Tempestry

October 4, 1957

The Space Race

The Space Race was a 20th-century competition between the United States and the Soviet Union to achieve superior spaceflight capability. Driven by Cold War tensions and the desire to demonstrate technological and ideological superiority, the contest began with the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957 and culminated in the Apollo 11 Moon landing in 1969. It produced some of humanity's greatest scientific and engineering achievements, including the first human in orbit, the first spacewalk, and ultimately crewed lunar exploration — all within a single decade.

#science-technology @tempestry

418

November 24, 1859

Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species

On 24 November 1859, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, presenting his theory of evolution — the most consequential idea in the history of biology. Drawing on observations from his 1831–1836 voyage aboard HMS Beagle — especially from the Galápagos Islands, where finch beak shapes varied by island food sources — Darwin argued that species were not fixed divine creations but changed over generations through natural selection: individuals with advantageous traits survived and reproduced, passing those traits on. The first edition of 1,250 copies sold out on the day of publication. The theory unified all of biology under a single explanatory framework and was later integrated with Gregor Mendel's genetics into the Modern Synthesis. It remains one of the best-supported theories in all of science. The book sparked fierce religious and philosophical controversy that, in parts of the world, continues today.

#science-technology

1989

The Digital Revolution

The Digital Revolution transformed global society through the rise of personal computing, the public internet, and mobile technology. Beginning with the invention of the transistor and accelerating sharply from the late 1980s onward, it reshaped commerce, communication, media, and culture at a pace unprecedented in human history. Within a generation, the internet went from an academic network to the backbone of civilisation — and then the smartphone put it in every pocket.

#science-technology @tempestry

April 25, 1953

The Genetics Revolution

The Genetics Revolution spans from the discovery of DNA's double-helix structure in 1953 to the completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003 — and continues today with CRISPR gene editing and personalised medicine. It fundamentally changed our understanding of life, heredity, and disease. Within 50 years, humanity went from not knowing how genetic information was encoded to reading the entire human blueprint, opening the door to targeted therapies, genetic screening, and the eventual ability to edit the code of life itself.

#science-technology @tempestry

September 28, 1928

Fleming discovers penicillin

On 28 September 1928, Scottish bacteriologist Alexander Fleming returned from a summer holiday to find a mould — Penicillium notatum — contaminating one of his petri dishes and killing the Staphylococcus bacteria around it. Rather than discarding the plate, he recognised what he was seeing. Fleming published his findings in 1929, but penicillin's clinical potential was only realised a decade later when Howard Florey and Ernst Chain at Oxford isolated, concentrated, and tested it. A police officer named Albert Alexander became the first patient treated in 1941 — he improved dramatically before supplies ran out and he died. Mass production, accelerated by wartime need, was achieved by 1944, saving tens of thousands of Allied soldiers' lives. Fleming, Florey, and Chain shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Penicillin transformed medicine, turning previously fatal infections into minor treatable conditions, and launched the antibiotic era. Antibiotic resistance, a direct consequence of widespread use, is now one of medicine's most urgent challenges.

#science-technology

July 16, 1945

Trinity: first nuclear weapon detonated

At 05:29 AM on 16 July 1945, the United States detonated the world's first nuclear device — code-named "The Gadget" — at the Trinity test site in the Jornada del Muerto desert, New Mexico. The explosion released energy equivalent to approximately 21 kilotons of TNT, vaporising the 100-foot steel tower and turning the desert sand into a green glass called trinitite. Test director J. Robert Oppenheimer later recalled the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." Secretary of War Henry Stimson called it "the most terrible weapon ever known in human history." Three weeks later, atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima (6 August) and Nagasaki (9 August), killing between 129,000 and 226,000 people and prompting Japan's surrender. Trinity opened the nuclear age and initiated an arms race between the United States and Soviet Union that defined the Cold War for the next four decades — and whose consequences remain with us today.

#science-technology

December 10, 1903

Marie Curie becomes the first woman to win a Nobel Prize

On 10 December 1903, Marie Curie became the first woman ever awarded a Nobel Prize, sharing the Nobel Prize in Physics with her husband Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel for their research into radioactivity — a term she coined. Born Maria Skłodowska in Warsaw in 1867, she had overcome both gender and nationality barriers to study at the Sorbonne in Paris, where she met Pierre. Their joint research into uranium and thorium revealed that radioactivity was an atomic property of matter itself, not a chemical reaction. In 1911 she received a second Nobel Prize, this time in Chemistry, for isolating pure radium and polonium — making her the first person, male or female, to win the prize in two different scientific disciplines. She remains the only person to have done so. Her discoveries laid the foundation for nuclear physics, cancer radiotherapy, and medical imaging. She died in 1934 from aplastic anaemia caused by decades of radiation exposure.

#science-technology

October 29, 1969

ARPANET sends its first message

On 29 October 1969, computer science student Charley Kline at UCLA transmitted the first message over ARPANET — the precursor to the internet — to a computer at the Stanford Research Institute 350 miles away. The intended message was "login." The system crashed after the first two letters, making "lo" the first transmission ever sent over a computer network. ARPANET was funded by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and designed to be a resilient packet-switching network that could route traffic around damage, including nuclear strikes. By 1971 it connected 23 sites; by the early 1980s it had become the backbone of a global academic network and given birth to email and file-sharing. In 1983, ARPANET adopted the TCP/IP protocol that still underlies the internet. In 1990 it was decommissioned as the public internet took over. The internet now connects over 5 billion people and carries the bulk of global communication, commerce, and knowledge.

