1709 – Hot air balloon demonstrated
1745 – Ewald Georg von Kleist and Pieter van Musschenbroek of Leiden invent the Leyden Jar (capacitor)
1766 – Henry Cavendish discovers Hydrogen
1775 – Watt improves steam engines by adding a condenser using half the coal or prior engines
1783 – Jacques Charles and the Robert brothers launched the world’s first hydrogen-filled balloon, the 35 cubic meter balloon was made of Nicolas Robert’s new rubberized silk, could lift 9kg or 20lbs, and flew 21 kilometers in 45 minutes before it landed and was destroyed.
Jacques Charles and the Robert brothers launched a manned hydrogen-filled rubberized silk balloon of 380 cubic meters, it stayed aloft for 2 hours 5 minutes and traveled 36km. The Charlière hydrogen balloon with wicker gondola, netting, gas release valve, and sand ballast altitude control system became the definitive hydrogen balloon for the next 200 years.
1785 – Jean-Pierre-François Blanchard crosses the English Channel in a hand-powered balloon
1792 – Tipu Sultan codifies the use of rocket artillery in warfare
1800 – Alessandro Volta creates the first battery
Watt’s steam engine patent expires allowing other inventors to create high-pressure steam engines
1802 – Richard Trevithick builds a 2-ton steam-powered coach with a 3hp engine that can carry 8 passengers and the driver. It had a top speed of 13kph and could travel 15km. The engine alone weighed 672lbs.
1804 – Richard Trevithick builds the first high-power steam engine that pulls a train. It weighed 7 tons and could pull a 25-ton train.
Joseph Marie Jacquard invents the punch card-driven Jacquard loom.
Oliver Evans receives a patent on his high-pressure steam engine, a 5hp version of the engine was demonstrated at his Philadelphia shop crushing plaster and sawing marble. Many considered Evans and Richard Trevithick’s work in high-pressure steam to be irresponsible due to the dangers inherent in the design. Evans’ work more so because the ironworking needed to contain high-pressure steam was all but non-existent in the United States.
1805 – Oliver Evans builds a 17-ton amphibious scow to dredge the river, the steam engine powered a paddlewheel as well as four road wheels that allowed it to move from Evans’ workshop to the river.
Oliver Evans’ Steam Engineer’s guide is popular and widely distributes the principles of steam engines and machinery that were previously a mostly European pursuit.
1806 – William Congreve’s 32-pound rockets, built for the Ordnance Department, reached a distance of 3,000 yards.
Oliver Evans founds the Mars Works to build steam engines, cast iron parts, and machinery. Philadelphia becomes known for industrial machinery. Before the Mars Works, Evans had to go to blacksmiths and other tradesmen not familiar with steam engines to make his parts.
1809 – Jean-Pierre-François Blanchard dies of a heart attack, his wife Sophie a professional balloonist promoted human flight until her death in 1819.
1813 – Oliver Evans adds a condenser to his high-pressure Columbian steam engine making it as efficient as low-pressure Watt-Boulton designs and far more compact.
1814 – Last Frost Fair on the Thames as the little ice age came to an end, removal of Old London Bridge in 1831 allowed the tide to flow more freely with less ice accumulating as a consequence and no frost fairs were held in 1881 or 1894 despite the extreme cold.
September 13-14, Captain Bartholomew commanding HMS Erebus attacks Fort McHenry in Baltimore with 600-700 32 pound Congreve Rockets.
1815 – Congreve makes improvements to his rocket artillery, with a base plate and threaded pole, that could be fired up to two miles.
Josef Božek a Czech engineer builds a steam carriage.
1819 – A fire at the Mars Works ironworks destroyed many moldings and was a financial disaster for Oliver Evans who died a few days later at sixty-four. Many of Evans’ ideas would come to pass horseless carriages, steamboats, and refrigeration just to name a few.
1822 – Charles Babbage completes his first difference engine
1823 – Numerous towns and cities throughout Britain were lit by gas
1824 – William Horstmann’s silk-weaving business adopts the Jacquard Loom, Horstmann’s company survives the 1837 American financial panic that wiped out many silk-related businesses.
1830 – The Liverpool and Manchester Railway 56km becomes the first line to use steam power for passenger and freight trains
1831 – Michael Faraday invents the electric dynamo.
