1500 to 1900

El Salvador · Before the 16th century

A method of drawing aromatic resin from Myroxylon trees by wounding and scorching the bark and soaking it up in cloths, practiced on El Salvador's Balsam Coast.

Philippines · By the 16th century

Baybayin is the pre-Spanish script of the Tagalogs, a system in which each character stands for a consonant with a vowel. It was widely used on Luzon in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Italy · 1501

A slanted, cursive printing type modeled on handwriting. First cut in Venice in 1501, it remains a standard part of typography.

Poland · c. 1508 to 1543

A mathematical model of the heavens that places the Sun, not Earth, at the center of planetary motion. It opened the Scientific Revolution.

Romania · 1529 to 1569

A 16th-century treatise kept in Sibiu that describes multistage rockets, delta-shaped fins and bell-shaped nozzles, about a century before the description once thought the first.

Yemen · 16th century (settlement older)

A walled city of sun-dried mud-brick tower houses up to seven or more stories on a grid plan, one of the oldest examples of urban planning based on vertical construction.

Portugal · 1542

A system of concentric scales that let an astrolabe or quadrant be read to fractions of a degree. Pedro Nunes devised it in 1542, and it led to the vernier scale.

Portugal · c. 1550

The curve a ship follows when it holds one compass bearing, which spirals toward the pole instead of tracing a great circle. Pedro Nunes identified it, and it became the basis of the Mercator chart.

Italy · 16th century

A four-stringed bowed instrument whose standard form was set by makers in Cremona in the 16th century. The Cremonese design is still the model for the violin family.

Mexico · 1554

A method of extracting silver from ore with mercury, first used at scale at Pachuca in 1554. It replaced smelting as the main silver process in Spanish America.

Mozambique · By 1560

A tuned wooden xylophone with gourd resonators made by the Chopi of Inhambane province and played in orchestras of five to thirty instruments.

The Netherlands · 1594

A windmill that drives saw blades up and down through a crankshaft, built by Cornelis Corneliszoon of Uitgeest in 1594. It made sawing logs into planks about thirty times faster.

Solomon Islands · Before 1595

An ocean-going outrigger canoe of Taumako in the Santa Cruz Islands, with a nearly submerged log hull, a raised deck and a pandanus crab-claw sail, used for trade voyages of several hundred miles.

Guinea-Bissau · c. 1600

A way of growing rice on cleared mangrove land behind hand-built sea dikes, with rain used to wash salt from the soil. Balanta farmers of present-day Guinea-Bissau developed it into a major system from about 1600.

Puerto Rico · 17th century

Puerto Rico's oldest music and dance tradition, developed by enslaved West Africans on coastal sugar plantations. Its barrel drums, made from rum casks and goatskin, follow the dancer's improvised steps.

Bangladesh · c. 17th century

A way of growing vegetables on rafts of rotting water plants that rise and fall with floodwater, practiced in south-central Bangladesh for 300 to 400 years.

Bangladesh · Mughal era; documented from the 17th century

A handloom technique from the Dhaka area in which patterns are woven into sheer cotton muslin with separate, discontinuous weft threads.

Philippines · 17th century

Piña is a sheer textile handwoven from the fibers of pineapple leaves. The technique arose in the Philippines after the Spanish brought the pineapple, and it is now centered in Aklan.

Ecuador · 17th century onward

A finely handwoven brimmed hat made from the fibers of the toquilla palm of the Ecuadorian coast. Exported through Panama in the 1800s, it picked up a misleading name but remains an Ecuadorian craft recognized by UNESCO.

The Netherlands · 1608

A tube with two lenses that makes distant things appear near. Its first written record is a patent application by the Middelburg spectacle maker Hans Lipperhey in 1608.

Bolivia · c. 1609

A way of extracting silver by heating ground ore with mercury in copper vessels. Álvaro Alonso Barba developed it in the silver district of Potosí and described it in a treatise read for two centuries.

Paraguay · 17th to 18th century

A Paraguayan needle lace of radiating sun medallions worked on a stretched cloth that is later cut away. It derives from Tenerife lace and centers on Itaugua.

