This is the present age. It begins with the publication in 1859 of Darwin and Wallace's theory of evolution by natural selection, and sees among much else the development of flight, electric power, radio broadcasting, elucidation of the molecular basis of genetics, and the decoding of the human genome.
Colour coding: red = mathematics and mathematical science orange = astronomy, physics, chemistry yellow = biology, medicine, anthropology, history, exploration, psychology green = engineering, architecture, art, printing blue = literature, poetry, music mauve = philosophy, metaphysics, theology grey = wars, politics, events (indented)
1850 - 1894 Robert Louis Stevenson, author, Treasure Island 1883, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 1886.
1850 - 1927 Charles Doolittle Walcott & & &, discovered the Burgess Shale Cambrian fossils, 1909.
1851 - 1901 George Fitzgerald, indicated, 1889, how "Fitzgerald contraction" would account for the result of the Michelson - Morley experiment.
1852 - 1853: Second Anglo-Burmese war
1852 - 1911 Jacobus Van't Hoff &, La chimie dans l'espace 1874 on stereoisomerism, optical activity, tetrahedral carbon atom. Later studied dynamics of chemical reactions, and osmosis. First winner of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, 1901.
1852 - 1919 Emil Fischer & &, purines, sugars (1883), peptides, proteins, amino acids, enzyme chemistry 1894.
1853 - 1925 James Mackenzie, The Future of Medicine 1919.
1853 - 1928 Hendrik Lorentz, special relativity Lorentz transformation 1904.
1854 - 1928 Leos Janacek. musician.
1854 - 1932 Patrick Geddes & &, Evolution of Sex 1889, Sex 1914.
1854 - 1932 John Philip Sousa, composer, marches.
1855 vegetable parchment made.
1856 - 1857: Persia at war with Britain after taking Herat (Afghanistan)
1856 - 1860: Second Opium war
1856 - 1939 Sigmund Freud neurologist, founder of psychoanalysis.
Ernest Jones.1857 - 1924 Joseph Conrad Korzeniowski, author Heart of Darkness (1899).
1857 - 1934 Edward Elgar, composer.
1857 - 1936 Andrija Mohorovicic seismologist, identified Earth has an outer crust over a denser, hotter mantle 2900km thick.
1858 - 1924 Giacomo Puccini, musician.
1858 - 1936 R. D. Oldham & & analysed seismograph waves and concluded that Earth had a dense core 7000km in diameter.
1858 - 1944 Ethel Smyth, musician.
1858 - 1947 Max Planck &, quantum theory of black body radiation, awarded Nobel prize in Physics 1918.
1859 - 1913 John Milne &, studied earthquakes and developed a seismograph for recording shock waves.
1859 - 1939 Henry Havelock Ellis & &, Sexual Inversion 1915.
1860 - 1872: Second Anglo-Maori war
1860 - 1903 Hugo Wolf, musician.
1860 - 1909 Isaac Albéniz, composer.
1860 - 1911 Gustav Mahler, composer.
1860 - 1917 Eduard Buchner, On alcoholic fermentation without yeast cells (1897), Zymosis 1903.
1860 - 1939 Alphonse Mucha, artist
1860 - 1941 Ignacy Paderewski, pianist, composer, statesman.
1860 - 1956 Gustave Charpentier, composer.
1861 - 1865: American civil war
1861 - 1926 William Bateson, genetics.
1862 tracing paper made.
1862 - 1951 Vilhelm Bjerknes & &, weather forecasting.
1862 - 1918 Claude Debussy, composer.
1862 - 1934 Frederick Delius, composer.
1864 - 1901 Henri de Toulouse-Lauterc poster artist/painter.
1864 - 1949 Richard Strauss, composer.
1865 - 1931 Carl Nielsen, composer.
1865 - 1935 Paul Dukas, composer.
1865 - 1936 Alexander Glazunov, composer.
1865 - 1957 Jean Sibelius, composer.
1866 - 1924 Ferruccio Busoni, composer.
1866 - 1925 Erik Satie, composer.
1866 - 1945 Thomas Hunt Morgan & & &, genes and chromosomes, Heredity and Sex (1914).
