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Technology/March 25, 2026/2 min read/ourworldindata.org

A long-term timeline of technology | Our World In Data

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Excerpt: Technology over the long run


The big visualization offers a long-term perspective on the history of technology.1

"The timeline begins at the center of the spiral. The first use of stone tools, 3.4 million years ago, marks the beginning of this history of technology.2 Each turn of the spiral represents years of history. It took – 12 turns of the spiral – for our ancestors to control fire and use it for cooking.

References

  1. Original source (ourworldindata.org)

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Reading

Published
March 25, 2026
Read time
2 min read
Progress0%
200,000
2.4 million years
3

To be able to visualize the inventions in the more recent past — the last 12,000 years — I had to unroll the spiral. I needed more space to be able to show when agriculture, writing, and the wheel were invented. During this period, technological change was faster, but it was still relatively slow: several thousand years passed between each of these three inventions.

From 1800 onwards, I stretched out the timeline even further to show the many major inventions that rapidly followed one after the other.

The long-term perspective that this chart provides makes it clear just how unusually fast technological change is in our time.

You can use this visualization to see how technology developed in particular domains. Follow, for example, the history of communication: from writing to paper, to the printing press, to the telegraph, the telephone, the radio, all the way to the Internet and smartphones.

Or follow the rapid development of human flight. In 1903, the Wright brothers took the first flight in human history (they were in the air for less than a minute), and just 66 years later, we landed on the moon. Many people saw both within their lifetimes: the first plane and the moon landing.

This large visualization also highlights the wide range of technology’s impact on our lives. It includes extraordinarily beneficial innovations, such as the vaccine that allowed humanity to eradicate smallpox, and it includes terrible innovations, like the nuclear bombs that endanger the lives of all of us."

What will the next decades bring...?


Source: Max Roser (2023) - “Technology over the long run: zoom out to see how dramatically the world can change within a lifetime” Published online at OurWorldinData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20251125-173858/technology-long-run.html' [Online Resource] (archived on November 25, 2025).

Link to Part 1 : The Curious Mr. Feynman Update https://www.nuggets.one/nuggets/1736af65 99d3 48c5 9978 1c66e73a4680/the curious mr feynman update part one of a three part series freakonomics radio 1736af "It is an atomic bomb. It is a har…