1900 to today

Austria · 1901

The finding that human blood falls into distinct groups that clump when mixed wrongly. Karl Landsteiner described it in Vienna in 1901, making safe transfusion possible.

Austria · 1900

An electric car driven by motors built into its wheel hubs, shown by the Vienna firm Jacob Lohner & Co. in 1900, and soon followed by a gasoline-electric hybrid.

Panama · c. 1900

A hand-sewn textile panel made by Guna women using layered cotton and reverse applique, invented around 1900 and now the best-known marker of Guna identity.

Indonesia · Early 20th century

The rig and sail of the Sulawesi schooner, a two-masted sailing cargo ship built by hand in South Sulawesi and the best-known Indonesian sailing craft.

Austria · 1900

A sealed glass globe of water with a small scene and white particles that fall like snow. Erwin Perzy made his first in Vienna in 1900 while trying to brighten a lamp.

Paraguay · Early 20th century

The recognition that the Paraguayan herb ka'a he'e, long used by the Guarani, could serve as a strong sweetener. It led to the modern stevia industry.

Russia · 1901

The finding that an animal can learn to respond to a neutral signal that has been paired with food. Ivan Pavlov's work on it in St. Petersburg became a foundation of behaviorism and behavior therapy.

Brazil · c. 1901

The finding by Vital Brazil in Sao Paulo that antivenom works only against the kind of snake whose venom was used to make it. It led to the first specific and polyvalent antivenoms.

The Netherlands · 1901 to 1905

An instrument built by Willem Einthoven in Leiden between 1901 and 1905 that recorded the heart's electrical activity precisely. It began electrocardiography as a clinical diagnostic tool.

Spain · 1903

A system for commanding a vehicle at a distance by radio signals, developed by Leonardo Torres Quevedo from 1901 and patented in 1903. IEEE recognizes it as laying down principles of modern wireless remote control.

Algeria · c. 1902

A small, sweet, early-ripening mandarin selected at an orphanage garden in Misserghin near Oran and named in 1902. It became the leading early citrus variety of the Mediterranean basin.

Luxembourg · 1902

In 1902 the steelworks at Differdange became the first to produce the modern wide-flange steel beam, using the universal rolling mill designed by Henry Grey.

Denmark · 1902 to 1903

An electric arc converter that produced continuous radio waves, invented by Valdemar Poulsen in 1902 to 1903. It was the first successful continuous-wave transmitter.

Norway · 1903

An electric arc method for fixing nitrogen from air to make nitric acid and fertilizer, developed in Norway in 1903. It was the first industrial nitrogen fixation process.

Norway · 1903

The first gas turbine to deliver more power than it took to drive its own compressor, built by a Norwegian engineer in 1903. It anticipated the engines later used in power plants and aircraft.

United States · 1903

The Wright Flyer made the first successful flights of a powered heavier-than-air machine in 1903, and its builders laid the foundations of aeronautical engineering.

Cayman Islands · 1904

A small single-masted wooden boat devised on Cayman Brac in 1904 for catching turtles. It replaced the dugout canoe across all three Cayman Islands.

Panama · 1914

A lock canal about 40 miles long across the Isthmus of Panama, opened in 1914, that lifts ships over the land through Gatun Lake and links the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

Croatia · 1906

An automatic (mechanical) pencil patented from a Zagreb workshop in 1906 by Slavoljub Penkala, followed in 1907 by a solid-ink fountain pen, and produced in Zagreb at industrial scale.

Mali · 13th century; rebuilt 1907

The Great Mosque of Djenne is the largest mud-brick building in the world and the leading example of Sudano-Sahelian earthen architecture.

Canada · 1907 to 1909

A screw with a square recess in its head that holds the driver without slipping, made practical by P. L. Robertson's cold-forming method and produced in Milton, Ontario, from 1908.

Sweden · 1907

A double-row ball bearing with a spherical outer raceway that lets a shaft tilt slightly without binding. Sven Wingquist invented it in Gothenburg in 1907 and founded SKF to make it.

Suriname · c. 1908-1910

A syllabary of 56 characters created in eastern Suriname around 1908 to 1910 by Afáka Atumisi for the Ndyuka language, a creole spoken by Maroons.

Romania · 1908

An oil refining method that uses liquid sulfur dioxide to pull aromatic compounds out of kerosene. Developed near Ploiesti in 1908, it was an early solvent extraction process in refining.

Germany · 1908-1913

A catalytic high-pressure process that makes ammonia from atmospheric nitrogen, worked out by Fritz Haber in Karlsruhe and scaled up by Carl Bosch at BASF. It made industrial nitrogen fertilizer possible.

Algeria · 1908

The discovery, made in Algeria in 1908, that the body louse carries relapsing fever from person to person. It pointed researchers to the louse as the carrier of epidemic typhus as well.

Brazil · 1909

The identification in 1909, by Carlos Chagas in Minas Gerais, of a new human disease together with its parasite and its insect carrier.

Tunisia · 1909

In 1909 Charles Nicolle, working at the Pasteur Institute in Tunis, showed that epidemic typhus is carried by the body louse. The finding made the disease preventable and won the 1928 Nobel Prize.

Denmark · 1909

A logarithmic scale for expressing how acidic or basic a solution is. S. P. L. Sorensen introduced it in 1909 at the Carlsberg Laboratory in Copenhagen.

Switzerland · 1910

A method of rolling aluminum into thin continuous foil, patented by Robert Victor Neher in 1910. He opened the first aluminum foil rolling plant in Kreuzlingen, and the foil replaced tin foil in packaging.

Liberia · c. 1900s to 1920s

An alphabet with tone marks for the Bassa language of Liberia, put into print and promoted by Thomas Flo Lewis in the early 20th century.

Myanmar · c. 1910

A textile technique from Inle Lake in which filaments pulled from lotus stems are rolled into yarn and woven by hand, producing one of the rarest fabrics made today.

Russia · 1910

A rubber made by polymerizing butadiene, first produced by Sergey Lebedev in St. Petersburg in 1910. His later industrial process made it the first mass-produced synthetic rubber.

The Netherlands · 1911

The finding, made by Heike Kamerlingh Onnes in Leiden in 1911, that the electrical resistance of mercury vanishes a few degrees above absolute zero. Superconductors now run MRI magnets and particle accelerators.