1867: Dominion of Canada formed
1867 - 1934 Marie Sklodowska-Curie worked with Pierre Curie, studied radioactivity of the Uranium ore pitchblende, isolated new elements Polonium and Radium. Awarded Nobel Prizes for Physics 1903 and Chemistry 1911.
1867 - 1944 Charles Dana Gibson illustrator
1867 - 1956 Frank Brangwyn Muralist/Etcher
1868 - 1934 Fritz Haber & & & &, synthesis of ammonia.
1868 - 1917 Scott Joplin, composer.
1869 - 1943 Ales Hrdlicka & &, The Old Americans 1925, anthropology.
1870 - 1966 Maxfield Parrish painter/illustrator.
1870 - 1927 Bertram Boltwood, first used radioactivity to estimate date of rocks 1911.
1871 - 1937 Ernest Rutherford & & & & &, discovered atoms consisted of a very small heavy nucleus with surrounding cloud of electrons 1911, Radioactive Substances and their Radiations 1913.
1872 - 1970 Bertrand Russell, Russell's Paradox 1901, Principles of Mathematics 1903, History of Western Philosophy 1946.
1872 - 1898 Beardsley illustrator.
1872 - 1915 Alexander Skryabin, composer.
1872 - 1949 William Nicholson artist.
1872 - 1958 Ralph Vaughan Wiliams, composer.
1873 Electricity and Magnetism by Maxwell, publishes the four partial differential equations of electromagnetism.
-- Heaviside Hertz, Lorentz1873 - 1943 Sergey Rachmaninov, composer.
1874 - 1934 Gustav Holst, composer.
1874 - 1941 Elsie Clews Parsons & & &, The Old-Fashioned Woman 1913.
1874 - 1949 Ludwig Hohlwein poster artist.
1874 - 1951 Arnold Schoenberg, composer.
1874 - 1954 Charles Ives, composer.
1875 - 1937 Maurice Ravel, composer.
1876 - 1946 Manuel de Falla, composer.
1876 - 1972 Havergal Brian, composer.
1877 - 1960 James Flagg illustrator.
1878 - 1880: Second Anglo-Afghan war
1879 - 1958 Milutin Milankovitch & cycles & &, climate cycles.
1879 - 1955 Albert Einstein & & &, Some Papers & & 1905, Relativity: The Special and General Theory & 1916.
1880 - 1881: First Anglo-Boer War.
1880 halftone printing invented.
1880 - 1930 Alfred Wegener & & & formulated theories of continental drift.
1881 - 1945 Bela Bartok, composer.
1881 - 1957 Irving Langmuir.
1881 - 1973 Pablo Picasso aka Pablo Ruiz Blasco, cubist artist, Guernica.
Andre Breton, Guillaume Apollinaire, Getrude Stein, Braque1882: Triple Alliance formed between Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy (to 1914).
1882 - 1940 Eric Gill sculptor, engraver, typographer.
1882 - 1945 Robert H. Goddard &, rocket scientist.
1882 - 1961 Percy Grainger, composer.
1882 - 1967 Zoltan Kodaly, composer.
1882 - 1971 Igor Stravinsky, composer.
1883 - 1918 Hans Erdt.
1883 - 1946 John Maynard Keynes, General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money 1936.
1883 - 1945 Anton von Webern, composer.
1884 - 1885: Congress of Berlin divides up Africa
typefaces: 1884 Ronaldson
1884 - 1958 Motonori Matuyama & &, discovered that the Earth's magnetic polarity reverses.
1885: Third Anglo-Burmese war
1885 - 1935 Alban Berg, composer.
1885 - 1962 Niels Bohr & & & & &, quantised theory of atom, On the Constitution of Atoms and Molecules 1913, Atomic Structure 1921.
1886 - 1941 James Pryde artist.
1887 Michelson-Morley experiment fails to detect change in velocity of light.
1888 Hertz shows light is a type of electromagnetic wave.
1887 - 1959 Heitor Villa-Lobos, composer.
1887 - 1961 Erwin Schrodinger, wave equations of quantum theory.
1888 - 1925 Alexander Friedmann, theory of an expanding universe 1922.
