889 - Edwin Powell Hubble, proved that 1889 - Eiffel Tower completed. many objects classified as nebulae are Oklahoma land run. other galaxies.

1891 - James Chadwick, discoverer of the neutron. 1895 - Guglielmo Marconi invents the radio. 1898 - Leo Szilard, played a major part in the development of the atomic bomb. 1899 - Aspirin marketed. Continue to 1900s Sweet Springs Science Central