Turkey · 1618

A cymbal made by a secret process for treating a metal alloy, worked out in Constantinople in 1618. The family workshop founded in 1623 still makes cymbals four centuries later.

Bermuda · 17th century

A fore-and-aft sailing rig with a tall triangular mainsail, developed on Bermudian boats in the 17th century. It became the most common rig on small sailing craft.

Vietnam · Early 17th century

Chu Quoc ngu is the Latin-based alphabet of Vietnamese, with marks for vowels and tones. Jesuit missionaries devised it in Vietnam in the 17th century and it is the country's standard script.

Slovakia · 1627

The use of gunpowder to break rock underground, first documented in 1627 at Banská Štiavnica. It greatly raised the efficiency of hard-rock mining.

Bermuda · 17th century

A heavy white limestone roof built in steps that slows rainfall into gutters and a storage tank. It has supplied drinking water to homes on an island with no rivers or springs.

Indonesia · Undated; documented from the 17th century

A wax-resist method of dyeing cloth, brought to its most refined form on Java, in which hot wax drawn or stamped on fabric keeps dye out of the pattern.

Italy · 1644

A glass tube of mercury that measures the pressure of the atmosphere. It gave the first measurement of air pressure and showed that air has weight.

Poland · 1647

The Selenographia of 1647, a book of engraved telescopic maps of the Moon made in Gdańsk, set out a systematic way to chart and name the lunar surface.

Bhutan · 17th century

A silk brocade weaving technique from Lhuntse in northeastern Bhutan, in which extra weft threads are coiled around the warp on a backstrap loom to raise patterns that look like embroidery.

The Netherlands · 1656

A clock regulated by a swinging pendulum, invented by Christiaan Huygens in 1656. It cut the daily error of clocks from about fifteen minutes to about fifteen seconds.

The Netherlands · 1672

A portable fire pump with flexible leather hoses for drawing water and for carrying it into a burning building, developed by Jan and Nicolaas van der Heyden in Amsterdam in 1672.

The Netherlands · 1674

Using tiny single-lens microscopes he made himself, the Delft tradesman Antony van Leeuwenhoek was the first to see bacteria, protists, sperm cells and blood cells, from 1674 onward.

Saint Helena · 1677 to 1679

A catalogue of 341 southern stars observed by Edmond Halley on St Helena in 1677 and 1678, the first star catalogue compiled with the aid of a telescope.

Mongolia · 1686

A script designed in 1686 by the Mongolian Buddhist leader Zanabazar to write Mongolian, Tibetan and Sanskrit; one of its characters became Mongolia's national symbol.

Bolivia · Early 18th century

A small ten-string lute of the Andes, traditionally built on an armadillo shell. It is widely held to have taken its present form in Potosí in the early 18th century.

Guyana · 18th to 19th century

A top-hinged louvered timber shutter built into colonial houses in Guyana, propped open to shade the room and admit breeze. Some had a cooler box at the sill that held ice to chill the incoming air.

Jersey · 18th century

A small dairy breed developed on the island of Jersey and kept as a closed population for about two centuries, valued for milk high in butterfat and protein.

Ghana · c. 17th to 18th century

A cloth woven in narrow strips on a horizontal treadle loom and sewn edge to edge, with patterns in both warp and weft. It began as Asante royal cloth and became a widely recognized symbol of African heritage.

Gambia · 18th century

A 21-string harp with a calabash body, made and played by Mandinka hereditary musicians. Its widely told origin story places its first maker in the kingdom of Kabu, at a town in present-day Gambia.

Italy · c. 1700

A keyboard instrument in which hammers strike the strings, so that the player controls loudness by touch. It was invented in Florence around 1700.

Micronesia · Before 1700

Large pierced stone disks used as money on Yap, quarried in Palau and carried home by sea, whose ownership passed by common knowledge without the stone being moved.

Madagascar · 18th century

A body of forestry and carpentry knowledge from the highlands of southeast Madagascar in which houses and tombs are built entirely with mortise and tenon joints and carved all over.

Ghana · 18th to early 19th century

A method of printing symbols on cotton cloth with carved calabash stamps and a black bark dye, used by the Asante for mourning cloth and to record proverbs and values.