1889 - 1953 Edwin Hubble & & & &, distance of Andromeda galaxy 1924, redshift observations support expanding universe 1929, The Realm of the Nebulae 1936.
1889 - 1969 Ben Shahn lithographer/painter.
1890 development of photoprocess, Kelmscott Press founded by William Morris.
1891 - 1953 Sergei Prokofiev, composer.
1892 - 1987 Louis de Broglie, quantum wave-particle duality.
1894 - 1978 Norman Rockwell illustrator.
1894 Century Old Style
1895 - 1963 Paul Hindemith, composer.
1895 - 1982 Carl Orff, composer.
1896 Cheltenham typeface
1896 - 1980 Jean Piaget developmental psychologist. The Child's Conception of the World 1926, The Origin of Intelligence in Children 1936, The Early Growth of Logic in the Child 1958.
Lev Vygotsky, Jurgen Habermas1897 - 1975 Jacob Bjerknes, weather forecasting.
1898 - 1937 George Gershwin, composer.
1898 Standard typeface
1,899 - 1902: Second Anglo-Boer War
1899 - 1963 Francis Poulenc, composer.
1900 - 1950 Kurt Weil, composer.
1900 - 1990 Aaron Copland, composer.
1901: Commonwealth of Australia formed
1901 - 1954 Enrico Fermi physicist, Nobel Prize 1938, dveloped first nuclear reactor, worked on the atomic bomb project.
1901 - 1968 A. M. Cassandra poster artist,
1901 - 1994 Linus Pauling awarded Nobel Prizes for Chemistry 1954, and Peace 1963.
1901 - Joaquin Rodrigo composer.
1901. First Nobel Prizes awarded.
1901 - 1976 Werner Heisenberg, matrix equations of quantum theory, uncertainty principle.
1902 - 1994 Karl Popper, Die Logik der Forschung (The Logic of Scientific Discovery) 1934 (translated 1959).
1902 - 1984 Paul Dirac & Prediction of antimatter positron 1927.
1902 - 1983 William Walton, composer.
1903 Franklin Gothic
1903 - 1978 Aram Khachaturian, composer.
1903 - 1989 Konrad Lorenz Biography and links. Imprinting in young birds 1935, ethology.
1903 - 1950 Eric Blair aka George Orwell & & &, writer, Animal Farm 1945, Politics and the English Language 1946, 1984 1948, Principles of Newspeak &.
1904 - 1968 George Gamow, astrophysics, The Origin of Chemical Elements 1948, with Alpher and Bethe, predicted the level of microwave background radiation.
1904 - 1991 Graham Greene, novelist, Brighton Rock 1938, The Third Man 1949.
1904 - 1975 Luigi Dallapiccola, composer.
1905 - 1998 Michael Tippett, composer.
1905 - 1991 Carl D. Anderson &, Discovery of positron 1932.
1906 - 1975 Dmitri Shosdtakovich, composer.
1906 - 1983 Elisabeth Lutyens, composer.
1907: Dominion of New Zealand founded
1907 - 1964 Rachel Carson & & & &, Silent Spring 1962.
1907 Clearface
1908: Tunguska explosion in Siberia, most recent disaster caused by body from space.
1908 News Gothic
1908 - 1992 Olivier Messaien, composer.
1908 - Elliott Carter, composer.
1909 - 1997 Isaiah Berlin, philosopher, Two Concepts of Liberty 1958.
1,910: South Africa beomes independent dominion
1,910 - 1920: Mexican revolution
1910 - 1981 Samuel Barber, composer.
1910 aluminium foil made.
1911 typeface Kennerley
1911 - 1993 William Golding & & &, Lord of the Flies 1954, The Inheritors 1955.
1912 - 1913: Balkan wars
1912: China: Republic
1912 cellophane invented.
1912 - 1992 John Cage, composer.
1912 - 1954 Alan Turing & & & & & & & & &, Computing Machinery and Intelligence 1950.
1913 - 1976 Benjamin Britten, composer.
1913 - 1994 Witold Luteslawski, composer.
