The PESC Engineering Timeline
65,000,000 BC The terrestrial reptile dinosaurs no longer roam earth
| 3,500,000 BC Approximate human origin
|
|
|-- 300,000 BC Some evidence of counting (notches in animal bone)
|
|
|-- 250,000 BC Oldest surviving wood tool
|
|-- 100,000 BC Neanderthal culture in Asia, Africa & Europe
| Using fire for cooking, protection and warmth
| Stone tools
| Storage pits for food1
|
|
|--- 40,000 BC First people settle in Greece
| Hunters and food gatherers2
|
|
|--- 35,000 BC Neanderthal culture disappearing
|
| Cro-Magnon culture developing
| Sewing needles made from bone
|
| Migration of the first Americans across
| the Bering Strait
|
|--- 20,000 BC Bow and arrow developed (by Cro-Magnon people)
| Ice Age - In some areas the glacial ice was 2 miles thick!
|
|--- 10,000 BC End of last Ice Age
|
|--- 8,000 BC Earliest Domestication of animals
|
|--- 7,000 BC Agriculture begins in the Americas
| Pottery in use
|
|---- 4000 BC Solid wheels used on carts
|
| People Along the Nile starting to build canals to
| control flooding and provide irrigation
|
|---- 3500 BC Potter's wheel in use
| Sumerians Develop cuneiform writing
| Egyptians develop hieroglyphic writing
|
|---- 3100 BC Rice domesticated in the region of the Yangtze River
|
| Egyptian civilization arose in Nile Valley
|
|---- 3000 BC Masonry dams in use
| Mortise and tendon wood joints in use
|
| The population of the city of Uruk (located on the
| Euphrates River), reaches 50,000.1
|
|
|---- 2900 BC Start of the Bronze Age in Greece2
|
|
|---- 2800 BC Plywood invented in Egypt
| Carpentry at a mastery by most advanced civilizations
|
|
|---- 2600 BC Pyramid of Gizeh built
|
|
|---- 2000 BC Spoke wheels in use
|
|
|---- 1800 BC Lever used (oars)
|
|---- 1500 BC Phoenicians develop an alphabet
|
| Farming common in Central America
|
|---- 1350 BC sundial
| use of iron
| water clocks
|
|---- 1200 BC Dorian invaders overtake the Mycenaean Greeks using
| Iron weapons. The Mycenaeans used Bronze weapons.1
|
|
|---- 700 BC Invention of Aqueducts
|
|----c. 500 BC Pythagoras develops the concepts of geometry1
|
|
|---- 400 BC Water wheel in use
| Catapults invented
|
|---- 399 BC Socrates executed
|
|---- 387 BC Plato starts Academy in Athens
|
|---- 350 BC The Chinese develop a printing press with
| symbols carved on a wooden block
|
|---- 343 BC Aristotle (384-322 BC), a student of Plato, becomes tutor
| of Alexander of Macedonia (Alexander the Great)
| Aristotle correctly defined the shape of the surface of water as spherical.
| He incorrectly thought the shape was the result of the center of the earth and universe coinciding.
|
|---- 323 BC The Greek Leader, Alexander the Great, dies
| of a fever in Babylon at the age of 32
|
|---- 332 BC City of Alexandria, Egypt founded
|
|---- 300 BC Euclid writes Elements, on Geometry1
|
|
|
|---- 200 BC Archimedes (287-212 BC)
| ( the birth of fluidstatics & earliest recorded writing in mechanics)
|
| Archimedes made statics (engineering mechanics) an Autonomous theoretical science3
|
| He extensively studies the center of gravity of object and made many postulates as axioms
| As an example:
| Proposition IV. - If two magnitudes do not have the same centre of gravity,
| the centre of gravity of the magnitude made up of these two magnitudes is the point situated
| at the middle of the line which joins their centres of gravity.3
|
| Archimedes developed:
| the principle of buoyancy
| the lever
| the compound pulley
| cranes & the water screw (pump)
|
|
| The population of Alexandria is 200,000
|
|
|---- 30 BC End of the Hellenistic Age (the Greeks)
|--------------------------------------------------------------------
|---- 50 AD Vitruvius writes ten volume compendium of
| Roman engineering practice
|
| Buddhism introduced in China
|
|---- 105 Tsai Lun invents paper
|
|---- 400 Windmill in use in China
|
|---- 476 Western Roman Empire Collapsed
|
|---- 700 Chinese invent Porcelain
|
|---- 820 Algebra Invented
|
|---- 1242 Roger Bacon describes the preparation of gunpowder ( in use in China in 1000 AD)
|
|---- 1428 Painter, Masaccio (1401-1428) introduces perspective - a technique
| that brought a three-dimensional look to painting
|
|---- 1450 The Chinese develop a printing press that uses
| Movable wooden blocks
|
|---- 1454 Johannes Gutenburg invents a printing press
| with movable metal type
|
|---- 1500 Birth of Engineering Science (start of Renaissance)
|
|
|---- 1550 Simon Stevin (stuh-veen') (military and civil
| engineer) develops the
| parallelogram law for the addition of forces
|
|
|---- 1588 First Engineering Handbook (mostly sketches) written
| by Ramelli
|
|---- 1596 Birth of Rene Descartes (1596-1650) French scientist
| and philosopher Descartes developed the Cartesian
| Coordinate System. His name in Latin is Renatus Cartesius.4
|
|
|---- 1607 Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in America,
| is established in southeast Virginia
|
|---- 1614 John Napier (Scottish mathematician) publishes his discovery of logarithms
|
|---- 1616 William Shakespeare died
|
|---- 1622 William Oughtred invents the slide rule
|
|---- 1637 The invention of ANALYTIC GEOMETRY by Rene
| Descartes (see above)
|
|
|---- 1638 Galileo's book, "Two New Sciences" published
| This is believed to be the first book published in the
| field of strength of materials! In it he states,
|
| "A small obelisk or column or other solid figure can
| certainly be laid down or set up without danger of
| breaking, while very large ones will go to pieces under
| the slightest provocation, and that purely on account
| of their own weight."
