Technology
Events · 92
Cugnot's Steam Wagon
Tasked by the French army with building a machine to haul cannon, the engineer Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot devised a working model in 1769 and, the next year, a full-sized three-wheeled 'fardier à vapeur' driven by a front-mounted copper boiler. Ponderous and hard to steer, it crept along at little more than 2 mph and had to halt every fifteen minutes to build up steam; after several years of trials the army abandoned the project.
Reputable sourceThe Birth of Flight: The First Balloons
In 1783 the Montgolfier brothers of France launched the air age with the hot-air balloon. In November two men became the first human beings to make a free flight over Paris, and within weeks others rose aloft in a hydrogen balloon. The spectacle of humans rising into the sky electrified the world.
Reputable sourceOtto's Four-Stroke Engine
In 1876 the German engineer Nicolaus Otto built the first practical and successful four-stroke internal-combustion engine, in which a piston draws in and compresses a fuel-and-air mixture, is driven down by its ignition, then expels the exhaust — the sequence still called the 'Otto cycle' in his honour. Reliable, efficient and comparatively quiet, more than 30,000 were built within a decade.
Reputable sourceDaimler and Maybach's High-Speed Engine
Building on Otto's work, Gottlieb Daimler and his partner Wilhelm Maybach spent about a decade developing a compact, high-speed petrol engine, completing it in 1885 and fitting it that year to a wooden two-wheeler — in effect the first internal-combustion motorcycle. Their light, fast-running engine was small enough to be mounted in almost any vehicle.
Reputable sourceBenz's Patent-Motorwagen
On 29 January 1886 the German engineer Karl Benz patented his Patent-Motorwagen, a three-wheeled carriage powered by a single-cylinder petrol engine with electric ignition. It is widely regarded as the world's first practical automobile.
Reputable sourceBertha Benz's Pioneering Drive
In the summer of 1888, Karl Benz's wife Bertha, with their two sons, drove a Motorwagen some fifty miles from Mannheim to Pforzheim and back — without telling her husband. Solving mechanical problems along the way, she became the world's first long-distance motorist.
Reputable source- July 22, 1894History of the Automobile
The First Automobile Race: Paris–Rouen
On 22 July 1894 the Paris newspaper Le Petit Journal ran a roughly 126-kilometre (78-mile) 'competition for horseless carriages' from Paris to Rouen, proposed by its editor Pierre Giffard. The machines averaged about 11.6 mph. Count Jules-Albert de Dion reached Rouen first in a steam tractor, but judges ruled his stoker-fed tractor-and-trailer ineligible, and the top prize was shared by the petrol cars of Panhard & Levassor and Peugeot for best meeting the contest's conditions.
Reputable source - c. 1900History of the Automobile
The Early Electric Cars
Around 1900 electric cars were among the most popular vehicles on the road, prized for being quiet, clean, and easy to drive compared with noisy, hand-cranked petrol cars. But cheap oil, the electric starter, and above all Henry Ford's inexpensive mass-produced petrol cars soon pushed electric vehicles into a long decline.
Reputable source The Oldsmobile Curved Dash: The First Mass-Produced Car
In 1901 Ransom E. Olds began building his little gasoline 'Curved Dash' runabout on a stationary assembly line, using interchangeable parts and passing each chassis from one work station to the next. The technique let Olds turn out cars in numbers no rival could match, and the Curved Dash became the best-selling automobile in America in the years that followed — the first true mass-produced car.
Reputable sourceThe Wright Brothers
On 17 December 1903, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville and Wilbur Wright made the world's first successful flights in a powered, heavier-than-air machine. The best flight of the day lasted 59 seconds and covered 852 feet. Their breakthrough was a three-axis control system that let a pilot truly steer an aircraft.
Reputable sourceThe Ford Model T
In 1908 Henry Ford introduced the Model T, a car deliberately designed to be affordable, simple, and rugged enough for ordinary people. Cheap for its day, it was an immediate success — dealers had 15,000 orders before a single car had been built — and by the end of its run in 1927 more than 15 million had been made.
Reputable sourceKettering's Electric Self-Starter
Early cars had to be started by hand with a crank that could kick back and break a driver's arm — or worse. Charles Kettering's key-operated electric self-starting ignition system, introduced on Cadillac vehicles in 1912 and patented three years later, spun the engine electrically and did away with the dangerous crank. His integrated electrical system also powered ignition and lighting — essentially the layout still used in cars today.