1914: Panama canal opened
1914 - 1918 World War I, fought between the Allies and the Central Powers, ended the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Russian Empire and the Ottoman Empire. This transformation was catalysed by wars of unparalleled scope and devastation. It also weakened France and Britain. In its aftermath, the Russian Revolution of 1917 created the first communist state, while the 1920s and 1930s saw militaristic fascist dictatorships gain control in Italy, Germany, Spain and elsewhere.
1915 - 1984 Elso Barghoorn &, precambrian fossils.
1915 - 2001 Fred Hoyle, astrophysics, nucleosynthesis 1946, The Nature of the Universe 1950, proposed a steady state cosmology in opposition to what he called the "big bang" theory.
1916 - 2004 Francis Crick & & &, Crick papers.
1916 - 2004 Maurice Wilkins. Discovery of Structure of DNA, Of Molecules and Men 1966.
1916 - Milton Babbitt, musician
1917: US declares war on Germany. Russian revolution.
1918: Spanish flu outbreak, in two years killed as many as the "black death" in 200.
1918 Johnston's Railway type
1918 - 1990 Leonard Bernstein.
1919 - James Lovelock & & &, Gaia hypothesis.
1919 - 1982 Henri Tajfel , group rivalry experiments 1963.
1920: German colonies in Pacific acquired by Australia and Japan
1920 - 2004 John Maynard Smith, evolutionist.
1920 - 1958 Rosalind Franklin, X-ray crystallographer.
1921 - 2002 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice & & 1971, Political Liberalism 1996.
1921 Cooper Black
1922: Egypt becomes independent
1922 - Iannis Xenakis
1,923: Ottoman empire ends. Turkish republic founded.
1923 - Gyorgy Ligeti
1923 - Freeman Dyson, Time without end 1979.
1924 - 1990 Luigi Nano, musician
1925 - Luciano Berio, musician
1925 - Pierre Boulez, musician
1,926: British Empire renamed "British Commonwealth of Nations".
1926 - Hans Werner Henze, musician
1926 Ionic Linotype
1927 Cable typeface
1928 Eric Gill introduces Gill Sans typeface.
1928 - Karlheinz Stockhausen, musician
1928 - James Watson & & & & &, The Double Helix & 1968, The Molecular Biology of the Gene, Human Genome Project.
1929: Astronomers using ever more powerful telescopes expand the universe by interpreting nebulae as galaxies of stars. Edwin Hubble deduces the expansion of the universe which leads to the big bang theory.
1929 - Edward O. Wilson &, Sociobiology 1975.
1929 Thannhaeuser typeface, Corvinus (condensed Bodoni)
1930: First Commonwealth Games held in Canada.
1930 Tempo typeface
1930 - 1996 Toru Takemitsu, musician
1931 Beton, Times New Roman
1932: Saudi Arabia united
1932 Metropolis, typeface
1933 - Krzysztof Penderecki, musician
1934 - 1935: Long March in China
1934 Edward Johnston, Rockwell
1934 - 1998 Alfred Schnittke, musician
1934 - Peter Maxwell-Davies, musician
1934 - Harrison Birtwistle, musician
1,935: Ethiopia invaded by Italy
1935 Futura
1935 - Arvo Part, musician
1935 - Terry Riley, musician
1936 - Steve Reich, musician
1936 - 2000 William D. Hamilton, altruism in evolution.
1937 - Philip Glass, musician
1939-1945 World War II. Ongoing national rivalries, exacerbated by the economic turmoil of the Great Depression, helped precipitate World War II. The militaristic dictatorships of Europe and Japan pursued a course of imperialist expansionism. Their defeat opened the way for the advance of communism into Central Europe, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, China, North Vietnam and North Korea. Nuclear weapons, used against Japan in 1945, ended the war.
1940 - 1993 Frank Zappa, musician
1941: USA enters world war, after Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, Hawaii
1941 - Richard Dawkins & &, selfish gene.
1942 - Dan Mckenzie & & & developed geological theory of plate tectonics.
1942 - Stephen Hawking &, A Brief History of Time.
1942: Battle of El Alamein
943 - Gavin Bryars, composer
1944 - John Tavener, composer
1944 - Michael Nyman, composer
(1945 - ) Anton Zeilinger &, H. C. von Baeyer, In the Begining was the Bit: Zeilinger's Quantum interpretation.
