Articles about inventions & science across every continent and era, oldest first.
A lump raised from a wreck off Antikythera showed a gear wheel in 1902. X-ray studies from 2005 to 2021 read its 30 gears as an eclipse and planet machine.
· 100 BCThe Maya wrote zero as a shell glyph in base-20 numbers by 665. The Long Count dates to 40–20 BC; India's first agreed dated zero is 876.
· 36 BCVesuvius carbonized a Roman villa's library in AD 79. Scans and machine learning now read the scrolls unopened: a first word in 2023, a whole roll by 2026.
· AD 79Two histories record Emperor Yang's canal orders of 605 to 610. For the Yongji Canal of 608 one counts over a million workers, the other over five million.
· AD 605Tang and Abbasid armies fought at Talas in July 751, but Sogdian letters on paper from about 313 show Central Asia had paper centuries earlier.
· AD 751From 762 to 833 the Abbasid caliphs paid translators in Baghdad to turn Greek, Persian and Indian works of medicine, astronomy and mathematics into Arabic.
· AD 830Maya astronomers put Venus's cycle at 584 days, near NASA's 583.92, and the year at 365.242 days, using sighting sticks. A Venus table survives in Dresden.
· AD 900Wood cut at L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, dates to AD 1021 by a radiocarbon spike from a 993 solar storm. It is the cutting year, not the arrival year.
· 1021Ancestral Pueblo people carried about 240,000 beams 75 km into Chaco Canyon from 850 to 1130, then moved on in a drought; 19 Pueblos and the Hopi claim it.
· 1050Navigators read star houses, swells, clouds and birds. East Polynesia was settled about AD 1025 to 1290, and Hokulea sailed to Tahiti in 1976.
· 1200A one-line colophon dates the Jikji's metal-type printing to 1377 at Heungdeoksa in Cheongju. Its only surviving volume is at the BnF in Paris.
· 1377From 1405 to 1433 the Yongle emperor's eunuch admiral led seven fleets from China to East Africa. Why they ended is argued: cost, Mongols, court politics.
· 1405Ulugh Beg's observatory at Samarkand held an arc of about 40 m radius. Its star tables were finished by 1440; he was put to death on October 25, 1449.
· 1429The Sejong Sillok records 28 new letters in 1443 and a finished Hunminjeongeum in 1446, with Choe Malli's 1444 memorial of protest between them.
· 1446A notary's record of November 6, 1455, is the only contemporary source for the Gutenberg Bible, printed at Mainz in about 180 copies; 49 are known.
· 1455A gazelle-skin fragment names about twenty source charts, including one by Columbus. Found at Topkapi in 1929, it carries a disputed Antarctica claim.
· 1513The colophon reads Basel, Oporinus, June 1543. Vesalius's Fabrica gave the sternum three parts, not Galen's seven. His annotated 1555 copy surfaced in 2007
· 1543Potosí silver, found in 1545 and refined with mercury by forced mita labor, sailed to Seville and, on Manila galleons, to China, the era's silver sink.
· 1572Finished at Tlatelolco in 1577 by Sahagún and Nahua scholars, ordered to Spain by Philip II, in Medici hands by 1587, in Florence from 1783, online 2023.
· 1577What the Ming History says Ricci offered the Wanli court in 1601, the six-panel world map of 1602, the Chinese Euclid of 1607, the grave granted in 1610.
· 1601Galileo's Sidereus Nuncius, printed by Baglioni in Venice in 550 copies, reported a rough Moon and four bodies circling Jupiter, seen from January 7, 1610.
· 1610The Vasa Museum says the warship foundered minutes into its 1628 voyage. The inquest found no one guilty; Franzén found the wreck in 1956, raised in 1961.
· 1628Lancashire machines from 1764, the Cromford mill of 1771, high wages and cheap coal explain why cotton factories appeared first in the English Midlands and North.
· 1771Queen Victoria opened the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park on May 1, 1851. The Royal Commission put its glass hall at 1,851 feet; its catalogue, 1,848.
· 1851