Reputable sourceFord's Moving Assembly Line
In 1913, at his Highland Park plant in Michigan, Henry Ford introduced the moving assembly line to build the Model T. Bringing the work to the worker on a moving chain cut the time to assemble a car from over twelve hours to about ninety minutes, and drove the price of the Model T within reach of ordinary families.
Primary source- January 5, 1914History of the Automobile
Ford's Five-Dollar Day
On 5 January 1914 Ford Motor Company announced it would roughly double pay to a minimum of five dollars for an eight-hour day — a profit-sharing plan on top of the base wage. The move answered a crippling labour-turnover problem on the monotonous assembly line, which had reached some 370 percent, and it made Ford jobs among the most sought-after in America.
Reputable source - 1914–1918History of Aviation
Aviation Goes to War
The First World War transformed the flimsy aeroplane into a weapon. In just four years, aircraft evolved from unarmed scouts into fast, rugged fighters like the Sopwith Camel and SPAD XIII, dueling in 'dogfights' over the trenches. Nations celebrated their leading 'aces,' such as the Red Baron, credited with 80 victories.
Reputable source - the 1920sHistory of the Automobile
Alfred Sloan and the Modern Car Company
As president of General Motors from 1923, Alfred P. Sloan built the template for the modern car company. Where Ford offered one unchanging Model T, Sloan organized GM's brands — Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick, Cadillac — into a ladder 'for every purse and purpose,' and introduced the annual model change, making styling and yearly updates a reason to trade up.
Reputable source - the 1920sHistory of the Automobile
The Automobile Reshapes America
As cars became affordable and common in the early 20th century, the automobile remade American life. It carried people out of crowded cities into new suburbs, filled the country with paved highways — among them the legendary Route 66, the 'People's Highway' from Chicago to Los Angeles — and turned driving into a defining part of American culture and landscape.
Reputable source Lindbergh Crosses the Atlantic
In May 1927 the 25-year-old Charles Lindbergh flew nonstop and alone from New York to Paris aboard the Spirit of St. Louis, a journey of 3,600 miles in over 33 hours. Landing before a crowd of 100,000, he became an overnight international celebrity.
Reputable source- 1932–1937History of Aviation
Amelia Earhart
In 1932 Amelia Earhart became the first woman — and the second person after Lindbergh — to fly solo nonstop across the Atlantic. A record-setting aviator and tireless advocate for women in flight, she vanished over the Pacific in 1937 during an attempt to fly around the world, in one of history's most enduring mysteries.
Reputable source The Modern Airliner: The DC-3
In 1935 the Douglas DC-3 first flew, and it became the airplane that made air travel practical and profitable. All-metal, strong, and comfortable, the 21-seat DC-3 was so efficient that by 1939 it carried the vast majority of the world's airline passengers — the first airliner an airline could operate profitably without government subsidy.
Reputable source- November 1936The Internet & Computing
Turing defines the universal machine
Alan Turing's paper "On Computable Numbers" described an abstract machine that could compute anything computable — a blueprint for every computer since.
Reputable source · 2 sources The Jeep Goes to War
As the United States prepared for the Second World War, the Army called for a light, rugged, four-wheel-drive reconnaissance vehicle. Willys-Overland's design, standardized in 1941 and eventually built in the hundreds of thousands (also by Ford), became the Jeep — a go-anywhere workhorse that served on every front of the war.
General source- 1939–1945History of Aviation
Air Power in the Second World War
In the Second World War, air power came fully into its own. Fighters battled for control of the skies, fleets of bombers laid waste to cities, aircraft carriers made the airplane master of the ocean, and in 1945 a single bomber, the B-29 Enola Gay, dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
Reputable source - 1938–2003History of the Automobile
The Volkswagen Beetle: The People's Car
Designed by Ferdinand Porsche in 1930s Germany as an affordable 'people's car,' the Volkswagen Beetle went into full civilian production under British military oversight in 1945 and became a global phenomenon. Cheap, reliable, and instantly recognizable, it was built in 19 countries and embraced everywhere from postwar Europe to 1960s American counterculture. When the last one rolled off a Mexican line in 2003, more than 21 million had been made — making it, in its original form, the best-selling car design in history.
Reputable source - February 1946The Internet & Computing
ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic computer
Unveiled at the University of Pennsylvania, ENIAC filled a room with 18,000 vacuum tubes and computed a thousand times faster than any machine before it.
Reputable source · 2 sources Breaking the Sound Barrier
On 14 October 1947, over the California desert, U.S. Air Force test pilot Chuck Yeager flew the rocket-powered Bell X-1 'Glamorous Glennis' faster than the speed of sound — the first piloted supersonic flight. Air-launched from a B-29 bomber, he reached Mach 1.06.
