Timeline: Before 1940

[[index|Thematic index]] · The 1940s →

1642

• Nineteen-year-old Blaise Pascal builds the Pascaline with automatic carry. → Before the Computer: Mechanical Calculation

1736

• Euler’s Königsberg bridges paper founds graph theory. → Graph Algorithms

1804

• Jacquard looms use punched cards to control weaving patterns. → Herman Hollerith and the Punched Card

1811

• The Luddites begin smashing looms, the first machine-breaking movement of the industrial age. → Automation and the Future of Work

1843

• Ada Lovelace publishes her Notes on the Analytical Engine, including the Bernoulli-number program. → Ada Lovelace and the Analytical Engine
• Alexander Bain patents an electric printing telegraph that copies images line by line, the first fax. → The Fax Machine

1844

• Morse’s telegraph line sends “What hath God wrought”. → Data Communication Prehistory: Telegraph, Morse, and Teletype

1847

• Boole’s The Mathematical Analysis of Logic turns reasoning into algebra. → George Boole and Boolean Logic

1854

• Boole publishes The Laws of Thought. → George Boole and Boolean Logic

1865

• Caselli’s pantelegraph opens the first commercial fax service, Paris to Lyon. → The Fax Machine
• Nokia begins as a Finnish paper mill. → Nokia: The Mobile Empire That Couldn’t Become a Software Company

1871

• Charles Babbage dies with the Analytical Engine unbuilt. → Charles Babbage: The Visionary Architect

1889

• Nintendo is founded to make hanafuda playing cards. → Nintendo: A Century of Play

1890

• Hollerith’s tabulators process the US census in six weeks. → Herman Hollerith and the Punched Card

1908

• Camillo Olivetti founds Italy’s first typewriter factory in Ivrea. → Camillo and Adriano Olivetti

1911

• Charles Flint assembles the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company from four firms. → IBM: The Company
• The Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, later IBM, is formed. → IBM: The Company

1912

• Torres Quevedo’s El Ajedrecista plays a chess endgame on its own. → Leonardo Torres Quevedo and El Ajedrecista

1914

• Torres Quevedo describes floating-point arithmetic. → Leonardo Torres Quevedo and El Ajedrecista

1922

• Lewis Fry Richardson proposes calculating the weather from physics. → Weather and Climate Modeling

1924

• Thomas J. Watson renames CTR as International Business Machines. → IBM: The Company

1925

• Bell Telephone Laboratories is established. → Bell Labs: The Idea Factory

1928

• Hilbert poses the Entscheidungsproblem. → David Hilbert and the Entscheidungsproblem

1929

• Poland’s Cipher Bureau runs a secret cryptology course for Poznań mathematics students. → The Polish Cryptologists Who Broke Enigma

1931

• Bush’s Differential Analyzer solves differential equations mechanically at MIT. → Vannevar Bush and the Memex
• Elizebeth Friedman heads her own codebreaking unit at the Treasury, breaking rum-runners’ ciphers. → Elizebeth Smith Friedman: The Hidden Codebreaker
• Kurt Gödel proves the incompleteness theorems. → Gödel and the Incompleteness Theorems
• Vannevar Bush’s differential analyzer runs at MIT. → Analog Computers

1932

• Gustav Tauschek patents magnetic drum memory. → Gustav Tauschek: The Forgotten Inventor
• Von Neumann’s Mathematische Grundlagen der Quantenmechanik puts quantum mechanics in Hilbert spaces. → John von Neumann
• Marian Rejewski reconstructs Enigma’s wiring with group theory in December. → The Polish Cryptologists Who Broke Enigma

1933

• Kolmogorov’s Grundbegriffe puts probability on measure-theoretic axioms. → Andrey Kolmogorov

1936

• Church proves the Entscheidungsproblem unsolvable with the lambda calculus. → Alonzo Church and Lambda Calculus
• Turing and Church give the algorithm a precise definition. → The Algorithm as a Concept: From Euclid to Turing
• Turing’s “On Computable Numbers” defines the Turing machine and proves the Entscheidungsproblem unsolvable. → Alan Turing and the Enigma
• Zuse starts building the mechanical Z1 in his parents’ living room. → Konrad Zuse and the Z3

1937

• Shannon’s master’s thesis shows Boolean algebra and switching circuits are the same thing. → Claude Shannon and Information Theory

1938

• Experts dismiss Schreyer’s proposal for a 2,000-tube electronic computer as “fantasy”. → Konrad Zuse and the Z3
• The Polish bomba mechanizes Enigma decryption. → The Polish Cryptologists Who Broke Enigma
• Chester Carlson and Otto Kornei make the first xerographic copy, “10.-22.-38 ASTORIA”, in a rented room in Queens. → Chester Carlson
• Germany adds two Enigma rotors in December, multiplying the search space tenfold. → The Polish Cryptologists Who Broke Enigma

1939

• Bell Labs demonstrates Homer Dudley’s Voder, a keyboard-played speech synthesizer, at the New York World’s Fair. → The History of Speech Synthesis
• Hewlett and Packard formalize their partnership on 1 January with $538. → Hewlett-Packard

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[[index|Thematic index]] · The 1940s →