1835 – Casimir Lefaucheux patents the self-contained cardboard cartridge for firearms
Nabeshima Naomasa brings scholars and artisans from all over Japan to his domain in Saga to reverse engineer British Armstrong Cannons, the team uses a translated book on Dutch metallurgy to create a reverberatory furnace and started casting
1836 – Colt’s Paterson cap and ball revolver introduced
1837 – Morse develops the telegraph, the first commercial telegraph is built
1838 – Sir William Grove wrote about his developments with the First Hydrogen Fuel Cell
1839 – Charles Goodyear invents rubber vulcanization.
1840s – British Turnpike Acts discourage steam-powered bus services from using the roads. This and the Locomotive Acts after 1861 hold back innovation in carriages and buses powered by steam. Successive Locomotive Acts limited the speeds vehicles could travel until 1879 when exceptions were made for steam and electrical personal vehicles.
1844 – William Hale patents a new form of a spin-stabilized rocket which is an improvement over the Congreve rocket and used by the US Army in the Mexican-American War 1846-1848 and the US Navy in the American Civil War.
Samuel Colt demonstrates a system of underwater mines detonated by electrical current, the government is not interested. The cost of the demonstration bankrupts Colt.
American dentist, Horace Wells demonstrates the first use of Nitrus Oxide as an anesthetic in surgery.
1845 – Great Irish Famine and potato blight led to the death of a million people and another million emigrated from Ireland.
1846 – Wholly metallic self-contained cartridge for firearms introduced by French gunsmith Benjamin Houllier
Captain Samuel Hamilton Walker and Samuel Colt collaborate on a new revolver, Colt enlists Eli Whitney, Jr. to make the guns.
1847 – Nitroglycerine was discovered by Ascanio Sobrero in Turin
1848 – January 24th, Gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill, in part of California that was still part of Mexico.
1848 – February 2nd, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the two-year war between the US and Mexico, giving control of California to the United States.
1850 – The Saga team builds Japan’s first reverberatory furnace at Tsukiji.
1851 – The Great Exhibition sees demonstrations of many new technologies including Colt’s improved firearms
The damiyo of Satsuma orders a local group of scholars and artisans to build a reverberatory furnace. The norther domain of Mito hires Dutch scholar Ōshima Takatō to build a western style ironworks. The Shogunate sends a scholar to study at Saga resulting in their own furnace at Nirayama in 1854. By 1868 there would be eleven such furnaces in existence or construction in Japan.
1852 – Jean Bernard Léon Foucault invents a gyroscope.
Henri Giffard built the Giffard dirigible or Giffard airship, a steam-powered semirigid airship. The engine weighed 350 pounds, made 3 horsepower, and turned the propellor 110rpm to push the 144ft long dirigible 10km per hour. It flew 27km in 3 hours demonstrating turning and control along the way. The engine was not powerful enough to fly against the wind for the return trip.
November, Nabeshima Naomasa establishes the Seirenkata center in the Saga domain to apply western technology to the arts of metalworking, shipbuilding, and armaments as well as textiles, paper, ceramics, and dyes.
1853 – Russian diplomat Yevfimiy Putyatin set up a steam engine in Japan, Tanaka Hisashige inventor and founder of the company that would become Toshiba is fascinated by the machine, and builds his own.
July 8, American Commodore Matthew Perry sails his four ships into Tokyo Bay harbor to establish trade.
Saga domain is manufacturing enough cast iron cannons to supply its own needs and fulfil orders from the Shogunate.
1854 – Daniel Halladay constructed the first American-style windmill with wooden blades.
The Crimean War 1854-1856
March 13th, Commodore — Matthew Calbraith Perry gifts many western inventions to the Emperor of Japan including a 1/4 scale railway, books, a telescope, weights and measures, western exports such as cloth and liquor, Colt Revolvers, Rifles, Muskets, and Carbines.
March 31st, the Treaty of Kanagawa is signed. Japan would protect stranded seamen and open the ports of Shimoda and Hakodate for refueling and provisioning American ships. Japan also allowed the U.S. to appoint consuls to live in Shimoda and Hakodate. Though it did not open trade with the U.S. it included a most favored nation status that granted to the U.S. any concessions granted to any other nation.
1855 – Georges Audemars invents rayon.