Reputable source- December 1947The Internet & Computing
The transistor is invented at Bell Labs
Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley demonstrated the first transistor — a solid-state switch that would replace the vacuum tube.
Reputable source Turing's Imitation Game
In his paper 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence,' Alan Turing set aside the question 'Can machines think?' as too vague, and proposed instead an 'imitation game': if an interrogator conversing by text cannot reliably tell a machine from a human, the machine should count as intelligent. It became known as the Turing Test.
Reputable source- 1950sHistory of Aviation
The Jet Age
The jet engine, developed independently in Britain and Germany in the late 1930s, transformed aviation after the Second World War. The first jet airliners entered service in the 1950s, flying higher, faster, and more smoothly than propeller aircraft and shrinking the world for ordinary travelers.
Reputable source The Dartmouth Workshop
A summer research project at Dartmouth College brought together John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, Claude Shannon, and others to explore whether machines could be made to simulate learning and intelligence. The 1955 proposal contained the first use of the phrase 'artificial intelligence.'
Reputable sourceThe Interstate Highway System
On 29 June 1956 President Eisenhower signed the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act, authorizing some 41,000 miles of high-speed, limited-access highways. It was the largest public-works project in American history to that point, funded largely by federal fuel taxes through a new Highway Trust Fund.
Primary sourceThe Perceptron
Frank Rosenblatt built the Perceptron, an early artificial neural network that could learn to recognize simple patterns such as letters. It was greeted with enormous enthusiasm — one report called it the first serious rival to the human brain — but in 1969 Minsky and Papert showed a single-layer perceptron could not compute basic functions like XOR.
Reputable source- September 1958The Internet & Computing
The integrated circuit
Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments demonstrated the first working integrated circuit; Robert Noyce independently developed a practical version months later.
Reputable source Volvo's Three-Point Seat Belt
In 1959 the Swedish engineer Nils Bohlin, Volvo's first safety engineer, patented the three-point seat belt — a single strap crossing the chest and lap that a driver could fasten with one hand and that restrained both the upper and lower body. Volvo made the patent freely available to every other carmaker so the design could save as many lives as possible.
Reputable sourceThe Mini
Launched in 1959 and designed by Alec Issigonis, the Mini was the first car to combine a transverse (sideways-mounted) engine with front-wheel drive in a tiny package, freeing up almost the entire body for passengers. Cheap and endlessly practical, over five million were built before production ended in 2000 — the best-selling British car ever.
Reputable sourceSpacewar!
At MIT in 1961–62, Steve Russell and fellow students wrote Spacewar!, a game for the new DEC PDP-1 computer in which two players duel with spaceships around a star, obeying real gravity and physics. It spread from lab to lab and was used to show off what the machine could do.
Reputable source- November 30, 1965History of the Automobile
Unsafe at Any Speed
On 30 November 1965 the young lawyer Ralph Nader published Unsafe at Any Speed, a best-seller that accused American carmakers of putting style and cost ahead of safety — singling out the Chevrolet Corvair. At the time few buyers chose safety features: only about 2 percent of Ford buyers took the $27 seat-belt option. Nader's book helped prompt the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966 and a wave of seat-belt laws.
Reputable source ELIZA, the First Chatbot
Joseph Weizenbaum of MIT wrote ELIZA, a program that imitated a psychotherapist by matching patterns in a user's typed words and reflecting them back as questions — all in about 200 lines of code. Weizenbaum was disturbed to find that users formed real emotional attachments to it.
Peer-reviewedThe Airbag and the Crash Sensor
In 1968 the American inventor Allen Breed developed the world's first electromechanical automotive air-bag system — a low-cost crash sensor that could detect a collision and trigger an inflatable cushion in milliseconds. The reliable sensor was the missing piece that made airbags practical, and over the following decades they spread from a rare option to standard equipment.
Reputable source- 1966–1972Artificial Intelligence
Shakey the Robot
Built at the Stanford Research Institute, Shakey was the first mobile robot able to perceive its surroundings and reason about its own actions. It could plan routes, move objects, and recover from errors, driven by a planning program called STRIPS.
Peer-reviewed - October 29, 1969The Internet & Computing
ARPANET sends its first message
UCLA student Charley Kline tried to send "LOGIN" to Stanford; the network crashed after "LO" — the first message on the ARPANET, the internet's direct ancestor.