|
| Up to this point it was thought, by many builders, that a safe method
| of building bigger buildings was to simply scale up the dimensions
| of the structure's individual elements (wall, columns, beams etc.).
| In other words, it was considered safe to make a wall twice as tall if
| you made it twice as thick. Many buildings that were designed using
| this method FAILED.
|
| It is now known that many elements of a structure CANNOT be scaled up
| using a linear relationship!!
|
| The field of "Strength of Materials" is born!
|
| Today student engineers take a course in college
| which they refer to as "Strengths".
|
|---- 1662 Robert Hooke - Theory of elasticity
|
|---- 1679 Hooke reveals the solution to his anagram "ceiiinosssttuu" -
| "ut tensio, sic vis" - "as the extension, so the force"
| All solid material must yield to resists force.
|
|---- 1687 Newton's Laws written
|
|---- 1709 First piano built
|
|---- 1752 Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
| Showed that lighting was a form of electricity
|
|---- 1757 Leonhard Euler derived the formula for
| the buckling of a pinned-pinned column
|
|---- 1760 Mechanization of British industry began
|
|---- 1769 Watt's steam engineer built
|
|---- 1776 Americans declared independence
|
|---- 1793 Eli Whitney invents the Cotton gin
|
|---- 1795 Metric system adopted in France
|
|---- 1799 Alessandro Volta (1745-1827) Builds first battery
|
|---- 1807 Steam ship built by Robert Fulton
| Slave trade abolished in British Empire
|
| A machine that made paper in a continuous roll was patented
| by Henry and Sealy Fourdrinier
|
|---- 1814 First Steam locomotive built by George Stephenson
|
|---- 1820 Hans Oersted (1777-1851) discovered a link between
| magnetism and electricity.
|
|---- 1826 Ampere's work in electrodynamics
|
|---- 1827 Ohm's Law
| Beethoven died
|
|---- 1830 Regular passenger train servce began in England
|
|---- 1831 Faraday's electromagnetic induction device
|
|---- 1836 First telegraph (Samuel Morse)
| Texas gained independence from Mexico
|
|
|---- 1852 The American Society of Civil Engineers founded5
|
|
|---- 1856 Bessemer process for making steel developed
|
|---- 1863 Slavery abolished in the United States
|
|---- 1866 Alfred Nobel develops dynamite
|
|---- 1869 Suez Canal opened
|
|---- 1874 A U.S. Patent was granted to T.B. Rhodes for several
| different forms of hollow concrete block.6
|
| First large span (three-spans of 500 ft. )
| steel bridge - St. Louis Bridge over the Mississippi
| River, Designed by James B. Eads
|
|
|---- 1876 Alexander Graham Bell invents the telephone
|
|---- 1879 Thomas Edison invents the light bulb
|
|---- 1883 The American Society of Mechanical Engineers founded
|
|
| Completion of the Brooklyn Bridge, designed by
| John A. Roebling (Suspension - 1595 ft. span)
| Spans the East River to link Brooklyn and Manhattan
|
|---- 1884 The American Institute of Electrical Engineers founded
|
|
|---- 1885 William Stanley invents an
| alternating current transformer
|
|---- 1895 The discovery of X-rays (Roentgen)
|
|---- 1902 Air Conditioning invented
|
|---- 1903 First powered air flight
|
|---- 1908 The American Institute of Chemical Engineers founded
|
|
|
|
|---- 1912 Titanic sank
|
|---- 1914 Panama Canal opened
|
|---- 1915 Albert Einstein (1879-1955) published
| The General Theory of Relativity
|
|---- 1919 First nonstop flight across Atlantic
|
|---- 1937 First jet engine built
|
|---- 1939 Radar developed by the British
|
|---- 1940 Penicillin developed
|
|---- 1950 World population 2.3 billion
|
|---- 1953 Mount Everest climbed for first time
|
|---- 1956 Oral polio vaccine developed
|
|---- 1957 Launching of Sputnik I
|
|---- 1968 Aswan High Dam in Egypt completed
|
|---- 1969 First man on the moon
|
|---- 1977 Apple Computer releases the Apple II computer
|
|---- 1978 World population 4.4 billion
|
|---- 1982 OPEC announced cut in oil production
| Population in china reached 1 billion
|
|---- 1983 Robert Wolf writes the first Bridge Builder® analysis engine on a Wang Computer
|
|---- 1989 Bridge Builder® for the Apple II hits the market in A+ magazine
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