Industrial Revolution
Steam engine, railway, telegraph, photograph, telephone, light bulb. The century when energy gets divorced from animals and humans get divorced from distance.
Part of First
14 moments in this segment.
- — Newcomen's Atmospheric Engine. Thomas Newcomen builds the first commercially-successful steam engine — pumps water out of Cornish tin mines. James Watt's improved version arrives 60 years later.
- — Hot-Air Balloon. The Montgolfier brothers fly their first passenger-carrying balloon over Versailles — a sheep, a duck, and a rooster aboard. Two months later humans fly. Aviation begins.
- — Vaccination. Edward Jenner inoculates an 8-year-old with cowpox to protect against smallpox. Smallpox is the first disease eradicated by vaccination (1980); polio and measles are next.
- — Battery (Voltaic Pile). Alessandro Volta stacks zinc and copper discs separated by saltwater-soaked card. The first reliable source of sustained electric current. The unit "volt" is named for him.
- — Steam Locomotive. Richard Trevithick's "Penydarren" hauls 10 tons of iron and 70 men along nine miles of Welsh track. Steam railways spread across Britain in the 1820s, the world by 1860.
- — Electric Motor. Michael Faraday demonstrates electromagnetic rotation — a wire carrying current rotates around a magnet. The principle behind every electric motor since.
- — Photograph. Joseph Nicéphore Niépce takes "View from the Window at Le Gras" — an 8-hour bitumen-coated pewter exposure of his courtyard in Burgundy. The oldest surviving photograph.
- — Electric Telegraph. Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail patent a single-wire telegraph using on/off current pulses. In 1844 Morse sends "What hath God wrought" from Washington to Baltimore. Communication detaches from physical transport.
- — Surgical Anesthesia. William T. G. Morton publicly demonstrates ether anesthesia at Massachusetts General Hospital. Major surgery becomes survivable; the operation rate goes 10×.
- — Transatlantic Telegraph Cable. Cyrus West Field lays the first cable between Valentia, Ireland and Heart's Content, Newfoundland. Queen Victoria messages President Buchanan on Aug 16. The cable fails in weeks; a working one is laid in 1866.
- — Periodic Table. Dmitri Mendeleev publishes the periodic table of elements, leaving gaps for elements not yet discovered and predicting their properties. Gallium, scandium, germanium are all later found with the exact properties predicted.
- — Telephone. Alexander Graham Bell transmits "Mr. Watson — come here — I want to see you" three days after his patent grants. By 1881 every major American city has telephone exchanges.
- — Sound Recording (Phonograph). Thomas Edison records and plays back "Mary Had a Little Lamb" on a tinfoil cylinder. The first device that captures sound and replays it.
- — Incandescent Light Bulb. Thomas Edison's carbon-filament bulb runs for 13.5 hours in his Menlo Park lab. The Pearl Street Station (1882) becomes the first commercial power plant. Cities stop sleeping.