#science-technology

July 5, 1687

Newton publishes the Principia Mathematica

On 5 July 1687, Isaac Newton published Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica — laying out three laws of motion and the law of universal gravitation in mathematical form. Newton unified celestial and terrestrial mechanics: the same force that made an apple fall from a tree governed the orbit of the Moon. Edmund Halley, who recognised the work's importance, personally financed publication after the Royal Society ran out of funds. Newton's three laws of motion — inertia, F = ma, and equal-and-opposite reactions — became the foundation of classical mechanics for over two centuries. The Principia is widely regarded as the most important scientific work ever published. It established the scientific method as the dominant framework for understanding the natural world and shaped the Enlightenment's conviction that reason could unlock the laws of nature. Its framework held until Einstein's theory of relativity in 1905–1915.

#science-technology

1543

Copernicus publishes the heliocentric model

In 1543, Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus published De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), proposing that the Sun — not the Earth — stood at the centre of the universe. The work appeared the same year Copernicus died, reportedly on the day printed copies arrived. The heliocentric model challenged over a millennium of Ptolemaic geocentric astronomy and the theological authority of the Church, which taught that humanity's home was the cosmos's pivot. The Church placed De revolutionibus on its Index of Forbidden Books in 1616, but the theory had already taken root. Copernicus's ideas were extended by Tycho Brahe's observations, confirmed by Galileo's telescope, given mathematical rigour by Johannes Kepler, and unified with terrestrial physics by Isaac Newton. The "Copernican Revolution" became a byword for any paradigm shift that fundamentally overturns a prevailing worldview.

#science-technology

July 20, 1969

Apollo 11 lands on the Moon

On 20 July 1969, NASA astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to walk on the lunar surface. Armstrong descended the ladder of the Lunar Module Eagle at 02:56 UTC and declared: "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." Michael Collins orbited above in the Command Module Columbia. The crew splashed down safely in the Pacific Ocean on 24 July, completing the mission set by President Kennedy in 1961.

#science-technology @tempestry

April 12, 1961

Yuri Gagarin becomes the first human in space

On 12 April 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin launched aboard Vostok 1 and completed a single orbit of Earth in 108 minutes, becoming the first human to travel to outer space. Gagarin ejected and parachuted to Earth separately from his capsule, landing in the Saratov region of Russia. His achievement came at the height of the Space Race and shocked the Western world. 12 April is now celebrated as Yuri's Night internationally.

#science-technology @tempestry

January 9, 2007

Steve Jobs unveils the first iPhone

On 9 January 2007, Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced the original iPhone at the Macworld Conference & Expo in San Francisco. Jobs called it "a revolutionary and magical product" combining a phone, widescreen iPod, and internet communicator. The device went on sale on 29 June 2007 at US$499–599. It established the modern smartphone paradigm — touchscreen, no physical keyboard, app ecosystem — and transformed multiple industries from photography to music to navigation.

#science-technology @tempestry

March 12, 1989

Tim Berners-Lee publishes the proposal for the World Wide Web

In March 1989 Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist at CERN, submitted a proposal titled "Information Management: A Proposal" to his supervisor Mike Sendall, who described it as "vague but exciting". The proposal outlined a distributed hypertext system linking documents across machines. By 1991 the first website was live at info.cern.ch. The web became publicly available without royalties in April 1993 and transformed how humanity accesses information.

#science-technology @tempestry

December 17, 1903

Wright Brothers make the first powered flight

At 10:35 AM on 17 December 1903, Orville Wright piloted the Flyer I for 12 seconds and 37 metres at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Wilbur Wright watched from the ground. The brothers made four flights that day; the longest lasted 59 seconds and covered 260 metres. The achievement marked the beginning of the aviation age. The Flyer I is now on display at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.

#science-technology @tempestry

April 25, 1953

Watson and Crick describe the double-helix structure of DNA

On 25 April 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick published their landmark paper in Nature describing the double-helix structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). The structure explained how genetic information could be copied and passed between generations. Crucial X-ray crystallography data was provided by Rosalind Franklin and Raymond Gosling. Watson, Crick, and Maurice Wilkins received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962.

#science-technology @tempestry

October 31, 2008

Satoshi Nakamoto publishes the Bitcoin whitepaper

On 31 October 2008, a person or group using the name Satoshi Nakamoto published a nine-page paper titled "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" to a cryptography mailing list. The paper proposed a decentralised digital currency using a proof-of-work blockchain to prevent double-spending without a trusted third party. The Bitcoin network went live on 3 January 2009. Satoshi's identity remains unknown.

#science-technology @tempestry

1440

Johannes Gutenberg introduces the printing press to Europe

Around 1440, Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz developed a movable type printing press adapted from existing screw presses. By around 1455 he had produced the Gutenberg Bible — the first major book printed using this technology in Europe. The press dramatically reduced the cost of producing books, enabling the mass dissemination of ideas. It is widely credited as a key enabler of the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution.

#science-technology @tempestry

April 26, 1986

Chernobyl nuclear reactor explodes

At 01:23 AM on 26 April 1986, reactor 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Soviet Ukraine exploded during a safety test. The explosion and subsequent fire released large quantities of radioactive particles into the atmosphere, spreading across much of Western USSR and Europe. The disaster forced the evacuation of 350,000 people, including the entire city of Pripyat. It is considered the worst nuclear disaster in history and was a significant factor in the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

#nature-environment @tempestry

April 14, 2003

Human Genome Project declares the human genome fully sequenced

On 14 April 2003, the Human Genome Project (HGP) consortium announced the completion of a high-quality sequence of the human genome, two years ahead of schedule and under budget. The project, a 13-year international collaboration, mapped the approximately 3.3 billion base pairs of human DNA. The sequence provided a foundation for understanding human biology, disease, and evolution. It has since enabled advances in personalised medicine, genetic diagnostics, and molecular biology.

#science-technology @tempestry