United Kingdom · 1712

A piston engine that used condensing steam and atmospheric pressure to pump water from mines. It was the first practical device to turn steam into mechanical work.

Sweden · 1742

A temperature scale with one hundred equal degrees between the freezing and boiling points of water, proposed by Anders Celsius in 1742. It gave thermometers everywhere two fixed points that could be reproduced.

The Netherlands · 1746

A glass jar that stores electric charge, the first capacitor, made known by Pieter van Musschenbroek at Leiden in 1746. It gave experimenters a way to collect electricity and release it at will.

Slovakia · 1749

A mine drainage engine driven by the pressure of a tall column of water, first built at Banská Štiavnica in 1749. It let silver mines be worked at greater depth.

Venezuela · 18th century

A small four-string guitar that evolved in Venezuela from the Renaissance guitar and serves as the rhythmic and harmonic base of most Venezuelan folk music.

Sweden · 1753

The system of giving every species a unique two-word Latin name, a genus name followed by a species name. Carl Linnaeus applied it consistently to plants in 1753, and it remains the basis of biological naming.

Austria · 1761

A way to examine the chest by tapping it and listening to the sound. Leopold Auenbrugger published it in Vienna in 1761, and it remains part of the physical examination.

Myanmar · 18th century or earlier

A pre-industrial petroleum industry in central Burma, where hereditary well owners dug shafts by hand and sold crude oil along the Irrawaddy long before mechanical drilling.

Belarus · 1758 to 19th century

A long silk belt woven with gold and silver thread for nobles' dress, made from 1758 at the Radziwill manufactory in Slutsk to rival Persian imports. It is treated as a national treasure of Belarus.

Albania · c. 1761

A 40-letter alphabet created in the mid-eighteenth century in Elbasan for the Albanian language, the oldest of the original alphabets made for Albanian.

United Kingdom · c. 1764

A hand-powered machine that let one person spin several threads at once. It was the first practical multiple-spindle spinning machine and helped industrialize textiles.

France · 1782-1783

A fabric and paper envelope lifted by heated air, invented by Joseph and Étienne Montgolfier of Annonay. In 1783 it carried the first living passengers and then the first humans into the air.

Spain · 1783

The first isolation of the metal tungsten, achieved in 1783 by the brothers Juan José and Fausto Elhuyar in the Basque Country. Tungsten is now essential to hard cutting tools and high-temperature parts.

North Korea · documented from 1786

A double-entry accounting method kept by the merchants of Kaesong, with journals and ledgers comparable to Western bookkeeping. Surviving accounts date from 1786.

France · 1790s

A decimal system of measurement based on the meter and the kilogram, created in France during the Revolution. It is now the official system of measurement in nearly every country.

United States · 1793

A machine that separates cotton fiber from its seeds. Patented by Eli Whitney in 1794, it made short-staple cotton profitable and greatly expanded slavery in the American South.

France · 1795-1810

A method of preserving food by sealing it in airtight containers and heating it in boiling water, developed by Nicolas Appert near Paris and published in 1810.

United Kingdom · 1796

Deliberate inoculation with cowpox to protect against smallpox. It began the era of vaccination and led to the eradication of smallpox.

Italy · 1799 to 1800

A stack of copper and zinc discs separated by brine-soaked cardboard. It was the first electric battery able to supply a continuous current.

Benin · Before the 19th century

A fish-farming installation of branches planted in shallow lagoon beds, developed in the lagoons of southern Benin, where it has been studied as a high-yield traditional system.

Lesotho · 19th century

A small, sure-footed horse breed shaped in Lesotho's mountains from Cape horse stock that reached the Basotho in the 19th century. It became the main transport of the highlands.

Costa Rica · 19th century, undated

A wooden stand holding a cloth filter bag over a cup, the household pour-over coffee brewer of Costa Rica.

Kiribati · 19th century or earlier

Full suits of body armor knotted from coconut husk cord, worn with porcupine fish skin helmets, made by the I-Kiribati of the Gilbert Islands.

France · 1801-1804

A loom attachment controlled by a chain of punched cards, demonstrated by Joseph Marie Jacquard in Lyon in 1801 and patented in 1804. It automated the weaving of complex patterns.