Primary source The Boeing 747 and the Wide-Body Revolution
In 1970 the Boeing 747 'Jumbo Jet' entered service, carrying more than twice as many passengers as earlier jets. Its enormous capacity dramatically lowered the cost per seat, and it spawned a generation of wide-body airliners that made intercontinental travel affordable to the masses.
Reputable sourceEmail crosses between machines
Ray Tomlinson sent the first network email on ARPANET, choosing the @ symbol to separate user from host.
Reputable source · 2 sources- November 1971The Internet & Computing
Intel 4004: the microprocessor
Intel released the 4004, the first commercial computer-on-a-chip, built for a Japanese calculator.
Reputable source · 2 sources Pong
In 1972 Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney founded Atari, and engineer Allan Alcorn built Pong, a simple electronic table-tennis game. A prototype placed in a California bar was so popular its coin box overflowed, and Atari announced the game on 29 November 1972.
Reputable sourceThe First AI Winter
After years of grand promises that failed to materialize, the British government's 1973 Lighthill Report concluded that AI research had not delivered its promised breakthroughs. Funding was slashed in Britain and the United States, ushering in a prolonged downturn known as an 'AI winter.'
Peer-reviewedThe Oil Crisis and the Small-Car Revolution
In October 1973, Arab oil-producing states declared an embargo that sent fuel prices soaring and left American drivers waiting in long lines at gas stations. Overnight, the big, thirsty cars Detroit had built for decades looked like liabilities. Fuel-efficient Japanese imports from Toyota, Honda, and Datsun surged in popularity, and Congress soon mandated corporate fuel-economy standards.
Reputable source- developed 1948–1975History of the Automobile
The Toyota Production System
In the decades after the Second World War, Toyota's chief of production Taiichi Ohno developed a new way to build cars aimed at the best quality, lowest cost, and shortest lead time by relentlessly eliminating waste. Its two pillars were 'just-in-time' (making only what is needed, when it is needed) and 'jidoka' (building in quality by stopping the line when a defect appears).
Reputable source Cleaning Up the Car: Emissions and the Clean Air Act
As smog choked cities, the U.S. Clean Air Act of 1970 set strict limits on the pollutants cars could emit. To meet them, automakers phased out leaded gasoline and, from the mid-1970s, fitted vehicles with catalytic converters that chemically neutralize harmful exhaust gases. Emissions of pollutants like carbon monoxide, lead, and smog-forming compounds from new cars fell dramatically over the following decades.
Reputable source- 1976–2003History of Aviation
Concorde and Supersonic Travel
A joint British-French project born in the Cold War, Concorde entered service in 1976 as the first supersonic airliner, whisking passengers across the Atlantic at twice the speed of sound in under four hours. Beautiful but hugely expensive and fuel-hungry, it never made economic sense, and the fleet was retired in 2003.
Reputable source Space Invaders
Released in 1978, the Japanese arcade game Space Invaders, designed by Tomohiro Nishikado, sent rows of descending aliens against the player's laser cannon. It became a global sensation and one of the defining games of the arcade boom.
Reputable sourceExpert Systems and the 1980s AI Boom
AI revived in the 1980s around 'expert systems' — programs that encoded the rules of human specialists to solve narrow problems, pioneered by systems like Stanford's MYCIN for diagnosing infections. Corporations invested heavily, and a commercial industry grew up around the technology before it, too, hit a downturn.
Peer-reviewedPac-Man
Debuting in 1980, Pac-Man (originally Puck-Man in Japan) sent players gobbling dots through a maze while fleeing four ghosts. It became the first breakout game to transcend the arcade and become a mass-culture phenomenon.
Reputable source- January 1, 1983The Internet & Computing
The internet switches to TCP/IP
ARPANET's "flag day" migration to the TCP/IP protocol suite let independent networks interconnect as one internet.
General source The Minivan and the Rise of the Family Hauler
For the 1984 model year, Chrysler — led by Lee Iacocca — launched the Dodge Caravan and Plymouth Voyager, front-wheel-drive vans built on a car platform, low enough to fit in a home garage yet able to carry seven people and their gear. They were an immediate hit and are credited with helping save Chrysler from bankruptcy.
Reputable source- January 1984The Internet & Computing
The Macintosh mainstreams the GUI
Apple's Macintosh brought the graphical interface — windows, icons, mouse — to a mass-market machine.
Reputable source Super Mario Bros. and the NES Revival
By the mid-1980s the American home video game market had collapsed. In 1985 Nintendo, led by designer Shigeru Miyamoto, released Super Mario Bros. on its Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). Its colorful worlds and tight controls made it a phenomenon and the best-selling game of its era.
