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History
For most of us history is something that happened far back in the past, with no relevance to us now. That’s just not true. A lot of what we consider “far off in the past” is actually quite recent (in relative terms). e.g. the cold war got over just 30 years ago. 200 years ago, Napolean was still around ! The technological progress of man in the last 100 years has been more than all of the progress we have made since we walked the earth. Maybe its this rapid pace of innovation that makes history seem…like history ! Like a snowball that keep going faster as it progresses downhill. Here are some dates that helped me get perspective of where we are and how far (or not) we have come since the early days.
10,000 BC : Dawn of agriculture (humans made the transition from hunter gatherers)
470 BC - 399 BC : Socrates
336 BC - 323 BC : Alexander the Great
27 BC - AD 395 : Unified Roman Empire
395 - 480 : Western Roman Empire
395 - 1453 : Eastern Roman Empire
950 : Gunpowder invented in China (Changed the way wars were fought)
1095 - 1291 : Crusades
1492 : Christopher Columbus ‘discovered’ America
1543 : Copernicus finding that the earth was not the center of the universe
1600 : East India Company founded
1712 : Thomas Newcomen invents the first steam engine
1776 : American declaration of independence
1789 - 1799 : French Revolution
1803 - 1815 : Napoleonic Wars
1844 : Charles Goodyear awarded patent for vulcanized rubber
1859 : First commercial crude oil well drilled at Titusville, Pennsylvania
1914 - 1918 : World War I
1939 - 1945 : World War II
1953 : Double helical structure of DNA discovered
1972 : Nixon meets Mao (opening up China to the world)
1989 : Berlin Wall fell (marking the failure of communism)