Serbia · 1911 to 1941

A mathematical theory, worked out in Belgrade, that ties ice ages to slow cyclical changes in the shape of the orbit, tilt and wobble of Earth.

Belgium · 1912

A molded chocolate shell with a soft filling, created by Jean Neuhaus II at his family shop in the Galerie de la Reine in Brussels in 1912. It defined the Belgian chocolate tradition.

Spain · 1912

An electromechanical machine completed in 1912 that played a king and rook endgame against a human without any hidden operator. It is widely regarded as the first computer game.

Czechia · 1912

A propeller-type water turbine whose blades can be turned to suit the flow, invented by Viktor Kaplan in Brno. It made rivers with a low drop and a large flow efficient sources of electricity.

Germany · 1913-1925

A compact still camera using 35 mm cinema film in a 24 x 36 mm frame, developed by Oskar Barnack at Leitz in Wetzlar. It established 35 mm film as the standard for photography.

United States · 1913

A production method in which the work moves past the workers. Introduced at Ford's Highland Park plant in 1913, it cut Model T assembly time from 12.5 hours to 93 minutes.

Argentina · 1914

A way to transfuse blood kept liquid with sodium citrate, performed by Luis Agote in Buenos Aires in November 1914. It ended the need to connect donor and patient directly and opened the way to stored blood.

Guatemala · 1915

The 1915 finding by Rodolfo Robles that a filarial worm in skin nodules was causing eye disease and blindness among Guatemalan coffee workers.

Romania · 1916 to 1922

A pancreatic extract that lowered blood sugar in diabetic dogs, reported from Bucharest in 1921. It is Romania's claim to the discovery of the hormone later named insulin.

Sierra Leone · c. 1917 to 1921

A syllabary for the Mende language created in southern Sierra Leone around 1917 to 1921, written right to left and named after its first three characters.

Sao Tome and Principe · 1919

Photographs of stars taken on Príncipe and at Sobral, Brazil, during the total solar eclipse of May 29, 1919, measured the bending of starlight by the Sun and supported Einstein's general relativity.

Somalia · 1920 to 1922

Osmanya is an alphabet created between 1920 and 1922 to write the Somali language. It was the most widely used of the scripts invented for Somali before the Latin alphabet became official in 1972.

Russia · 1920

An electronic musical instrument played without being touched, invented by Lev Termen in 1920. It was one of the first electronic instruments and led directly to later synthesizer makers.

Canada · 1921 to 1922

A purified pancreatic extract that lowers blood sugar, developed at the University of Toronto in 1921 and 1922. It turned type 1 diabetes from a fatal disease into a treatable one.

Spain · 1921

A technique for numbing a band of the body by injecting local anesthetic just outside the membrane around the spinal cord, described by Fidel Pagés in 1921. It is now routine in surgery and childbirth.

Taiwan · 1920s

Japonica rice adapted to Taiwan's subtropical lowlands in the 1920s. It became the island's main rice and the base of most Taiwanese varieties grown today.

Czechia · 1922

An electrochemical method of analysis that reads the makeup of a solution from current and voltage curves at a dropping mercury electrode. Jaroslav Heyrovský discovered it in Prague in 1922.

Spain · 1923

A rotary-wing aircraft lifted by a freely spinning, unpowered rotor and pulled by a propeller. Its hinged rotor blades made rotary-wing flight controllable and led to the helicopter.

Georgia · 1923

The sustained medical use and production of bacteria-killing viruses, built up in Tbilisi from 1923 by Giorgi Eliava with Félix d'Herelle, who had discovered bacteriophages in France.

North Macedonia · 1924

A handmade imitation pearl built up in layers of an emulsion made from the scales of the plasica, a small fish of Lake Ohrid. Two families in Ohrid have made it by a secret method since the 1920s.

Poland · 1924

A way of writing logical and mathematical formulas with each operator placed before its arguments, so that no parentheses are needed.

Japan · 1924

A highly directional antenna that focuses radio waves using closely coupled parasitic elements. It was designed at Tohoku Imperial University in Sendai from 1924.

Norway · 1925

A hand tool with a slotted blade that planes thin, even slices from a block of cheese. A Lillehammer cabinetmaker patented it in 1925, modeled on a carpenter's plane.

United Kingdom · 1926

A system that scanned and displayed live moving images using a spinning disc. Its 1926 London demonstration is regarded as the first demonstration of true television.

Norway · 1927

A pressurized can with a valve that holds and dispenses fluids as a spray, devised by a Norwegian chemical engineer in the 1920s. It is the basis of later aerosol products.

Belgium · 1927-1931

The proposal that the universe is expanding and began from a single compressed 'primeval atom'. Georges Lemaître of the Catholic University of Louvain set it out in 1927 and 1931, founding modern cosmology.

Senegal · 1927 to 1940

A live yellow fever vaccine developed at the Institut Pasteur in Dakar and given by skin scarification. It was used on a mass scale in French-speaking Africa from 1940 until 1982.

Poland · 1927 to 1929

A 27 meter steel truss over the Słudwia River, opened in 1929. It was the first fully welded road bridge and proved welding could replace rivets in bridges.

Finland · 1928

A way of preserving fresh green fodder by acidifying it, devised by a Finnish biochemist. It was the first reliable method for making good silage and earned the 1945 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Argentina · 1928

A shared taxi running a fixed route for a low fare per passenger, started by Buenos Aires taxi drivers in 1928. It grew into the privately run bus network that carries most of the city's riders.

United Kingdom · 1928

An antibacterial substance produced by Penicillium mold, discovered in London in 1928. It was the first true antibiotic and opened the era of antibiotic medicine.

India · 1928

The discovery, made in Calcutta in 1928, that a small part of light scattered by a substance changes color in a way that identifies the substance. It is the basis of Raman spectroscopy.

New Zealand · 1930s

A livestock fence that delivers a short, safe electric pulse, built by the Waikato farmer Bill Gallagher in the 1930s. His energizers made cheap, movable fencing a basis of pasture farming.

