Beginner’s Guide

This is an introductory map of technological invention across two thousand years, from Hero’s aeolipile to ChatGPT, 73 figures threading together the seven technical lines of writing, power, electricity, flight, life science, the computer, and artificial intelligence. The goal is not to memorize "who invented what" but to see how an invention grew out of someone else’s failure or half-finished work — behind almost everyone’s story stands an earlier person.

A Few Things to Know First

The "priority dispute" is exceedingly common in the history of technology — the telephone (Bell vs. Gray), radio (Marconi vs. Tesla), the DNA double helix (Watson and Crick vs. Franklin) — this site states the acknowledged course of events and the re-evaluation of modern scholarship, without adjudicating for any side "who was really the inventor"; how you see it is your own judgment.
"Invention" and "profit" are often two unrelated things: Gutenberg lost his own printing workshop, Goodyear died in poverty while the "Goodyear" tire company has no equity relation to him, and Faraday and Farnsworth were both robbed of commercial success by better-capitalized rivals — the history of technology is not a fairy tale of "a good idea will naturally have a good ending."
For figures of complex historical judgment such as von Braun, this site states directly the fact that his early V-2 development made heavy use of concentration-camp forced labor, not avoiding or beautifying it because of his later contribution to the Apollo Moon program; both histories must be remembered at once.
Women’s contributions in the history of technology have long been systematically underrated — Franklin’s X-ray diffraction data, Lamarr’s frequency-hopping patent, Hopper’s and Hamilton’s core work in early computing — this site tries to restore this history in their entries and "modern echoes" columns, but this restoration itself began only gradually decades later, a point worth noting.

A Few Suggestions

Look at the timeline first to see "what else was happening in the world when this technology appeared" — the improvement of the steam engine and Lavoisier overturning the phlogiston theory happened at almost the same time, and such contemporary contrasts are often more interesting than reading one person’s biography alone.
The "teacher/student" labels in the relationship graph mark inheritance on the technical thread, not real face-to-face apprenticeship — Bi Sheng and Gutenberg, four hundred years apart, never met, and the "teacher" label only means Gutenberg’s printing carried on, in inventive logic, the movable-type idea Bi Sheng began.
Note the content in each card’s "differing versions" column; these are real, still-discussed disputes in the history of technology, and when you read them it is best to keep the mindset of "understanding the dispute" rather than rushing to "take a side."

How to Read

To know "how an invention emerged"

Look at the teacher–student links in the relationship graph — Watt’s separate condenser was built on the experience of repairing a Newcomen engine model, Benz’s automobile could not do without the four-stroke principle Otto established, and almost every seemingly out-of-nowhere invention has a clear thread of technical inheritance behind it, very few truly "from scratch."

To know "who was wronged in this history"

Focus on the "who is this" and "modern echoes" parts of the cards of Franklin (Rosalind), Lamarr, Hopper, Hamilton, Goodyear, and Gutenberg; the history of technology is not always fair, some contributing greatly yet dying in poverty, some having their key data taken by others to publish, and these injustices are themselves a part of the history of technology worth knowing.

To know "how technology spread on the map"

Look at the dashed trade routes on the world map — papermaking spread west from Luoyang all the way to Gutenberg’s Mainz, nearly thirteen hundred years apart; von Braun’s team was secretly moved by "Operation Paperclip" from Peenemünde in Nazi Germany to Huntsville in the US — the spread path of technology is itself often as intriguing as the technology.

Going Deeper: General History-of-Technology Reading

James Burke, ConnectionsA classic history-of-technology book and documentary of the same name, skilled at revealing the unexpected causal chains between seemingly unrelated inventions, highly in tune with this site’s "relationship graph" core approach.

Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific RevolutionsProposing the far-reaching philosophy-of-science concept of the "paradigm shift," an important theoretical framework for understanding why major theoretical breakthroughs in the history of technology are often accompanied by fierce dispute.

Walter Isaacson, The InnovatorsFocusing on the history of the computer and the internet, recounting in detail the technical inheritance from Babbage and Lovelace to Jobs and Berners-Lee, an important reference for this site’s "Computing and Information Age" timeline block.

Going Deeper: Biographies and Focused Reading

Walter Isaacson, Steve JobsThe official biography authorized by Jobs himself, recording in detail his complex, many-sided character and product philosophy, a first-hand source for understanding Apple’s rise.

Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The EnigmaThe most authoritative and detailed biography of Turing, deeply recounting his full life in computer theory, codebreaking, and personal experience; the film The Imitation Game is adapted from this book.

Brenda Maddox, Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNAA systematic tracing of Franklin’s key contribution in the discovery of the DNA double helix and the historical reasons her long lack of recognition, an important reference for re-evaluating this affair in the history of technology.

A Timeline of Coordinates

Antiquity and the Middle Ages (1st–15th centuries)

c. 1st c. AD Hero designs the aeolipile and other automata
c. 105 Cai Lun improves papermaking
c. 1040 Bi Sheng invents movable-type printing
1206 Al-Jazari completes the Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices
1440s Gutenberg invents the metal-type printing press

The Scientific Revolution and the First Industrial Revolution (17th – early 19th centuries)

1687 Newton publishes the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy
1712 Newcomen builds the practical atmospheric steam engine
1769 Watt patents the separate condenser
1789 Lavoisier publishes the Elementary Treatise on Chemistry
1804 Jacquard invents the punched-card figured loom

The Century of Electricity and Steel (19th century)

1831 Faraday discovers electromagnetic induction
1856 Bessemer invents the converter process
1866 Mendel publishes his genetics paper
1876 Bell invents the telephone, the same year Otto establishes the four-stroke engine principle
1879 Edison develops the practical incandescent lamp

Flight, Radioactivity, and Relativity (early 20th century)

1885 Benz invents the modern automobile
1895 Röntgen discovers X-rays
1898 The Curies discover radium and polonium
1903 The Wright Brothers complete the first powered flight
1905 Einstein’s "miracle year"

The Computing and Information Age (mid-to-late 20th century)

1936 Turing publishes the computability-theory paper
1945 Von Neumann proposes the stored-program architecture
1953 Watson and Crick determine the DNA double helix
1958 Kilby invents the integrated circuit
1969 Apollo 11 lands on the Moon, the same year ARPANET is established
1989 Berners-Lee proposes the World Wide Web

The Explosion of Deep Learning and Generative AI (2006–present)

2006 Hinton publishes the deep-belief-network paper
2012 AlexNet wins the ImageNet competition overwhelmingly
2014 Goodfellow proposes the generative adversarial network
2016 AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol
2017 A Google team publishes "Attention Is All You Need"
2022 ChatGPT is released, its users breaking a hundred million in two months