Missouri farmers form vigilance committees to prevent cattle herds with ticks carrying Texas fever from crossing their lands.
1856 – Nikola Tesla born
1857 – Smith & Wesson produced the Model 1 Revolver using rimfire metallic cartridges.
Sedville Missouri was founded, the town was later renamed Sedalia, the terminus of the Sedalia cattle trail.
The Indian Mutiny 1857-1858
1858 – First Transatlantic telegraph cable completed, the cable burns out after a few days of slow operation
The Great Stink of London caused by human and industrial waste in the Thames leads to the creation of new sewer lines and a reduction in Cholera outbreaks.
Jean Lenoir invents an internal combustion engine.
1859 – June silver was discovered at the Comstock Lode, Nevada
September 1-2nd, the Carrington Event causes telegraphs in Europe and North America to fail, Auroras were seen all over the world.
1860 – April 3rd, Pony Express delivers mail from Missouri to California until the completion of the transcontinental telegraph in late 1861
April 26th, Gold deposits were discovered in California Gulch near Leadville, Colorado.
1861 – April 12th, the American civil war begins. The war is fought over slavery and is won in part by the Union’s adoption of new technologies and a superior industrial base.
June, President Lincoln creates the U.S. Army Civilian Balloon Corps
Linus Yale invents the Yale lock or cylinder lock.
The serfdom of Russian peasants was abolished by the proclamation of Tsar Alexander II after 700+ peasant uprisings since 1826.
Richard Jordan Gatling invents a rapid-firing multiple-barrel firearm, it used paper cartridges and gravity feed ammunition.
October 24th, Transcontinental Telegraph is completed.
October 26th, Pony Express ceases operation.
1862 – James Glaisher makes 28 balloon ascents between 1862 and 1866 his observations increase our understanding of the weather.
The Homestead Act encourages farmers to settle the west increasing tensions between farmers, sheepherders, and cattlemen.
1863 – Construction of the Transcontinental Railroad begins.
Austrian Henry Wickenburg discovers gold and founds the Vulture Mine in Arizona.
November, the Chōshū Five, samurai scholars from Japan arrive in Britain, mainly studying at University College London for five months.
1864 – Pierre Michaux and his son Ernest invent a pedal-driven bicycle.
February 6, the Tokugawa shogunate sends a Second Japanese Embassy to Europe called the Ikeda Mission.
Gatling gun sees first use during the siege of Petersburg, Virginia.
1865 – April 9th, US Civil War ends.
19 students from the Satsuma clan (now Kagoshima Prefecture) followed in the footsteps of the Chōshū Five by traveling to the UK to study.
1866 – Second Transatlantic telegraph cable completed.
Alfred Nobel invents dynamite.
With the Civil War over, over 200,000 cattle in Texas are driven overland to railheads in Kansas and Missouri.
1867 – Antiseptic Theory applied to the Practice of Surgery.
Pierre Michaux attaches a Louis-Guillaume Perreaux commercial steam engine (2hp) onto one of his iron-framed bicycles.
Sylvester H. Roper attaches a steam engine to a purpose-built hickory bicycle frame.
Six U.S. states pass laws against cattle drives through their territory.
The U.S. purchases Alaska from Russia.
August, the first cattle drive arrives in Abilene, Kansas over the Chisolm Trail, beginning a new cowboy era.
The last shogun Tokugawa Yoshinobu steps down, the Meiji Restoration and Modernization begins in 1868.
1868 – Pharmacy Act restricted the dispensing of drugs to a certified class of professionals, the act did not restrict the profession to men.
1869 – May 10th, the Transcontinental Railroad is completed at Promontory Summit, Utah.
Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas: A World Tour Underwater is serialized in the Magasin d’éducation et de récréation
1870 – September 19th, the Siege of Paris begins, balloonist Gaston Tissandier delivered mail, newspapers, and antiwar leaflets from a balloon. His balloon left Paris and landed in Dreux 88km away.
The Franco-Prussian War 1870-1871
1871 – January 28th, the Siege of Paris ends.
The Imperial Russian Army orders 41,000 Smith & Wesson No. 3 Schofield revolvers in .44 caliber, the Russians reverse engineer the pistol and make copies of it in their arsenal in Tula. The Russians cancel significant portions of the S&W order which nearly bankrupts the company.