1945. Founding of the United Nations in the hope of preventing future conflicts.
1945 - 1985. The Cold War, a stand-off between the United States and the Soviet Union, and their respective allies. With the development of nuclear weapons and the arms race, all of humanity were put at risk of nuclear war. In the early postwar decades, the African and Asian colonies of the Belgian, British, Dutch and French won their formal independence. Western and Central European nations gradually formed a political and economic community, the European Union, which subsequently expanded eastward to include former Soviet satellites.
1946 - 1949: Chinese Civil War
1947 - Gregory Chaitin &, Godel's Theorem and Information 1982.
1947 - John Adams, composer
1947; India and Pakistan gain independence from Britain.
1947 - 1948: Palestine partitioned. Jewish state of Israel established.
1948 - 1949: First Arab-Israeli war
(1948? - ) Robert Axelrod &, Complexity of Cooperation.
1949: NATO formed. Germany divided into East and West (to 1990).
Policy of apartheid in South Africa (to 1991).
The British Commonwealth becomes just "The Commonwealth".
1950 - 1953: Korean war
1,951: ANZUS alliance signed
1952: Military coup in Egypt
1953 - David Deutsch &, quantum computers.
1954: French withdraw from Indochina
1954 acrylic paints invented, Trump Medieval typeface.
1956: Suez crisis
1956? - Steven Benner &, synthetic biology, genomics.
1957: EEC established.
Independence movements in Africa (to 1975).
1957 Univers, Helvetica, Folio, Mercator
1958 Optima
1959: Cuban revolution.
Hawaii becomes 50th state of USA.
1959 - Stephen Wolfram & &, A New Kind of Science, Reviews by S. Weinberg and D. Naiditch.
1960: Sharpeville massacre in South Africa
1963 - Garry Kasparov aka Garri Weinstein, world chess champion 1984. Games against IBM Deep Blue computer 1986/7.
Anatoly Karpov, Victor Korchnoi, Vassily Smyslov1964 - 1975: Vietnam war. USA involved until 1973.
1966 - 1976: Cultural Revolution in China
1,967: Six Day War
1969: IRA Violence in Northern Ireland
1971 Souvenir typeface: Typefaces: ? Clarendon ? Perpetua ? Old English, Fraktur, Black letter, Gothic ? Carousel (Fat Face) ? Grotesque ? Bell ? Venetian Centaur Typeface designers: William Morris, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Stanley Morison Eric Gill, Monotype Corporation
1972: Yom Kippur war
1972. The last exploration of the Moon: Apollo 17.
1973 - 1974: Oil prices increased by OPEC
1978 - 1989: Vitenam invades Cambodia
1979 - 1989: USSR invades Afghanistan
1980: Black majority rule in Zimbabwe
1980 - 1988: Iran-Iraq war
1982: Falklands war
1985: South Pacific dclared a nuclear-free zone. Greenpeace ship destroyed by French
1989 - 2000: Afghan Civil war
1991: USSR breaks up.
Civil war in Yugoslavia.
Gulf war.
1992: Yugoslavia breaks up. Czechs and Slovaks separate.
1993: Israel-PLO peace accord
1994: Palestinian autonomous areas established.
World Trade Organisation formed.
Ethnic massacres in Rwanda and Burundi.
ANC wins multiracial elections in South Africa.
1995: South Pacific Forum condemns France for nuclear tests
1997: Lease on New Territories ends. Hong Kong handed over to China. Economic crisis in far east.
1999: China resumes sovereignty over Macao.
NATO attacks Serbia over Kosovo.
2000: Completion of the human genome project. World wide web electronic communication advances.
2001: Terrorist attacks on USA. Afghan war
2003: Iraq war
2004: Ethnic massacres in Darfur, Sudan. Tsunami in Indian ocean
Superstring Theory official site.
J. G. Gilson on Fine Structure Constant.
Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Mission and results.
E. H. Hagen: Evolutionary Psychology 2002 problems.
Obviously there is a lot more work to be done on these pages!