Paraguay · First half of the 20th century

A light diatonic harp whose strings run from the center of the neck, giving a loud bright tone. It was shaped in 20th century Paraguay from harps brought by Jesuits.

Trinidad and Tobago · 1930s

The steelpan is a tuned percussion instrument hammered from a steel oil drum, invented in Trinidad and Tobago in the 20th century.

United Kingdom · 1930

A gas-turbine engine that propels an aircraft with a jet of exhaust. Frank Whittle patented the design in 1930 and ran a prototype in 1937.

Germany · 1931

A microscope that forms images with a beam of electrons instead of light, first built by Ernst Ruska and Max Knoll in Berlin in 1931. It resolves detail far beyond the limit of optical microscopes.

Argentina · 1931

A leather football with an invisible seam and an inflation valve instead of an outer lace, patented in Bell Ville, Cordoba, in March 1931. It gave the game a rounder ball that was safer to head.

Hungary · 1932

At the University of Szeged in the early 1930s, Albert Szent-Gyorgyi showed that hexuronic acid is vitamin C and extracted it in bulk from paprika, which opened the way to its synthesis.

Luxembourg · 1930s

A method worked out by William Kroll in Luxembourg in the 1930s that makes ductile titanium by reducing titanium tetrachloride with magnesium, and remains the main way titanium metal is produced.

Vatican · 1932

A microwave radio telephone link that Guglielmo Marconi set up in 1932 between Vatican City and the papal summer residence at Castel Gandolfo, an early working use of microwaves for telephony.

Somalia · 1933

The Borama script is a phonetic alphabet for Somali devised in 1933 in the town of Borama. It was used by a small circle of scholars and merchants and produced a body of poetry.

Zimbabwe · 1933

A sturdy lever hand pump for deep boreholes, designed in Plumtree in 1933 and standardized nationally in 1989. It is described as the longest surviving hand pump in Africa.

Russia · 1934

The bluish light emitted when charged particles move through a medium faster than light travels in that medium. Discovered in Moscow in 1934, it is now used to detect particles and inspect nuclear fuel.

Australia · 1934

A vehicle that joins a closed passenger cabin to an integrated cargo tray, designed at Ford's Geelong plant for farmers who needed one vehicle for work and town.

Liberia · 1930s

A syllabic script for the Kpelle language invented by Chief Gbili in central Liberia in the 1930s and used for tax, trade and court records.

Latvia · 1936 to 1938

A camera small enough to hide in a closed fist, designed by Walter Zapp and first manufactured by the VEF factory in Riga from 1938. It created the 8x11 mm film format and became known as a spy camera.

Eritrea · 1937

A freight ropeway of about 72 km that climbed from the Red Sea port of Massawa to Asmara. When it opened in 1937 it was the longest three-cable aerial line ever built.

Canada · 1937

A tracked motor vehicle for travel over snow, built on the sprocket and track drive that Joseph-Armand Bombardier patented in Quebec in 1937. It ended winter isolation in snowbound regions.

Indonesia · Traditional; diatonic version 1938

A bamboo instrument from West Java in which tuned tubes hung in a frame sound a single pitch when shaken; a diatonic version made in 1938 took it into schools and orchestras.

Poland · 1938

An electrically powered machine built in Warsaw in 1938 to find the daily settings of the German Enigma cipher, the first machine made to break Enigma.

Switzerland · 1938

A synthetic compound derived from ergot, first made by Albert Hofmann at Sandoz in Basel in 1938. Its powerful effect on the mind, found in 1943, shaped psychiatric research and later drug policy.

Switzerland · 1939

The discovery that the compound DDT kills insects on contact, made by Paul Müller at Geigy in Basel in 1939. It was used against malaria and typhus and was later restricted for its harm to wildlife.

North Korea · 1939 to 1961

A synthetic fiber made from polyvinyl alcohol with anthracite and limestone as raw materials. North Korea industrialized it at Hamhung and made it the country's main textile fiber.

Mexico · 1940

A rotating three-color filter system that let black-and-white television equipment send and receive color images. Guillermo Gonzalez Camarena patented it in Mexico in 1940.

Switzerland · 1941 to 1955

A two-part fastener in which a strip of tiny hooks grips a strip of fabric loops and can be opened and closed repeatedly. Swiss engineer George de Mestral conceived it in 1941 after studying burdock burrs.

Germany · 1941

An electromechanical computer completed by Konrad Zuse in Berlin in 1941. It is described as the first working programmable, fully automatic digital computer.

Spain · 1942

A low, lightweight articulated train with short cars and independently rotating wheels, first tested near Madrid in 1941 and 1942. It later added variable-gauge and passive tilting systems.

The Netherlands · 1943

The first practical dialysis machine, built by the physician Willem Kolff in Kampen in 1943. It cleaned a patient's blood through cellophane tubing wound on a rotating drum.

Finland · 1944 to 1945

A cupboard above the sink with open-bottomed racks where washed dishes drip and air dry. Developed in Finland in 1944 and 1945, it became standard in Finnish kitchens.

Sweden · 1944 to 1952

A paper carton formed from a continuous tube, filled and sealed in one process into four-sided packages. Developed in Sweden from 1944 and launched in 1951, it began the modern beverage carton.

Philippines · 1945 to 1946

The jeepney is a shared passenger vehicle that Filipinos made by lengthening surplus United States military jeeps after World War II. It became a main form of public transport in the Philippines.

Uganda · 1947

The first isolation of Zika virus, from a sentinel rhesus monkey in the Zika Forest of Uganda in 1947, which identified a mosquito-borne virus that later caused outbreaks worldwide.

Jamaica · 1947

A mobile rig of turntable, custom high-fidelity amplifier and large bass speakers for outdoor dances, first built in Kingston in 1947.

Switzerland · 1947

A light vegetable peeler with a movable blade set crosswise to the handle, patented by Alfred Neweczerzal of Zurich in 1947. Its form, widely copied and known as the Y peeler, is used around the world.

United States · 1947

A solid-state device that amplifies and switches electrical signals without a vacuum tube. First demonstrated at Bell Labs in December 1947, it underlies modern electronics.

Liechtenstein · 1948

A hand-cranked mechanical calculator small enough to hold in one hand, designed by Curt Herzstark and first manufactured in Liechtenstein from 1948.