United Kingdom · 1804

A high-pressure steam engine mounted on wheels to haul loads along rails. Its first recorded journey, in South Wales in 1804, began the age of railways.

Poland · c. 1810 to 1818

A series of mechanical calculators built in Warsaw from about 1810, ending in one machine that performed the four arithmetic operations and extracted square roots.

Philippines · 1816 to 1824

A church pipe organ built in Las Piñas between 1816 and 1824 with 902 of its 1,031 pipes made of bamboo. It still plays and is a National Cultural Treasure of the Philippines.

France · 1816

A tube for listening to the sounds of the heart and lungs, invented by René Laënnec in Paris in 1816. It became the basic instrument of physical examination.

Estonia · 1816 to 1855

A chain of survey triangles measured between 1816 and 1855 along a meridian through Tartu Observatory, from the Arctic Ocean to the Black Sea. It was the first accurate measurement of a long segment of a meridian.

Lithuania · 1817

The rule that only light absorbed by a substance can cause a chemical change in it, formulated in 1817 by Theodor von Grotthuss at his laboratory in Gedučiai, Lithuania.

Benin · By the early 19th century

A court textile technique of the Kingdom of Dahomey in which cut cloth figures are sewn onto a plain ground to record the deeds and emblems of kings and families.

Guernsey · 19th century

A dairy breed fixed on the island of Guernsey in the 19th century through import controls and herd books, known for golden milk rich in carotene.

Denmark · 1836

The division of prehistory into Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages by the material of tools. Christian Jurgensen Thomsen set it out in Copenhagen in 1836.

Denmark · 1820

The finding that an electric current deflects a compass needle, showing that electricity and magnetism are linked. Hans Christian Oersted observed it in Copenhagen in 1820.

France · 1824

A tactile reading and writing system of raised dots in six-dot cells, devised by Louis Braille as a student in Paris. It is used by blind people worldwide.

France · 1824-1839

The first processes for fixing a camera image with light-sensitive chemicals, invented by Nicéphore Niépce in Burgundy and improved by Louis Daguerre, who announced the daguerreotype in 1839.

United Kingdom · 1824

A cement made by burning a ground mixture of limestone and clay and grinding the result to powder. Patented in Leeds in 1824, it gave its name to the modern cement industry.

Austria · 1829

A portable free-reed instrument played with hand bellows and keys. Cyrill Demian patented it in Vienna in 1829 and gave it its name.

Ireland · 1830

A two-column still that distills spirit continuously instead of in batches, patented by a Dublin distiller in 1830. It became the standard apparatus for grain whisky and neutral spirits.

United Kingdom · 1831

The discovery that a changing magnetic field induces an electric current in a wire. It is the principle behind the transformer and the electric generator.

Brazil · 1833

A way of fixing images with light on sensitized paper, worked out in Campinas in 1833 by Hercule Florence, who also used the word photography for it years before the term spread in Europe.

Liberia · c. 1833

A writing system of about 200 syllable signs created for the Vai language in the 1830s. It is one of the most used indigenous scripts of West Africa.

Ireland · 1836

A device that turns low-voltage current into very high voltage by electromagnetic induction, first built at Maynooth in 1836. It became a basic component of later electrical technology.

Austria · 1840

The first photographic lens designed by mathematical calculation. Joseph Petzval designed it in Vienna in 1840, and its speed made portrait photography practical.

Reunion · 1841

A quick manual way to pollinate the vanilla orchid, worked out on Réunion in 1841 by the enslaved boy Edmond Albius. It made vanilla growing possible outside Mexico.

Belgium · early 1840s, patented 1846

A single-reed brass woodwind devised by the Dinant-born instrument maker Adolphe Sax in the early 1840s and patented in 1846. It became a core voice of military bands and later of jazz.

Slovenia · 1842

A method of making photographs on glass plates devised by the Slovene priest Janez Puhar and first reported in 1842, cheaper and faster than the daguerreotype on metal.

Ireland · 1843

A four-part number system that extends complex numbers and describes rotation in three dimensions. William Rowan Hamilton found its multiplication rule in Dublin in 1843.