December 3rd, the Iwakura Mission sails from Yokohama aboard the SS America, bound for San Francisco. The mission is composed of 50 Japanese leaders and government officials, as well as 50 students. Their 18-month voyage sought the blueprint for constructing a modern nation. The mission’s members visited 120 cities and settlements in 12 countries trying to understand how modern countries operated in order to modernize Japan and renegotiate imbalanced treaties with developed nations.
1872 – Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days published.
The first commercial railway in Japan opened between Shimbashi (Tokyo) and Yokohama, 34km.
Dodge City is founded at the edge of the Fort Dodge reservation. It makes money off settlers moving west on the Santa Fe Trail.
German engineer, Paul Haenlein builds the first internal combustion-powered airship, the engine ran off the coal gas used to lift the airship.
May 22nd, Amnesty Act pardons ex-confederates
1873 – Colt introduces the Single Action Army revolver using a metallic cartridge
Japan is connected to the international telegraph network.
The Japanese Ministry of Engineering commissioned Hisashige Tanaka to develop telegraphic equipment.
1874 – General Custer’s expedition discovers gold in the Black Hills.
1875 – Nikola Tesla enrolls in technical school, but drops out near the end of his third year.
Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island published.
1876 – Lewis Howard Latimer drafts diagrams for Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone patent.
Kansas Legislature shifts the Texas cattle quarantine west and trade bound for Abilene shifts to Dodge City.
The town of Deadwood is founded amid the Black Hills gold rush.
1877 – September 3rd, Ed Schieffelin files a mining claim named Tombstone in Arizona.
1878 – Electric street lighting was first introduced to London.
1879 – Lewis Howard Latimer joins U.S. Electric Lighting Company, improves filament production, and travels to England to set up factories there, Latimer teaches the entire production process to the workers in the new factory.
1880 – The Weinling family made toy hydrogen balloons of lightweight ‘goldbeater’s skin’ made from cow intestines.
1881 – Marquis Jules Félix Philippe Albert de Dion de Wandonne hires toymakers Georges Bouton and Charles-Armand Trepardoux to build a steam engine large enough to move a carriage. Compact De Dion-Bouton engines would be used by 150 automobile and motorcycle manufacturers.
1882 – Parliament passes the Electric Lighting Act and Edison opens the Pearl Street Station power plant in New York with 6 200hp dynamos
1883 – First electric-powered airship using a 1.5hp Siemens motor
Tokyo Electric Lighting company founded
Thomas Perry designs concave steel windmill blades 80% more efficient than flat wooden blades.
1884 – Lewis Howard Latimer goes to work for Thomas Edison, Latimer writes the book on electric lights.
1885 – Karl Benz invents the first practical automobile to be powered by an internal combustion engine.
Gottlieb Daimler invents the first gas-engined motorcycle.
1886 – Jules Verne’s Robur the Conqueror published.
1888 – Nikola Tesla invents the AC motor and transformer.
1890 – Ichisuke Fujioka set up his own firm, Hakunetsu-sha to manufacture prototypes of incandescent light bulbs.
1894 – The Thames froze over halting river traffic as well as road and railway freight due to snow and ice, water pipes and gas lines burst
Tanaka Engineering Works produced Japan’s first waterwheel power generators (60 kW).
1896 – Brazilian Alberto Santos-Dumont combines a gasoline tricycle motor with a balloon, he builds a total of 14 motorized balloons.
Inoue Masaru establishes the first locomotive manufacturer in Japan, Kisha Seizō Joint Stock Company in Osaka.
1899 – The Boer War 1899-1902
1900 – The zeppelin was invented by Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin.
1904 – Jules Verne’s Master of the World published.
1912 – Zepplin begins using Goldbeater’s skin in their airships.
1921 – British R-38 airship destroyed during testing, control problems and structural issues were to blame.
1923 – USS Shenandoah (ZR-1) was completed with a Duralumin frame and gas cells made of goldbeater’s skin rubber cemented to a layer of cotton.
1927 – British airship builders describe samples of goldbeater skin and fabric gas cells as still supple and having good gas holding properties though they were ten to twelve years old.
1931 – The Hindenberg begins construction using gas cells composed of layers of gelatine sandwiched between two layers of cotton similar to American airships being built at the time.

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