Brazil · 1948

A peptide that widens blood vessels and lowers blood pressure, found in 1948 by Brazilian pharmacologists studying pit viper venom. It opened the path to a class of blood pressure drugs.

Argentina · 1949

The finding, made in Buenos Aires from 1949, that sugars joined to nucleotides are what cells use to convert one sugar into another and to build carbohydrates. It earned Luis Leloir the 1970 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Spain · 1949

A mechanical reading device patented in 1949 by the teacher Ángela Ruiz Robles, with interchangeable reels of text, a light and a magnifier. It is regarded as a forerunner of the electronic book.

Colombia · 1949-1963

Surgery that corrects eyesight by cutting a thin layer of the cornea, reshaping it and putting it back. José Barraquer developed it in Bogotá from 1949, along with the microkeratome, and LASIK descends from it.

Austria · 1949 to 1952

A steelmaking method that blows pure oxygen onto molten iron in a converter. Brought to production in Linz and Donawitz in 1952, it became the main way steel is made.

Uruguay · 1949

A measure of how hard the uterus is working during labor, calculated from the pressure of contractions over ten minutes. It was devised in Montevideo and is still used in obstetrics worldwide.

Azerbaijan · 1949

A drilling and production complex built on the open Caspian Sea from 1949, described as the first operating offshore oil platform. It grew into a town on trestles.

Taiwan · 1949

The first bred high-yield semidwarf rice variety, crossed in Taiwan in 1949. It carried the short-stature gene later used in IR8 and helped start the Green Revolution in rice.

Ivory Coast · 1950s

A set of about 440 pictographic signs, each standing for a syllable, created in the 1950s by Frédéric Bruly Bouabré to write the Bété language of Côte d'Ivoire.

Ukraine · 1950-1951

A vacuum-tube stored-program electronic computer built in Kyiv and working by 1951. It was the first computer of the Soviet Union and is described as the first of its kind in continental Europe.

Uruguay · 1950s

A thin roof shell of a single layer of brick with steel reinforcement, made stiff by its double curvature. Engineer Eladio Dieste used it to span up to 50 meters over warehouses, churches and gyms.

Russia · 1950s

A machine that confines hot plasma in a ring using strong magnetic fields, conceived by Soviet physicists in 1950 and first built in Moscow. It is the leading design in the effort to produce fusion power.

Canada · 1951

A machine that directs radiation from radioactive cobalt at deep tumors. Two Canadian teams built and used the first units within days of each other in 1951.

Mexico · 1951

A synthetic hormone active when swallowed, first made at Syntex in Mexico City on October 15, 1951. It became one of the first active ingredients of birth control pills.

Australia · 1952

A method of chemical analysis that measures how much light atoms absorb, which made it quick to detect very small amounts of metallic elements.

Romania · 1950s

A procaine-based preparation developed in Bucharest in the 1950s and promoted against aging. It made Romanian geriatrics widely known, though trials found no anti-aging benefit.

Jamaica · 1952

A dairy cattle breed developed at Hope Farm in Jamaica and recognized in 1952, bred to give good milk yields in tropical heat and on poor pasture.

Somalia · 1952

The Kaddare script is an alphabet for Somali invented in 1952, with upper and lower case forms. A national committee judged it the most accurate of the indigenous Somali scripts, though Latin letters were chosen in the end.

Venezuela · 1953-1955

A blade with an edge of polished diamond, used to cut sections thin enough for electron microscopy and later adopted in eye surgery.

Haiti · 1950s

A craft technique from Croix-des-Bouquets in which discarded steel oil drums are burned clean, flattened and cut by hand into sculpture.

Australia · 1954

A crash-survivable device that records cockpit sound and flight instrument readings, so investigators can work out what happened before an accident.

Russia · 1954

The first nuclear power plant connected to an electricity grid, started at Obninsk in 1954. Its 5 megawatt reactor marked the move of nuclear energy from military to civilian use.

New Zealand · 1954

A shallow-draft boat driven by a waterjet instead of a propeller, built by Bill Hamilton in 1954 to run the fast, shallow rivers of the South Island. His design made waterjet propulsion practical.

Italy · 1954

A plastic made by polymerizing propylene with catalysts that arrange every unit the same way. First made in Milan in 1954, it became a major industrial material.

Venezuela · 1954

An industrial process that peels, cooks, dries and mills maize into a flour that becomes arepa dough when water is added, replacing hours of daily work.

Kazakhstan · 1955

Built by the Soviet Union on the Kazakh steppe from 1955, Baikonur was the launch site of the first artificial satellite and the first human spaceflight.

Thailand · 1955 to 2003

A Thai cloud seeding method developed under King Bhumibol Adulyadej from 1955. Its Super Sandwich technique, which seeds warm and cold clouds at two altitudes, was patented in 2003.

New Zealand · 1956

A single-use plastic replacement for the reusable glass syringe, designed and patented in 1956 by the Timaru pharmacist and veterinarian Colin Murdoch to cut the risk of cross-infection.

Spain · 1956

A long-handled cotton mop paired with a bucket that wrings it out, introduced in Spain in 1956. It let people clean floors standing up instead of kneeling.

Uganda · 1958

The recognition at Mulago Hospital in Kampala in 1957 and 1958 that jaw tumors in African children were one disease, which led to the discovery of the Epstein-Barr virus.

Russia · 1957

A polished metal sphere with four radio antennas, designed and built by the Soviet design bureau OKB-1 and launched on 4 October 1957. It was the first artificial Earth satellite and opened the space age.

Sweden · 1958

A self-contained device placed inside the body that paces the heart with electrical pulses. The first was implanted in a patient in Stockholm on October 8, 1958.

United States · 1958

A complete electronic circuit whose components are formed in a single piece of semiconductor. First built in 1958, the microchip became the basic building block of modern electronics.

Nepal · late 1950s

A handloom cloth from Palpa with small geometric patterns in colored cotton woven into a plain ground. It is the cloth of the Dhaka topi, the national cap of Nepal.

Sweden · 1959

A car safety belt with one strap across the chest and one across the hips, joined at a single buckle. Volvo engineer Nils Bohlin designed it in 1958 and 1959, and Volvo let other carmakers use it freely.

