Inventions Timeline 1500–1799 ∼ The Roots of Modern Science Nicolaus Copernicus, a Polish mathematician, develops new theories of a sun-centered universe (c. 1500) / Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) and Galileo Galilei (1564–1642)...

Inventors in the eighteenth century worked to make life easier. Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) introduced bifocal eyeglasses and a stove that warmed a whole room. The three-color print process and wood-pulp paper brought us newspapers, magazines, and...

The age of humanism that followed the Medieval era built upon a revolution in science that celebrated human curiosity and its use of rational inquiry. This embrace of human discovery also affected technology with a rational approach to the material...

The medieval era often is considered a time of modest achievements, literally a middle period between the substantial intellectual achievements of Greece and Rome and the Renaissance. Yet this sweeping generalization was not true for technology, which...

The eighteenth century saw the transformation of technology from a small-scale, handcrafted activity to a mechanized industrial system. Building on improvements in agriculture, on established small-scale production (proto-industrialization), and on...

Invention (from the Latin invenire, to find or to discover) in a broad sense refers to any novel idea or the process of its creation. In the technological sense it means the identification of a science or technology potential matching a specific...

What we think of as the modern world was born not in the twentieth century but in the technological innovations of the nineteenth century. Almost everything that is quintessentially modern—rapid transportation and communication, entrepreneurship...

1900-1949 The industrial revolution, which transformed technology in the nineteenth century, entered a second or mature phase by the beginning of the twentieth century. The widespread use of iron, coal, and steam in the 1800s provided a foundation for...

Technology in the ancient and classical worlds reached impressive levels of achievement. The use of simple tools, skilled management of large numbers of workers (many of them slaves), and the absence of time pressure allowed these societies to create...

A discovery of a new product or process of production which is often crudely measured by PATENT statistics. Economists have analysed the rate of invention as a function of the business cycle, the type of market or the organization of scientific...

An invention is an object, process, or technique which displays an element of novelty. An invention may sometimes be based on earlier developments, collaborations or ideas, and the process of invention requires at least the awareness that an existing...