Czechia · 1843

Sugar pressed into small, uniform cubes, first made at a refinery in the Moravian town of Dačice in 1843. It replaced the large hard loaves that had to be cut or scraped by hand.

Ireland · 1844

The delivery of a drug under the skin through a hollow needle, first recorded at a Dublin hospital in 1844. It opened a new route for giving medicines.

Sweden · 1844

A match that lights only on a prepared striking surface, because the red phosphorus sits on the box and not in the match head. It replaced matches made with poisonous white phosphorus.

Canada · 1846

A clean-burning lamp oil distilled from bitumen and coal, first shown in public by Abraham Gesner in Charlottetown in 1846. It became the standard lighting fuel in homes.

Azerbaijan · 1846

In 1846 a well was drilled for oil at Bibi-Heybat near Baku, 13 years before the Drake well in Pennsylvania. It is widely cited as the first drilled oil well.

Saint Helena · 1840s to 1870s

A planned 19th century planting program on Ascension Island that turned a barren volcanic peak into a self-sustaining cloud forest, an early large experiment in building an ecosystem.

Costa Rica · Mid-19th century

A wooden cart with solid spokeless wheels built to haul coffee over muddy mountain roads, later painted with regional designs.

Spain · 1850s

The guitar form set by Antonio de Torres in the 1850s: a larger body with a thin, domed, fan-braced soundboard. It became the pattern for the modern concert guitar.

Australia · 1851 to 1855

An ether-based vapor-compression machine built at Geelong in the 1850s that made ice mechanically and was put to commercial use in brewing and meat packing.

Poland · 1854

An oil field in the Polish Carpathians where systematic digging for crude oil began in 1854. It still produces oil today.

Panama · 1855

A 47-mile railway across the Isthmus of Panama, finished in 1855, that carried the first train from the Atlantic to the Pacific and later served the building of the Panama Canal.

France · 1860s

A heat treatment that destroys harmful microorganisms in food and drink, demonstrated by Louis Pasteur in the 1860s on wine and beer. It is now applied to milk and many other foods.

Hungary · c. 1861

A generator built by Anyos Jedlik in Pest about 1861 in which electromagnets, not permanent magnets, supply the magnetic field, six years before Siemens and Wheatstone described the principle.

Belgium · 1861

An industrial method for making soda ash (sodium carbonate) from brine, limestone and ammonia, patented by Ernest Solvay in 1861. It replaced the Leblanc process and supplied the glass and soap industries worldwide.

Mauritius · 1860s

Working in Mauritius from ships' logs, Charles Meldrum is credited as the first to confirm from observations that cyclone winds spiral in toward the storm center, a finding that mattered to mariners.

Uruguay · 1863

The Liebig plant at Fray Bentos was the first to turn beef into concentrated meat extract at industrial scale, then canned corned beef, shipping both to Europe. It is an early model of the global food industry.

Denmark · 1865 to 1870

An early typewriter with keys set on a brass hemisphere. Rasmus Malling-Hansen invented it in Copenhagen in 1865, and from 1870 it was the first typewriter made for sale.

Czechia · 1865

From pea-crossing experiments in a monastery garden in Brno, Gregor Mendel showed that traits pass between generations as separate units in fixed ratios. His results became the foundation of genetics.

Sweden · 1867

A stabilized form of nitroglycerin, patented by Alfred Nobel in 1867, that made blasting for mines, tunnels, canals and railroads safer and far more effective than black powder.

Russia · 1869

A system that arranges the chemical elements so that similar properties recur at regular intervals. It let chemists predict undiscovered elements and became a basic tool of science and teaching.

Austria · 1869

A prepaid card for short open messages sent by post. The Austrian post issued the first official ones on October 1, 1869, at the prompting of Emanuel Herrmann.

Azerbaijan · 1870s

The 11-string form of the tar, a long-necked lute, rebuilt by the musician Sadigjan in Shusha in the late 19th century and played held against the chest.

Canada · 1879

A plan for a worldwide system of 24 hour-wide time zones, set out by the engineer Sandford Fleming in Toronto in 1879. It replaced a patchwork of local times.

Australia · 1876

A hinged, weighted plough whose shares ride over buried stumps and rocks and drop back into the furrow, which opened uncleared scrub land to grain farming.