Israel · 1959 to 1965

A plastic emitter that uses friction in a long passage to release water drop by drop at plant roots. Developed by Simcha Blass and commercialized by Netafim at Kibbutz Hatzerim.

Puerto Rico · 1963

A 305 meter spherical reflector built into a natural karst sinkhole near Arecibo and opened in 1963. It was the world's largest single-dish telescope for 53 years and a pioneer of radar astronomy.

Guatemala · 1960

A low-cost flour of maize and cottonseed, fortified with vitamins and minerals, developed in Guatemala as a vegetable protein substitute for milk.

United States · 1960

A device that produces an intense, narrow-frequency beam of light by stimulated emission. Theodore Maiman operated the first one, a ruby laser, in California in May 1960.

Belarus · 1960s-1970s

A line of mainframe computers designed in the Byelorussian SSR and built at the Ordzhonikidze plant in Minsk from 1960. The Minsk-2 and Minsk-22 became workhorses of Soviet civilian computing.

South Africa · early 1960s

A hand-moldable epoxy putty adhesive developed in Krugersdorp in the early 1960s. It was used by NASA on the Ranger 9 probe and on the Apollo 11 lunar lander.

Indonesia · 1961

A foundation for soft ground made of a thin reinforced concrete slab stiffened by concrete pipes fixed beneath it, invented in Jakarta in 1961.

Canada · 1961 to 1964

Experiments in Toronto in the early 1960s that proved single bone marrow cells can renew themselves and give rise to different blood cells. They gave stem cells a working definition.

Senegal · 1961

A right-to-left alphabet with capital letters, created in 1961 by Assane Faye to write Wolof, the most widely spoken language of Senegal.

Tajikistan · 1961-1980

A 300 meter earth-fill embankment dam on the Vakhsh River, built 1961 to 1980. On completion it was the tallest dam in the world and it remains the tallest embankment dam on record.

Norway · 1961 to 1967

Programming languages created in Oslo in the 1960s that introduced classes, objects and inheritance. They are the origin of object-oriented programming.

Czechia · 1961

A contact lens made of a water-absorbing gel, first cast by the chemist Otto Wichterle in Prague in 1961. It made contact lenses comfortable enough for mass use.

Serbia · 1963

A five-fingered artificial hand built in Belgrade in 1963 as a prosthesis, with sensor feedback controlling the fingers. It is regarded as the first bionic hand and a landmark in robotic grasping.

South Africa · 1963

A twisted H-shaped concrete block, devised at the East London harbor in 1963, that is piled on breakwaters to dissipate wave energy. It is used on coasts around the world.

Ukraine · 1969

An automatic welding unit designed at the Paton Electric Welding Institute in Kyiv and operated aboard Soyuz 6 in October 1969. It carried out the first welding in space.

Japan · 1964

The Tokaido Shinkansen between Tokyo and Osaka, opened in 1964, was the first inter-city high-speed railway and set the model for later systems.

Latvia · 1964

An anticancer drug introduced in 1964 by chemists at the Institute of Organic Synthesis in Riga. The body converts it into 5-fluorouracil, and it is still used in combination therapies.

Malaysia · 1965

A grading scheme introduced in 1965 that classifies natural rubber by measured technical specifications, giving buyers a controlled, standardized product.

Greenland · 1966

The first ice core drilled through an entire ice sheet to its bed, completed in northwestern Greenland in 1966. It opened the field of climate history read from polar ice.

Colombia · 1966

A one-way shunt valve that regulates the pressure of cerebrospinal fluid drained from the brain. Salomón Hakim built it in Bogotá and introduced it in 1966.

South Africa · 1967

The first transplant of a human heart into another person, performed at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town in December 1967. It showed that a donor heart could work in a new body.

Sweden · 1967

A machine that focuses many beams of gamma radiation from cobalt-60 on a precise target inside the brain, treating it without opening the skull. The first unit was built in Sweden in 1967.

Canada · 1967 to 1971

A motion picture system that runs very large film frames sideways through a rolling-loop projector to fill a giant screen. It was developed by four Canadians and first shown in 1970.

Israel · 1968 to 1996

A synthetic copolymer of amino acids, made at the Weizmann Institute to mimic a myelin component, that became a drug for relapsing multiple sclerosis.

Namibia · 1968

Treating municipal wastewater to drinking quality and feeding it straight into the city supply. Windhoek built the first such plant in 1968 and still runs the longest-operating scheme.

India · 1968

A low-cost rubber prosthetic foot developed in Jaipur in 1968 that allows squatting, barefoot walking and work on uneven ground. It has been fitted to more than a million amputees.

Ivory Coast · Late 1960s

A Senufo textile from Korhogo in which figures are painted on hand-spun cotton strips with iron-rich fermented mud and fixed with a plant dye.

Bangladesh · 1968

A drink of water, glucose and salts that replaces fluid lost in cholera and other diarrheal disease; first proven in a clinical trial in Dhaka in 1968.

Australia · 1968 to 1988

A banknote printed on plastic film with a see-through panel and an optically variable device, developed to defeat forgery and to last longer than paper.

United States · 1969

The first packet-switching network linking different computers at distant sites. Its first message was sent from UCLA in 1969, and it formed the foundation of the Internet.

Luxembourg · 1969

A blast furnace charging system invented by Paul Wurth engineers in Luxembourg in 1969 that replaced heavy sealing bells with lock hoppers and a rotating chute, and became the usual way to charge large furnaces.

Japan · 1969

A wristwatch regulated by a vibrating quartz crystal instead of a balance wheel. The Seiko Quartz Astron of 1969 was the first sold to the public.

Latvia · 1970s

A heart drug invented by Ivars Kalvins at the Institute of Organic Synthesis in Riga in the 1970s. It became one of Latvia's largest medical exports and was banned in sport in 2016.

Switzerland · 1970

A small, efficient programming language designed by Niklaus Wirth at ETH Zurich in 1970 to teach structured programming. It became one of the most widely used teaching languages.

China · 1971-1972

An antimalarial compound extracted from sweet wormwood by Tu Youyou's team in Beijing in the early 1970s. Artemisinin combination therapy became the first-line treatment for malaria.