Reputable sourceThe Legend of Zelda
Released in 1986, The Legend of Zelda, also from Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto, dropped players into a large open world to explore at their own pace, solving puzzles and battling monsters as the hero Link. It let players save their progress, a novelty for console games of the time.
Reputable sourceBackpropagation
In a landmark Nature paper, David Rumelhart, Geoffrey Hinton, and Ronald Williams showed how the 'back-propagation' algorithm could train multi-layer neural networks, letting hidden layers learn useful internal representations of a problem.
Peer-reviewedTetris and the Game Boy
The Soviet mathematician Alexey Pajitnov created Tetris, an addictive falling-block puzzle, in 1984. It reached the West in 1987, and when Nintendo bundled it with the launch of the handheld Game Boy in 1989, it became a worldwide hit.
Reputable source- March 1989The Internet & Computing
Tim Berners-Lee proposes the Web
At CERN, Berners-Lee wrote "Information Management: A Proposal" — hypertext documents linked across the internet. His boss's note: "Vague, but exciting."
Primary source · 2 sources Sonic the Hedgehog
In 1991 Sega released Sonic the Hedgehog for its Genesis console, a fast, brash platform game built around a blue hedgehog created to be the company's mascot and challenge Nintendo's Mario.
Reputable source- August 1991The Internet & Computing
The Web goes public
Berners-Lee posted the World Wide Web project to public newsgroups, releasing the first website, browser, and server to the world.
Unverified source - August 1991The Internet & Computing
Linus Torvalds announces Linux
A Finnish student posted about his hobby OS kernel — "just a hobby, won't be big and professional."
Primary source - April 1993The Internet & Computing
Mosaic makes the Web visual
NCSA's Mosaic browser displayed images inline with text and installed easily — Web traffic exploded within months.
Reputable source Doom and the First-Person Shooter
Released in December 1993 by id Software, Doom put players behind a gun in fast, immersive 3-D corridors. It added networked multiplayer over local networks and modems, and was deliberately built so that players could create and share their own levels and graphics.
Peer-reviewed- May 1997Artificial Intelligence
Deep Blue Defeats Kasparov
In a six-game rematch in New York, IBM's Deep Blue became the first computer to defeat a reigning world chess champion, Garry Kasparov, under standard tournament conditions, winning 3.5–2.5. The machine used hundreds of processors and custom chips to evaluate millions of positions per second.
Peer-reviewed - September 1998The Internet & Computing
Google is founded
Larry Page and Sergey Brin incorporated Google, ranking pages by the link structure of the Web itself.
Unverified source The Toyota Prius and the Hybrid Era
Toyota's Prius, released worldwide around 2000, paired a petrol engine with an electric motor and battery to cut fuel use and emissions. An unexpected success, it made the hybrid car mainstream and put fuel efficiency back at the centre of the industry.
Reputable source- January 15, 2001The Internet & Computing
Wikipedia launches
A free encyclopedia anyone could edit sounded absurd — it became the largest reference work ever assembled.
Reputable source Grand Theft Auto III
Released in 2001 by Rockstar Games, Grand Theft Auto III set players loose in a fully three-dimensional open city to follow the story or simply roam and cause mayhem. Praised for its freedom and criticized for its violence, it was a landmark of the 'open-world' or 'sandbox' game.
Reputable source- 2004–2005History of the Automobile
The DARPA Grand Challenge and the Self-Driving Car
At dawn on 13 March 2004, fifteen robotic vehicles set off across the Mojave Desert in the DARPA Grand Challenge, a U.S. defence contest to build a car that could drive itself over 142 miles of open terrain. None finished — the best managed about seven miles. Eighteen months later, in 2005, Stanford's 'Stanley,' a modified Volkswagen Touareg led by Sebastian Thrun, completed a 132-mile course to win the $2 million prize.
Reputable source · 2 sources World of Warcraft
Launched by Blizzard Entertainment in 2004, World of Warcraft was a massively multiplayer online role-playing game in which millions of players around the world shared a single persistent fantasy realm, questing and battling together. At its peak it had more than ten million subscribers.
Reputable source- January 9, 2007The Internet & Computing
The iPhone
Steve Jobs introduced a phone, an iPod, and an internet communicator — one device. The multi-touch smartphone defined the next two decades.