United States · 1876

A device that carries the human voice over a wire as a varying electric current. Alexander Graham Bell's first successful call took place in his Boston laboratory in March 1876.

United States · 1877

The first machine that could record sound and play it back, built at Thomas Edison's Menlo Park laboratory in 1877. The sound recording industry grew from it.

Switzerland · 1879

A chocolate-making step in which the mass is stirred and aerated for hours in a machine called a conche, giving a smooth texture that melts in the mouth. Rodolphe Lindt introduced it in Bern in 1879.

Algeria · 1880

The first observation of the parasite that causes malaria, made by Alphonse Laveran in the blood of a patient at the military hospital in Constantine in 1880. It was the first time a protozoan was linked to a human disease.

Cuba · 1881

In 1881 the Havana physician Carlos Finlay proposed that a mosquito carries yellow fever from person to person. The idea was confirmed in 1900 and became the basis for controlling the disease.

Luxembourg · 1881 to 1886

A lead-acid storage battery with rigid grooved plates, developed by Henri Tudor at Rosport from 1881 and patented in 1886, that was reliable enough for power stations and town lighting.

Denmark · 1883

A laboratory method for measuring the nitrogen, and so the protein, in organic material. Johan Kjeldahl introduced it at the Carlsberg Laboratory in 1883.

Poland · 1883

The first condensation of oxygen and nitrogen into a stable liquid that could be studied, achieved in a Kraków laboratory in 1883.

Denmark · 1883

A method of growing brewing yeast from a single cell so that every batch ferments the same way. Emil Christian Hansen developed it at Carlsberg in Copenhagen in 1883.

Italy · 1884

A machine that brews coffee quickly by forcing hot water and steam through ground coffee. It was patented in Turin in 1884 and refined in Milan.

Austria · 1884

The use of a cocaine solution to numb the eye for surgery. Carl Koller reported it in Vienna in 1884, which marks the start of modern local anesthesia.

Germany · 1885-1886

A three-wheeled vehicle with a gasoline engine built by Carl Benz in Mannheim and patented in 1886. It is widely regarded as the first practical automobile.

Hungary · 1885

The closed-core, parallel-connected transformer developed at the Ganz Works in Budapest in 1884 and 1885, which made alternating-current power distribution practical.

Austria · 1885

A fabric hood soaked in rare-earth salts that glows brightly in a gas flame. Patented by Carl Auer von Welsbach in 1885, it sharply raised the light output of gas lamps.

Croatia · 1888

An electric device patented in 1888 by the Istrian teacher Josip Belušić that measured a vehicle's speed and recorded ride time, stops and passengers.

Malta · 1887-1905

The identification in Malta of the bacterium behind Malta fever in 1887 and, in 1905, of healthy goats and their milk as its source, which showed that symptomless animals can carry human disease.

Puerto Rico · late 19th century (ten-string form)

A viola-shaped lute with ten metal strings in five double courses, the lead instrument of the island's jíbaro country music and its national instrument. It grew from an older four-string cuatro.

Spain · 1888

The finding that the nervous system is made of separate cells, neurons, that communicate at points of contact, set out by Santiago Ramón y Cajal in 1888. It is the basis of modern neuroscience.

Australia · 1889

A drill driven by an electric motor, first patented in Melbourne in 1889 as a large machine for boring rock and coal in mines.

Cuba · Late 19th century

A pair of small open-bottomed hand drums of different sizes joined by a wooden bridge. They took shape in eastern Cuba in the late 19th century and spread through Latin music worldwide.

Myanmar · Late 19th century

A farming method of the Intha people in which mats of lake vegetation are cut, towed, staked with bamboo and planted, so that crops grow on beds that float on the lake.

Singapore · 1890s

A way of cutting rubber trees so that latex can be collected at regular intervals for decades without harming the tree, developed by Henry Ridley at the Singapore Botanic Gardens. It made plantation rubber viable in Malaya.

Denmark · 1891

An experimental windmill that made electricity, kept steady by a regulator and stored as hydrogen. Poul la Cour built it at Askov in 1891, a base for Danish wind power.

