Technology Timelines

Three common lithium-ion battery cell formats: cylindrical, prismatic and pouch.

Technology History Ongoing

1976–Present 7 milestones

The Battery That Electrified Everything: From Lithium Chemistry to Electric Cars

How lithium-ion chemistry moved from laboratory electrodes to phones, electric vehicles and grid storage.

Explore timeline →

Diagram showing how an mRNA vaccine instructs cells to produce an antigen and trigger immunity.

Technology History Ongoing

1961–Present 8 milestones

The mRNA Journey: From Fragile Molecule to Programmable Medicine

The molecular biology, delivery engineering and clinical evidence behind mRNA vaccines and programmable medicine.

Explore timeline →

Honda's ASIMO humanoid robot performs for students and U.S. President Barack Obama at Miraikan in Tokyo.

Technology History Ongoing

1973–Present 9 milestones

The Long Road to Humanoid Robots: From Walking Machines to AI Workers

From integrated walking machines to AI-guided industrial pilots, and the hard gap between demonstrations and useful work.

Explore timeline →

Artist's rendering of a GPS Block III satellite in orbit above Earth.

Technology History Ongoing

1957–Present 14 milestones

How GPS Became Invisible Infrastructure: Satellites, Smartphones and Precise Time

From Cold War navigation experiments to the positioning and timing utility behind maps, mobile networks, finance and power systems.

Explore timeline →

Digital illustration of CRISPR-Cas9 editing a DNA strand.

Technology History Ongoing

1987–Present 16 milestones

From Bacterial Defence to Medicine: The CRISPR Gene-Editing Revolution

How a bacterial immune system became a programmable editor, an ethical controversy and an approved treatment.

Explore timeline →

Illustration of immune cells attacking cancer after checkpoint inhibition releases immune brakes.

Technology History Ongoing

1942–Present 13 milestones

How Cancer Treatment Became Personal: From Chemotherapy to Precision Immunotherapy

How cancer treatment progressed from broadly toxic chemicals to therapies selected by tumour markers, engineered immune cells and patient-specific molecular information.

Explore timeline →

An 18th-century Qing dynasty print depicting Cai Lun as the patron saint of papermaking

Invention

0105–1844 8 milestones

The Invention and Global Spread of Paper

From Cai Lun's refinement of papermaking in Han China around 105 CE to Friedrich Gottlob Keller's invention of wood-pulp paper in 1844, this timeline follows how paper spread from China through the Islamic world to Europe, evolving from a hand-made luxury into a raw material for mass production.

Explore timeline →

Brain-computer interface hardware used for long-term communication by a person living with ALS.

Technology History Ongoing

1875–Present 10 milestones

From Brain Signals to Digital Speech: The Evolution of Brain-Computer Interfaces

How scientists learned to record, decode and translate neural activity into control, movement and communication, and why dependable daily use remains harder than a laboratory record.

Explore timeline →

IBM Quantum laboratory with a cryogenic quantum computing system

Technology History Ongoing

1981–Present 11 milestones

The Road to Useful Quantum Computing: From Qubits to Error Correction

A living timeline of the theories, experiments and engineering milestones behind the effort to build quantum computers that solve useful problems beyond the reach of classical machines.

Explore timeline →

SpaceX Falcon 9 launching Crew Dragon with NASA astronauts on the Demo-2 mission

Company Industry History Ongoing

2002–Present 12 milestones

SpaceX and the New Commercial Space Race: From Falcon 1 to Starship

A living timeline of how SpaceX, NASA partnerships and reusable rockets reshaped launch economics, cargo delivery, human spaceflight, satellite internet and the ambitions of the commercial space industry.

Explore timeline →

ASML engineers assembling an extreme ultraviolet lithography system inside a semiconductor cleanroom

Industry History Ongoing

1987–Present 9 milestones

The Global AI Chip War: GPUs, Foundries and the Race for Computing Power

A living timeline of the technologies, companies and government policies that turned advanced semiconductors into the strategic infrastructure of artificial intelligence.

Explore timeline →

A grid of varied images generated by DALL-E from text prompts.

Technology History Ongoing

2014–Present 17 milestones

From GANs to AI Agents: The Evolution of Generative AI

How generative AI progressed from adversarial image synthesis to foundation models that create across media, reason through difficult problems and use software tools to complete multi-step tasks.

Explore timeline →