Primary source Tesla and the Electric Revival
In 2006 a Silicon Valley startup called Tesla Motors announced a luxury electric sports car able to travel more than 200 miles on a single charge; its Roadster reached customers in 2008. Tesla's success pushed established carmakers to accelerate their own electric vehicles, and by the 2010s models such as the Nissan Leaf and Chevrolet Volt were bringing EVs to the mass market.
Reputable source- October 31, 2008The Internet & Computing
The Bitcoin whitepaper
The pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto published "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" — digital money without a central authority.
Primary source - February 2011Artificial Intelligence
IBM Watson Wins Jeopardy!
IBM's Watson, a question-answering system able to interpret natural-language clues, defeated the quiz show Jeopardy!'s two greatest champions, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, in a televised match. The room-sized machine drew on thousands of processor cores and a vast store of text.
Primary source Minecraft
Created by Markus Persson and released in full by the studio Mojang in 2011, Minecraft dropped players into an open world of blocks to mine, build, and survive with almost no set goals. Its simple graphics and boundless creativity made it a global phenomenon.
Reputable sourceAlexNet and the Deep Learning Revolution
A deep neural network called AlexNet, built by Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever, and Geoffrey Hinton and trained on graphics processors, won the ImageNet image-recognition challenge by a huge margin, roughly halving the previous error rate.
Peer-reviewedGenerative Adversarial Networks
Ian Goodfellow and colleagues introduced Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), in which two neural networks — a generator and a discriminator — are trained against each other, one trying to create realistic data and the other trying to spot fakes.
Peer-reviewed- March 2016Artificial Intelligence
AlphaGo Defeats Lee Sedol
DeepMind's AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol, one of the world's greatest players of Go, four games to one in a match in Seoul. Go, with more possible positions than atoms in the universe, had been considered far beyond the reach of computers for decades to come.
Peer-reviewed The Transformer
Researchers at Google published 'Attention Is All You Need,' introducing the Transformer — a neural network architecture built entirely on 'attention' mechanisms, dispensing with the recurrence used before. It trained faster and handled long-range context far better.
Peer-reviewedBERT and the Rise of Large Language Models
Google researchers released BERT, a Transformer-based model pre-trained on huge amounts of text to understand language bidirectionally — reading context from both directions at once. It set new records across a wide range of language tasks.
Peer-reviewedGPT-3
OpenAI unveiled GPT-3, a language model with 175 billion parameters. Trained simply to predict the next word across enormous amounts of text, it could perform many tasks — translation, question-answering, even basic coding — from a few examples given in the prompt, without task-specific training.
Peer-reviewedWaymo and the First Public Robotaxis
In October 2020 Waymo — the self-driving company spun out of Google's early autonomous-car project — opened its fully driverless ride-hailing service to the general public in the Phoenix, Arizona area. For the first time, ordinary riders could hail a car with no human safety driver behind the wheel and be carried across the metro area by the vehicle itself.
Primary sourceDALL·E and AI Image Generation
OpenAI introduced DALL·E, a model that generates original images from written descriptions, combining unrelated ideas into plausible pictures. It and successors like DALL·E 2 brought text-to-image generation into the mainstream.
Primary sourceAlphaFold Solves Protein Folding
DeepMind's AlphaFold predicted the three-dimensional structures of proteins from their amino-acid sequences with accuracy rivalling laboratory experiments — cracking a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology.
Peer-reviewed- November 30, 2022Artificial Intelligence
ChatGPT Launches
OpenAI released ChatGPT, a conversational interface to a GPT-3.5 language model, fine-tuned with human feedback to follow instructions and answer follow-up questions in dialogue. Free and easy to use, it reached an estimated hundred million users within two months.
Primary source - November 30, 2022The Internet & Computing
ChatGPT ignites the AI boom
OpenAI released ChatGPT as a free research preview; it reached an estimated 100 million users in two months — the fastest-adopted consumer application to that point.
Primary source · 3 sources - March 2023Artificial Intelligence
GPT-4 and the Generative AI Boom
OpenAI released GPT-4, a larger, more capable multimodal model that could accept images as well as text and scored in the top ranks of human test-takers on many professional and academic exams, including a simulated bar exam. It arrived amid an explosion of rival models and a fierce debate over AI's risks and regulation.
Primary source - the 2020sHistory of the Automobile
The Global Electric-Car Surge
By the mid-2020s the electric car had gone mainstream. Global sales of electric vehicles reached a record 17.1 million in 2024, up about 25 percent on the year before. China dominated the market with some 11 million sold — more than the whole world had bought only two years earlier — while growth was slower in Europe.
Reputable source