Chile · 1971 to 1973

A national network built in Chile from 1971 to 1973 that sent factory data by telex to one computer and a control room, an early attempt at near real-time management of an economy.

Kazakhstan · 1973

The BN-350 at Aktau on the Caspian Sea was a sodium-cooled fast reactor that from 1973 supplied electricity, heat and desalinated water to a desert city, the first reactor to desalinate seawater on an industrial scale.

United States · 1973

A constellation of satellites carrying atomic clocks that lets a receiver work out its position and the time. The U.S. Department of Defense approved it in 1973.

Iceland · 1973

During the 1973 Eldfell eruption on Heimaey, Icelanders pumped seawater onto advancing lava to solidify its front and keep it from closing the harbor, the most extensive lava-cooling operation ever attempted.

Zimbabwe · 1973

A pit toilet with a screened vent pipe that removes odors and traps flies. First built near Harare in 1973, it became a sanitation standard used around the world.

South Africa · 1974

A suction-driven device that moves around a swimming pool by itself and vacuums the floor and walls. It was designed in Springs in 1974 and is described as the first commercially successful pool vacuum cleaner.

Venezuela · 1970s-1987

A combined preparation of killed leprosy bacilli grown in armadillos and BCG vaccine, developed in Caracas as immunotherapy and tested as a vaccine against leprosy.

Singapore · 1975

A charge on vehicles entering a restricted city-center zone at busy hours, introduced in Singapore in June 1975. It was the first urban congestion pricing scheme successfully put into practice.

Israel · 1977

A lossless compression algorithm that replaces repeated strings of data with short codes built up in a dictionary as the data is read. It became a basis for ZIP, GIF and PNG files.

Chile · 1977

A copper smelting reactor developed at the Caletones smelter in Chile in 1977. It smelts concentrate directly with oxygen-enriched air and needs no extra fuel.

Finland · 1977 to 1982

A portable device that measures an athlete's heart rate during training, developed in northern Finland from 1977. It was the start of wearable training computers.

Colombia · 1978-1979

A method of caring for low birth weight babies by continuous skin-to-skin contact on the mother's chest, breastfeeding and early discharge. It was developed in Bogotá in the late 1970s as an alternative to incubators.

Democratic Republic of the Congo · 1978

A writing system created in 1978 by David Wabeladio Payi in Bas-Congo for Kikongo, Lingala, Swahili, Tshiluba and other Bantu languages.

Australia · 1978

An implanted device that turns sound into electrical signals on several channels and stimulates the auditory nerve directly, letting profoundly deaf people understand speech.

Afghanistan · from 1979

Hand-knotted rugs whose traditional motifs are replaced by tanks, helicopters and rifles. Afghan weavers began making them after the 1979 Soviet invasion to record the country's wars.

Croatia · 1979 to 1981

A semi-synthetic antibiotic, the first of the azalide class, invented at the PLIVA Research Institute in Zagreb and later sold worldwide as Sumamed and Zithromax.

Burkina Faso · 1979 to 1982

Contour stone bunds are low lines of stone laid along the contour to slow runoff so that water and silt stay in the field. The improved method was worked out in Yatenga from 1979 and became a model for soil and water conservation in the Sahel.

Switzerland · 1981

A microscope that maps a surface atom by atom by measuring the electric current that tunnels between a sharp tip and the sample. Built at IBM's Zurich laboratory in 1981, it opened the way to nanotechnology.

Brazil · 1979

The Fiat 147 built in Brazil in 1979 was the first car made in series to run on pure sugarcane ethanol. It started a fuel system that still powers most Brazilian cars.

Japan · 1979

A pocket-sized stereo cassette player with lightweight headphones, released by Sony in 1979. It made listening to music while walking an everyday habit.

Australia · 1980

A toilet cistern with two buttons that release a full or a half flush, cutting household water use.

Japan · 1980s

A type of floating-gate memory chip that keeps data without power and can be erased electrically in blocks. Fujio Masuoka invented it at Toshiba in the early 1980s.

Venezuela · 1980s

A power-plant fuel made by dispersing natural bitumen from the Orinoco belt in water, which let very heavy bitumen be pumped, shipped and burned like fuel oil.

Cuba · 1980s

The first vaccine shown to protect against serogroup B meningococcal disease, developed in Havana in the 1980s. It ended an epidemic in Cuba and has been given more than 60 million times in Latin America.

Burkina Faso · c. 1980 (traditional technique revived)

Zaï are hand-dug planting pits, filled with manure or compost, that catch rain and runoff on crusted Sahelian soil. Farmers in Yatenga revived and improved them around 1980 to bring barren land back into crop production.

Canada · 1981

A 15 meter robotic arm built in Canada for the United States Space Shuttle. It first flew in 1981 and moved satellites, cargo and astronauts in orbit for 30 years.

Niger · 1983

A low-cost land restoration method begun in Niger in 1983 in which farmers regrow trees from living stumps and roots in their fields instead of planting seedlings.

United Kingdom · 1984

A technique that identifies individuals from highly variable regions of their DNA. Discovered at the University of Leicester in 1984, it became the basis of forensic DNA profiling.

Libya · 1984 to 1991

A network of buried pipelines that carries fossil groundwater from beneath the Libyan Sahara to the coast. It has been described as the largest irrigation project in the world.

Ukraine · 1988

A six-engine strategic airlift aircraft designed by the Antonov Design Bureau in Kyiv, first flown in 1988. With a maximum takeoff weight of 640 tonnes it was the heaviest aircraft ever built.

Benin · 1985

A zero-waste farm model from Porto-Novo that links crops, livestock, fish farming, processing and energy so the waste of one activity feeds another.

Pakistan · 1986

A boot sector program written in Lahore in 1986 that is considered the first virus for the IBM PC and caused the first PC virus epidemic.

New Zealand · 1988

The elastic cord, ankle harness and safety code that turned bungy jumping into a public activity. AJ Hackett opened the world's first commercial site at the Kawarau Bridge near Queenstown in 1988.

Japan · 1986 to 1992

A gallium nitride diode that emits blue light, completing the colors needed for white LED lighting. Developed in Japan from 1986, it earned the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Iceland · 1986

A silicone sleeve worn over a residual limb inside a prosthetic socket, invented in Reykjavik by prosthetist Ossur Kristinsson and patented in 1986, which became the standard of care for comfort and suspension.

