DISCOVERIES & INVENTIONS

Discoveries & Inventions

Timelines where knowledge arrives early, late, or never: engines in antiquity, medicine a century sooner, libraries unburned. Each page follows an idea let loose in a different year.

11 charted timelines in this galaxy

Discoveries & Inventions

Knowledge arrives early, late, or never.

Two men confer over papers at a table on a summer cottage porch, sailboat rigging beyond, 1939

DISCOVERIES & INVENTIONS · AUG 1939 · LONG ISLAND

The letter stays in the drawer

Long Island, August 1939. Leo Szilard has drafted a warning to the President about atomic bombs, and needs the one signature every American knows. This is the timeline where Einstein declines to sign.

A solitary scholar works by candlelight among papers and a reflecting telescope in a Cambridge room, 1684

DISCOVERIES & INVENTIONS · AUG 1684 · CAMBRIDGE

The apple misses Newton

London, January 1684. Three men in a coffee house set a wager that will send Edmond Halley riding to Cambridge, where a reclusive professor has the answer in a drawer. This is the timeline where the ride is never made.

A single unsigned sheet of paper on a desk at CERN beside a black NeXT computer, 1993

DISCOVERIES & INVENTIONS · 30 APR 1993 · GENEVA

The web stays in the lab

Geneva, 30 April 1993. A one-page declaration waits on a desk at CERN, releasing the World Wide Web to everyone, forever, for nothing. This is the timeline where it is never signed.

A woman in a 1977 pantsuit leans toward a glowing upright computer screen on a mock office desk while suited executives stand back with arms crossed.

DISCOVERIES & INVENTIONS · 10 NOV 1977 · BOCA RATON

The chairman uncrosses his arms

November 1977, a Xerox sales conference in Boca Raton. On a mock office set flown in on two chartered jets, the company's Palo Alto laboratory demonstrates the personal computer it has already built: the screen, the mouse, the network, the laser printer. The executives cross their arms. This is the timeline where their chairman does not.

Punjabi farmers broadcasting pale wheat seed by hand into dark earth at dawn, distant smoke on the horizon, 1965

DISCOVERIES & INVENTIONS · 1965 · THE PUNJAB

The seed in the dry year

In 1965 two failed monsoons and a rising population set India and Pakistan on course for the famine Paul Ehrlich would soon call unstoppable. Norman Borlaug's dwarf Mexican wheat reached them late and half dead, and was sown by hand as the two nations went to war. In our timeline that thin seed still came up and helped feed a subcontinent. This is the timeline where it comes up too thin to save.

A 187-foot lattice tower crowned by a vast copper dome throwing electric-blue fire into a winter night over a Long Island hamlet.

DISCOVERIES & INVENTIONS · 1901 · LONG ISLAND

The tower that lit the coast

1901, Long Island. J.P. Morgan's money is raising Nikola Tesla a tower meant to send words and power through the earth to all of it at once. In our timeline the checks stopped, the tower was dynamited for scrap, and Tesla died in a rented room. This is the timeline where Morgan signs one more check, and one winter night the copper dome answers.

A surgeon scrubs his hands in a basin of chlorinated lime at the door of an 1847 Vienna maternity ward

DISCOVERIES & INVENTIONS · 1847 · VIENNA

The doctors wash their hands

May 1847, the maternity wards of the Vienna General Hospital. A young doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis has proved that a basin of chlorinated lime at the ward door cuts childbed-fever deaths from nearly one mother in five to almost none. In our timeline the profession mocked him and let him die unheard. This is the timeline where Vienna believes the basin.

An aging caliph sets down a Mongol envoy's letter beside an inkwell and open manuscript in a lamplit Baghdad hall

DISCOVERIES & INVENTIONS · 1258 · BAGHDAD

The ink stays in the books

1258, and the Mongol army of Hulagu Khan stands at the walls of Baghdad, seat of the caliphs and keeper of the richest libraries of the medieval world. This is the timeline where the caliph opens the gates in time, and the books are never poured into the Tigris.

A small brass sphere spins on steam over a brazier in a first-century Alexandrian workshop, a Greek engineer and a merchant watching

DISCOVERIES & INVENTIONS · AD 62 · ALEXANDRIA

The engine in the temple

AD 62, the Museum of Alexandria. Heron the engineer builds a brass sphere that spins on steam, and the age keeps it as a temple wonder and a rich man's toy. Grain is ground by slaves, and no one asks the sphere to work. This is the timeline where a grain merchant asks, and pays to find out.

An aged Greek geometer traces circles in the sand as a Roman soldier holds back his raised sword, a burning city behind

DISCOVERIES & INVENTIONS · 212 BC · SYRACUSE

The circles are not disturbed

The autumn of 212 BC, the sack of Syracuse. The Roman general Marcellus has ordered that the geometer Archimedes be taken alive, and a soldier has found him bent over circles drawn in the sand. In our timeline the soldier killed him anyway. This is the timeline where the order is obeyed and the circles are left undisturbed.

Ada Lovelace and Babbage before the vast half-built Analytical Engine, 1843

DISCOVERIES & INVENTIONS · 1843 · LONDON

Ada Lovelace boots the first computer, 1843

In 1843 Ada Lovelace published the first program ever written — for a machine that existed only on paper, because Parliament would not pay for it. This is the timeline where the Treasury said yes, and the computer age began ninety years early, in brass.