Switzerland · 1891 to 1897

A folding pocket knife that packs several tools, such as blades, a can opener, a screwdriver and a corkscrew, into one handle. Karl Elsener of Ibach patented the officer's version in 1897.

Argentina · 1891

A method for classifying and filing fingerprints, devised in La Plata in 1891, that let police identify people by their prints and led to the first murder conviction based on fingerprint evidence.

Hungary · 1893

A spray carburetor that atomizes gasoline into the engine's air stream, patented in Budapest by Donat Banki and Janos Csonka in February 1893.

Japan · 1893

A technique for making pearl oysters form pearls around an inserted nucleus. Kokichi Mikimoto produced the first cultured hemispherical pearls at Toba in 1893.

Germany · 1893-1897

A compression ignition internal combustion engine invented by Rudolf Diesel and developed in Augsburg in the 1890s. It was far more efficient than the steam engines of its time.

Hungary · 1893

A wired service launched in Budapest in 1893 that sent news, music and lectures to subscribers' homes over telephone lines, three decades before radio broadcasting.

Guatemala · 1894-1896

A marimba with a second row of bars for sharps and flats, arranged like a piano keyboard, which allowed the instrument to play in any key.

Hong Kong · 1894

The bacterium that causes bubonic plague was first isolated in Hong Kong in June 1894, which turned plague from a mystery blamed on bad air into a disease with a known cause.

India · 1894-1897

Transmitters, horn antennas, waveguides, lenses and crystal detectors built by J. C. Bose in Calcutta in the 1890s for radio waves as short as 5 mm, decades before such work resumed.

Poland · 1894

An early film device built in Warsaw in 1894 that could both record movement and project it on a screen, a year before the Lumière cinematograph was shown.

Slovakia · 1895 to 1905

An early helicopter designed by a Slovak military engineer, patented in 1895 and later fitted with a petrol engine. Tests in Bratislava lifted it a few meters off the ground.

France · 1895

A single device that worked as motion-picture camera and projector, developed by Louis and Auguste Lumière in Lyon and patented in 1895. Its public screenings are regarded as the birth of cinema.

Denmark · 1895 to 1896

Treatment of skin tuberculosis with concentrated ultraviolet light. Niels Finsen developed it in Copenhagen in 1895 and 1896 and won the 1903 Nobel Prize for it.

Croatia · 1895

A hydroelectric plant on the Krka River that began sending polyphase alternating current 11 km to Šibenik on August 28, 1895, one of the first complete systems of its kind.

Russia · 1895

A coherer-based receiver that Aleksandr Popov demonstrated in St. Petersburg in 1895. Built to detect lightning, it showed that signals carried by electromagnetic waves could be received at a distance.

Italy · 1895

A system for sending telegraph signals by radio waves without wires. Guglielmo Marconi's first working system was built near Bologna in 1895.

Germany · 1895

A penetrating, invisible form of radiation discovered by Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen in Würzburg in 1895. It made it possible to see inside the body without surgery.

Cameroon · 1896

A writing system created from about 1896 by King Ibrahim Njoya of Bamum, which he refined in stages from several hundred pictograms to an 80-character syllabary.

France · 1896

The finding, made by Henri Becquerel in Paris in 1896, that uranium emits penetrating radiation on its own. It opened the study of the atomic nucleus.

Russia · 1896

A tower whose steel lattice follows a doubly curved hyperboloid surface, first built by Vladimir Shukhov in 1896. The form gives high strength from little material and is now common in towers and cooling towers.

Latvia · 1896

The discovery that a chemical reaction can turn a chiral molecule into its mirror image, reported by Paul Walden at Riga Polytechnic in 1896. It gave experimental support to the tetrahedral model of carbon.

Germany · 1897

Pure, stable acetylsalicylic acid, first prepared at Bayer in Elberfeld in 1897 and sold as Aspirin from 1899. It became one of the most widely used medicines in the world.

Serbia · 1892 to 1900

A hydraulic analog computing machine designed by Belgrade mathematician Mihailo Petrovic Alas that solved differential equations through the behavior of liquid in a vessel.

Denmark · 1898

The first working machine to record sound magnetically, on steel wire. Valdemar Poulsen built it in Copenhagen in 1898, founding magnetic recording.