Colombia · 1986-1987

A chemically synthesized peptide vaccine against the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum, created in Bogotá in 1986 and 1987. It was the first malaria vaccine tested widely in endemic areas.

Jamaica · 1987

Eye drops derived from cannabis that lower pressure inside the eye for glaucoma patients without a psychoactive effect, developed in Jamaica and marketed from 1987.

Germany · 1987-1993

An audio compression format developed by a team at Fraunhofer IIS and Erlangen-Nuremberg University and standardized as MPEG-1 Layer 3. It made it practical to store and send music as small files.

Taiwan · 1987

A chip factory that only manufactures other companies' designs and sells none of its own. First set up in Hsinchu in 1987, it made chip design without a factory possible.

Slovenia · 1988 to 1993

A ski with a sidecut about three times deeper than race skis of its day, developed at the Slovenian maker Elan from 1988. It let skiers carve clean turns and led the industry to shaped skis.

Indonesia · 1988

A construction technique in which the concrete pier heads of an elevated road are cast parallel to the road below and then rotated 90 degrees on an oil-filled bearing.

Guinea · 1989

ADLaM is an alphabet for Fulfulde, the language of the Fulani people, invented in 1989 by two teenage brothers in Nzérékoré. It gave a language spoken by tens of millions its own script and is now in Unicode.

Sweden · 1989 to 1990s

A short-range radio technology that connects devices without cables, developed at Ericsson's research lab in Lund in the 1990s. It links phones, headsets, speakers and billions of other devices.

The Netherlands · 1989 to 1991

A general-purpose programming language designed by Guido van Rossum at the CWI research institute in Amsterdam and first released in 1991. It is among the most widely used languages in the world.

Singapore · 1989

An add-on card that gave personal computers digital audio, a music synthesizer, a MIDI interface and a joystick port. Launched by Singapore's Creative Technology in 1989, it became the standard for PC sound.

Singapore · 1989

An electronic system linking traders with customs and other agencies so that trade documents are filed and approved through one channel. Singapore launched it in 1989 as the first national single window for trade.

Switzerland · 1989

A system of linked hypertext documents reached over the Internet, invented by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN near Geneva in 1989. CERN released it for free use in 1993.

Vanuatu · c. 1990

An alphabet devised on Pentecost Island by Chief Viraleo Boborenvanua, modeled on Vanuatu sand drawings so that each word is written in one continuous stroke.

Finland · 1991

A free operating system kernel begun by a Helsinki student in 1991. Developed in the open by volunteers, it became the core of the widely used Linux operating system.

Portugal · 1991

A system that charges road tolls through a tag on the windshield without the car stopping. Introduced near Lisbon in 1991, it was the first to cover every toll in a country.

Ukraine · 1990s

A surgical technique that joins cut tissue with a controlled electric current in place of stitches. It was developed at the Paton Electric Welding Institute in Kyiv in the 1990s.

Lithuania · 1992

A method of amplifying ultrashort laser pulses in an optical parametric amplifier, first demonstrated at Vilnius University in 1992 and now a basis of petawatt laser facilities.

Hong Kong · 1993

A chain of 20 escalators and three moving walkways opened in Hong Kong in 1993 that carries commuters 800 meters up a steep hillside, described as the longest outdoor covered escalator system in the world.

Thailand · 1993

A floating paddlewheel machine that adds oxygen to polluted water, invented by King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand and patented in 1993.

Honduras · Early 1990s

A hillside farming method from Lempira in which maize, beans and sorghum grow under scattered pruned trees on permanently mulched, unburned soil.

Cabo Verde · 1994

A Latin-based phonemic alphabet for Cape Verdean Creole that emerged in 1994 and became the first alphabet recognized by the Cape Verdean government for writing the language.

Japan · 1994

A two-dimensional code readable at high speed from any angle, released by Denso Wave in 1994. It holds far more data than a barcode and became an open international standard.

Cuba · 1990s

A therapeutic vaccine developed in Havana that turns the immune system against a growth factor that lung tumors need. It is approved in Cuba and several other countries.

Finland · 1995

A protocol and program for encrypted remote login, written in Finland in 1995 after a password-sniffing attack. It replaced plaintext tools and became the standard for secure remote access.

Brazil · 1996

A purpose-built electronic ballot box developed for Brazil's electoral court in 1995 and first used in 1996. In 2000 Brazil became the first country to hold an election entirely on electronic machines.

Zimbabwe · 1996

A 1996 office and shopping complex in Harare that is ventilated and cooled by natural means, using a design inspired by termite mounds.

Israel · 1996

An internet chat program from the Israeli company Mirabilis that gave each user a number and showed which contacts were online. It became the first widely adopted instant messaging service.

Tanzania · 1997 to 2003

A method of training African giant pouched rats to find landmines and tuberculosis by smell, developed by APOPO at Sokoine University of Agriculture in Morogoro.

Hong Kong · 1997 to 2011

A blood test on a pregnant woman that reads fetal DNA floating in her plasma to detect Down syndrome, developed at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and now used in more than 60 countries.

Hong Kong · 1997

A contactless stored-value smart card launched in Hong Kong in 1997 for public transport fares, which grew into an everyday payment system for shops, parking and building access.

Haiti · 1998

A way of delivering antiretroviral therapy through paid village health workers who observe daily doses, first run in Cange in 1998 and later used to argue for global treatment funding.

South Korea · 1998

A pocket music player with no moving parts that stored MP3 files in flash memory, released by the Korean firm Saehan Information Systems in 1998. It was the first mass-produced portable MP3 player.

North Korea · 1998

A North Korean Linux distribution developed at the Korea Computer Center from 1998, built to replace modified copies of Windows with a domestically controlled operating system.

Israel · 1990s to 2001

A swallowable pill-sized camera that photographs the small intestine and radios the images to a recorder worn by the patient. It gave doctors a direct view of a part of the gut that scopes could not reach.

Malaysia · 1999

The identification in 1999 of a previously unknown paramyxovirus as the cause of a deadly encephalitis outbreak among Malaysian pig farmers.

