3.3 million years · one continuous record
All of Human History
Every invention, discovery and turning point, laid out on a single coiling spiral — the centre is three million years ago, the rim is today. Drag to pan, scroll to zoom, or jump straight to a year.
In view · 3.3 million BCE – 2026
40 entriesCuneiform writing
Sumerian scribes press wedge marks into clay to record grain, debt and law.
Sumer
Egyptian hieroglyphs
A mixed logographic and phonetic script carved in stone and inked on papyrus.
Egypt
Papyrus
Pressed reed sheets give Egypt a light, portable writing surface.
Egypt
Cuneiform accounting and schools
Scribal schools in Sumer trained clerks in arithmetic, contracts and letters.
Mesopotamia
Alphabetic writing
Proto-Sinaitic script reduces writing to a few dozen sound signs.
Sinai and Levant
Greek alphabet with vowels
Phoenician consonants adapted with explicit vowel signs.
Greece
Royal Road and postal relay
Persia builds a 2,700 km road with relay stations for imperial couriers.
Persia
Herodotus and written history
The Histories gathered testimony, geography and causation into a critical narrative.
Greece
Paper
Chinese artisans pulp hemp and rags into thin, cheap sheets.
China
Roman postal service
The cursus publicus ran relay stations and way inns along imperial roads for official traffic.
Roman Empire
Standardised papermaking
Cai Lun formalises the paper process at the Han court.
China
Woodblock printing
Carved wooden blocks print texts and images on paper in Tang China.
China
Paper mills at Samarkand and Baghdad
Papermaking passed west and became an industry supplying an expanding bureaucracy.
Central Asia
Movable type
Bi Sheng casts individual ceramic characters that can be rearranged.
China
Mongol relay post and Pax Mongolica
The yam network of remount stations carried messages thousands of kilometres.
Central Asia
Jikji, printed with metal type in Korea
Korean printers produced a Buddhist anthology with movable metal type before Gutenberg.
Korea
Printing press with movable metal type
Gutenberg combines a wine press, oil-based ink and cast type alloy.
Germany
Hangul alphabet
King Sejong's scholars designed a phonetic script whose letters depict speech organs.
Korea
Inca road system and khipu
The Inca ran 40,000 km of roads with relay runners and recorded data in knotted cords.
Andes
Encyclopedie
Diderot and d'Alembert compiled the crafts and sciences into a systematic reference.
France
Rosetta Stone deciphered project begins
A trilingual decree gave scholars the key that Champollion turned in 1822.
Egypt
Braille
Louis Braille published a six-dot tactile alphabet readable and writable by touch.
France
Electric telegraph
Morse and Cooke-Wheatstone send coded messages down wires.
Britain and United States
Transatlantic telegraph cable
A successful cable linked Ireland and Newfoundland permanently.
Atlantic
Telephone
Bell patents the transmission of speech over wire.
United States
Transatlantic radio
Marconi receives a wireless signal across the Atlantic.
Atlantic
Radio broadcast of voice and music
Reginald Fessenden transmitted speech and violin to ships at sea.
United States
Commercial radio broadcasting
Stations such as KDKA began scheduled public programmes.
United States
Television demonstrated
John Logie Baird transmitted a recognisable moving human face.
Britain
Photocopying and xerography
Chester Carlson made a dry electrostatic copy in a Queens kitchen.
United States
Hedy Lamarr and frequency hopping
Lamarr and George Antheil patented a spread-spectrum system to protect torpedo guidance.
United States
Communications satellite Telstar
Telstar relayed the first live transatlantic television pictures.
Global
ARPANET
The first packet-switched network links four American universities.
United States
Low-loss optical fibre
Corning researchers drew fibre transparent enough for long-distance signals.
United States
Handheld mobile phone call
Cooper places the first cellular call on a Motorola prototype.
United States
TCP/IP internet
ARPANET switches to TCP/IP, letting separate networks interconnect.
United States
World Wide Web
Berners-Lee proposes hypertext over the internet at CERN.
Switzerland
PageRank and web search
Google ranked pages by the structure of links between them.
United States
Wikipedia
An open, editable encyclopedia grew from volunteer contributions worldwide.
Global
Multi-touch smartphone
The iPhone merges phone, camera, browser and app platform.
United States