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From Gutenberg to the Internet Timeline An Annotated Chronology of the History of Information from about 30,000 B.C.E. to the present, by Jeremy M. Norman. |
| 1920194019501960 |
|
1750 |
Printing by hand on wooden printing presses remains a very laborious process that has not improved dramatically since the 15th century. A competent printer can expect to print about 100 sheets per hour. |
| 1753 | The British Museum is formed from the collection of 70,000 objects including a library, and an herbarium, collected by the physician and naturalist, Sir Hans Sloane. |
1755 |
Thomas Simpson describes the “advantage of taking the mean of a number of observations,” a landmark in statistical inference, and the earliest formal treatment of any data-processing. |
| 1757 | King George II donates the 'Old Royal Library' of the sovereigns of England to the British Museum. With that gift the British Museum obtains the privilege of acquiring books by copyright receipt. |
1763 |
Thomas Bayes's paper enunciating Bayes's Theorem for calculating “inverse probabilities” is published two years after his death. |
1764 |
James Hargreaves invents the spinning jenny, which spins eight threads simultaneously. |
| 1764-66 | Printer and type founder Pierre-Simon Fournier le Jeune issues his Manuel typographique. The first volume concerns type-founding and contains plates showing instruments used by the type-founder. The second volume shows a vast range of type specimens. |
1766 |
The British Government sanctions Nevil Maskelyne, the astronomer royal, to produce each year a set of navigational tables, to be called the Nautical Almanac. This is the first permanent table-making project in the world. The tables will greatly improve accuracy of navigation. They become known as the “Seaman’s bible.” The product of human computers working by hand, the accuracy of these tables is dependent upon the accuracy of the people producing them. These tables will become notorious for their errors during the time of Charles Babbage. |
1769 |
Richard Arkwright patents his hydraulic spinning machine. He builds a factory for this machine in 1781, creating disruptive economic and social changes characteristic of the Industrial Revolution. |
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Wolfgang von Kempelen builds his chess-playing Turk, an automaton that purports to play chess. Although the machine displays an elaborate gear mechanism, its cabinet actually conceals a human controlling the moves of the machine. The Turk will become the most famous automaton in history. |
1770 |
The first banker’s clearing house, the earliest large-scale data-processing organization, is founded in London. |
1772 |
Wilhelm Haas of Basel builds a new type of printing press in which all parts subject to stress during the printing process are made of iron, including both the bed and the platen. Building key parts of the handpress out of iron greatly improves the efficiency of the press. |
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| 1920194019501960 |
(This page was last revised on
March 18, 2006. Please report errors and broken links to jnorman@jnorman.com.) |
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