| overview
to 1600
to 1800
to 1850
to 1880
to 1900
to 1910
to 1920
to 1930
to 1940
to 1950
to 1960
to 1970
to 1980
to 1985
to 1990
to 1995
to 2000
to 2005
to 2010
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to 1800
This chronology covers -
1601
1604 Cawdrey's A Table Alphabeticall, first English
dictionary
1604 King James Bible
1605 Avisa Relation oder Zeitung, world's first
regular newspaper
1612 Napier makes first printed use of decimal point
1612 Bacon's On Usury
1613 de Suarez' Defensio Fidei Catholicae
1620 Bacon's Novum Organum
1622 Weekly News, first English newspaper
1622 first newspaper advertisement in England
1625 Grotius' De Jure Belli ac Pacis
1627 France introduces registered mail
1630
1631 French newspaper carries classified ads
1631 Spee's Cautio Criminalis
1635 Académie Francaise founded
1636 Harvard founded
1636 futures market for tulip bulbs in Netherlands
1637 René Descartes' Discourse de la méthod
1637 tulip mania ceases in Holland in precursor of dot-com
crash
1639 first North American printing of books (Freeman's
Oath and An Almanack)
1640
1640 Athanasius Kirchner's magic lantern
1642 mezzotint
1642 Pascal's mechanical calculator
1643 Vesalius' De humani corporis fabrica libri septem
1643 Copernicus' De Revolutionibus
1645 launch of Post och Inrikes Tidningar, claimed
to be "oldest still-existing newspaper"
1646 Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica
1648 Treaty of Westphalia
1650
1650 slide rule invented by Gunter and Oughtred
Usher's Annales Veteris at Novi Testamenti
Hobbes' The leviathan
1652 first mint in North America
1653 mail boxes in Paris for postage-paid letters
1659 first cheque drawn in London
1660
1660 Office of Postmaster General and Comptroller of The
Post Office established in UK
1662 mass-production of the pencil
1662 John Graunt's Observations on the Bills of Mortality
1662 Antoine Arnauld's La logique, ou l'art de penser
1663 Erbauliche Monaths-Unterredungen, Europe's
first magazine
1665 Robert Hooke's Micrographia
1665 Great Plague of London
1666 first European printed paper banknote
1666 Hornius' Arca Noae
1668 Riksens Staenders Bank (later Svenska Riksbanken)
is first central bank
1670
1670 sanctity of the jury established in case of Penn
and Mead
1672 Pufendorf's On the Laws of Nature and of Nations
1673 Leibniz's mechanical calculator
1674 Moreri's Grand Dictionnaire Historique
1676 William Petty's Political Arithmetick
1680
1681 Bossuet's Discours sur l'histoire universelle
1687 Newton's Principia Mathematica
1689 first US newspaper, Publick Occurrences Both Forreign
& Domestick, printed in Massachusetts
1689 Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration
1690
1690 papermill in Moscow
1690 John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
1690 Locke's Two Treatises on Civil Government
1692 Salem witch trials
1694 Bank of England issues printed banknotes (with watermarks
from 1697)
1695 Bank of Scotland founded
1697 Bayle's Dictionnaire Historique et Critique
1697 Blasphemy Act in England
1700
1701 Mead's A Mechanical Account of Poisons in Several
Essays
1702 The Daily Courant, first UK daily newspaper
1703 Peter II founds St Petersburg
1704 first newspaper advertisements in N America
1706 The Evening Post, first evening newspaper
issued in London
1709 first British Copyright Act
1710
three-colour printing invented in West by Le Blon
George Berkeley's A Treatise Concerning the Principles
of Human Knowledge
1712
1714 first typewriter patented by Henry Mill in England
1719 Reaumur proposes using wood to make paper
1720 South Sea Bubble
bursts
1724 Thomas Longman founded
1727 The Gentleman's Magazine, first modern magazine
1735 Orell and Füssli acquire Froschauer's shop
1740
1741 first magazine in America is published - American
Magazine
1742 Ben Franklin's General Magazine prints first
American magazine ads
1750
1755 Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language
1757 Whatman invents wove paper
1760
1760 launch of weekly Gessnersche Montagszeitung
1762 John Murray founded
1764 Fournier develops point system to measure type sizes
1765 earliest known children's pop-up book
1768 first edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica
1768 first Letters of Junius in England
1768 first voyage of Cook's Endeavour
1770
1770 gum eraser
1770 Eyre & Spottiswoode founded
1772 first English patent for coloured ink
1774 paper whitener
1780
1780 launch of Zürcher Zeitung
by Orell, Gessner, Füssli as replacement for Gessnersche
Montagszeitung
1783 Glasgow Herald founded
1785 first edition of London Daily Universal Register
1788 Daily Universal Register becomes The
Times
1786 Playfair's Commercial & Political Atlas
1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man
1790
1791 establishment of the Observer
1792 Chappe's mechanical semaphore in France
1792 New York Stock Exchange established
1792 postal money orders in Britain
1794 Metric system in France
1798 Malthus' first Essay on Population
1798 Senefelder invents lithography
1798 Neue Zürcher Zeitung founded by Salomon
Gessner
1798 launch of weekly Schweizer Republikaner
1799 paper-making machine invented in France by Robert
1800
1801 Jacquard invents punch-card control for looms
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