Malawi · 2000 to 2003

A way of treating severely malnourished children at home with an energy-dense peanut paste instead of weeks of hospital milk feeding. It was first put into practice and tested at scale in Blantyre, Malawi, from 2000.

North Korea · early 2000s

A countrywide closed computer network opened in North Korea in the early 2000s. It offers domestic websites, email and search while keeping users separate from the global internet.

Estonia · 2001

A secure data exchange layer that lets separate government and private databases query each other over the internet. Estonia deployed it nationally in 2001 and Finland later adopted it.

Hong Kong · 2003

In March 2003 researchers in Hong Kong isolated a previously unknown coronavirus from patients with severe acute respiratory syndrome and built tests for it, giving the outbreak a laboratory diagnosis.

Singapore · 2003

A thermal camera system that picks out people with a possible fever as they walk past, built in Singapore during the 2003 SARS outbreak. It was the first infrared system used to screen large groups for fever.

Malaysia · 2003 to 2007

A 9.7 km flood diversion tunnel under Kuala Lumpur whose central 3 km also carries a double-deck motorway. Sources describe it as the first tunnel built for both uses.

Estonia · 2003

An internet calling program whose software was written by Estonian engineers in Tallinn and released in 2003. It used peer-to-peer networking to make voice calls cheap and reached hundreds of millions of users.

Cuba · 2004

A vaccine against Haemophilus influenzae type b whose sugar antigen is made by chemical synthesis instead of being grown from bacteria. It was the first approved vaccine of its kind.

Estonia · 2005

A system for casting legally binding votes over the internet using a national electronic identity card. Estonia introduced it in 2005, the first country to do so in national elections.

Japan · 2006

Mature body cells reprogrammed into stem cells able to become any cell type, by adding only a few genes. Shinya Yamanaka reported the method in 2006.

Iceland · 2007 to 2014

A method developed in Iceland that dissolves captured carbon dioxide in water and injects it into basalt, where it turns into carbonate minerals within about two years.

Taiwan · 2007

A small, low-cost laptop launched by Asus in Taipei in 2007. It started the netbook category of cheap portable computers built mainly for internet use.

Kenya · 2007

A payment and store-of-value system run from ordinary mobile phones through a network of cash agents. Launched in Kenya in March 2007, it became a model for mobile money services.

Uruguay · 2007

A national program launched in 2007 that gave a laptop and internet access to every public primary school pupil and teacher. Uruguay was the first country to do this at national scale.

Svalbard and Jan Mayen · 2008

A rock vault in the permafrost near Longyearbyen, opened in 2008, that stores duplicate seed samples from gene banks around the world as a backup for crop diversity.

Kenya · 2008

Open-source software that collects eyewitness reports sent by text message, email and the web and places them on a map. Built in Kenya in January 2008, it became a model for crowdsourced crisis mapping.

Qatar · 2009 to 2022

A cooling system for open-air stadiums that chills only the pitch and the seating zone and recycles the air, developed at Qatar University for the 2022 FIFA World Cup venues.

Cameroon · 2010

A touch-screen medical tablet that records an electrocardiogram in a remote clinic and sends it to a distant cardiologist, created in Cameroon by engineer Arthur Zang.

Iceland · early 2010s

A wound treatment made from decellularized Atlantic cod skin, developed in Isafjordur, Iceland, that acts as a scaffold for the patient's own cells in chronic wounds and burns.

Malawi · 2011

Option B+ is the policy of starting every pregnant or breastfeeding woman with HIV on lifelong antiretroviral therapy, whatever her CD4 count. Malawi designed and launched it in 2011, and the World Health Organization later adopted it.

Kenya · 2011

A small solar power kit that is paid off in daily mobile-money installments and metered over the phone network. M-KOPA introduced it in Kenya in 2011 and 2012, replacing kerosene in off-grid homes.

Iceland · 2012

The George Olah plant at Svartsengi, Iceland, commissioned in 2012, was the first industrial-scale facility to make fuel methanol from waste carbon dioxide and hydrogen from electrolysis.

Lithuania · 2012

The 2012 demonstration by Virginijus Šikšnys's group at Vilnius University that the bacterial Cas9 protein can be steered by RNA to cut chosen DNA sites, reached independently of Doudna and Charpentier.

Tokelau · 2012

Solar arrays with battery storage and coconut biofuel backup on three Pacific atolls, which in 2012 made Tokelau the first territory able to meet all its electricity needs with solar power.

Belarus · 2013

A mining dump truck built by BelAZ in Zhodzina and introduced in 2013. Rated to carry 450 tonnes, it is the largest and highest payload haul truck in the world.

Togo · 2013

A working 3D printer built in Lome in 2013 almost entirely from parts of discarded computers, printers and scanners, for about 100 US dollars.

Estonia · 2014

A small six-wheeled autonomous robot that carries groceries and parcels along sidewalks, first prototyped in Tallinn in 2014 by Starship Technologies. Its fleet has made more than 10 million deliveries.

United Arab Emirates · 2016

A 2,700-square-foot office in Dubai, opened in 2016, whose structure was printed in 17 days. Guinness World Records lists it as the first 3D-printed commercial building.

Rwanda · 2016

In October 2016 Rwanda began the first drone delivery service to run at national scale, flying blood from a base at Muhanga to hospitals on demand. It showed that routine autonomous delivery could work outside trials.

Malawi · 2017

A designated block of airspace where companies, universities and aid groups can test drones for humanitarian uses. Malawi and UNICEF opened the first one in Africa at Kasungu in 2017.

South Korea · 2020

A way of screening and sampling people for infection while they stay in their cars, first put into practice in Daegu in February 2020. It was copied around the world during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Brazil · 2020

A payment scheme created and run by Brazil's central bank that moves money between accounts in seconds at any hour. Within three years it handled more transactions than cards.

Slovenia · 2020

A two-seat battery-powered training airplane from the Slovenian maker Pipistrel. In June 2020 it became the first fully electric aircraft in the world to receive a type certificate.

Faroe Islands · 2020

A road roundabout built beneath the seabed where three tunnel tubes meet, opened in the Faroe Islands in 2020 and described as the first of its kind.