| Issue 13 Spring 2004
This is an expanded version of a timeline that appeared in Cabinet's "Histories of the Future" issue. Daniel Rosenberg's introduction to the timeline can be found here. Although we have not been able to preserve the horizontal design, we have added additional entries for this web version. If there are omissions or errors, we'd love to hear from you. Please email Cabinet at this e-mail address. 2ND CENTURY AD Jewish scholar José ben Halafta calculates the exact length of time between Creation and the destruction of the 325 In his Chronicle, Eusebius of Caesarea innovates the "canon table," a device to coordinate chronological events depicted in the Bible. Abraham's life structures the chronicle; events are matched to the age of Abraham and then to the year of various monarchies. Eusebius calculates the beginning of time as 5,198 years before the Incarnation. 415 Augustine's allegorical interpretation of the Biblical chronology forms a framework for interpreting human history according to the "six ages of man." 527 Scythian monk Dionysius Exiguus introduces the convention of dating events "Anno Domini." 530 Rule of St. Benedict organizes devotional practice around the "canonical hours" measured by the clock. 643 Muslim year 1 established by Caliph Umar I as 622. 725 In De Temporum Ratione, Bede calculates the beginning of time at 3,952 years before the Incarnation. In The Ecclesiastical History, Bede implements the "Dionysian system" of dating in relation to the birth of Christ. 10th CENTURY An anomalous graph appears in an edition of Macrobius's commentary on 12th CENTURY Moses Maimonides promotes use of the mundane era among Jewish scholars. 12-13th CENTURY Explosion of narrative genres including the lay, fabliau, and romance. Rise of the notion of Purgatory as a variable, measurable, and manipulable period in the after life. 12-13th CENTURY Jesse Trees, pictorial depictions of Christ's royal ancestry as given in Matthew, proliferate in medieval manuscripts, murals, and stained glass windows. Jesse, the father of King David and the claimed ancestor of the Virgin, is typically pictured at the base of the scene, the tree's trunk growing from his navel. 13th CENTURY Following the Franconian reforms, music becomes a true time series. Franco of Cologne's (c.1240-c.1280) treatise Ars cantus mensurabilis codifies a system of music notation that fixes the durational value of notes, while their relative value is measured against the breve, Franco's base unit of musical time. 1260 The pivotal year in humanity's transition to the third and final "state" of history according to Joachim of Fiore (1135-1202). Twelfth- and thirteenth-century renderings depict Joachim's system of historical states (status) and phases (aetates) as trees, chains, and ladders. 14-15th CENTURY A genre of illuminated private prayer books, the Book of Hours contains the texts of certain prayers to be said at the canonical hours; the devotionals are often prefaced with a richly illustrated 12-month calendar, depicting events common to each month or season. 1433 Leon Battista Alberti's I Libri della famiglia insists on the importance of a literal accounting of the hours of the day. 1440 By highlighting its anachronisms, Lorenzo Valla shows the much-disputed Church document, The Donation of Constantine, to be a forgery. 1493 The Nuremburg Chronicle of the World depicts the creation of the earth with seven concentric circles. Also of note, the Chronicle represents royal ancestry with portraits interconnected with vines to indicate marriage and parenthood, thereby participating in a broader tradition that associates genetic lineage and arboreal growth. ↓ image below c. 1500 Leonardo da Vinci is both the first to use rectangular coordinates to analyze the velocity of falling objects and the first to recognize a correlation between the particular climate and precipitation of a given time period and the shape of the resultant tree rings. 1566 Jean Bodin's Method for the Easy Comprehension of History argues for an absolute chronology that applies to all historical events regardless of place, time, or culture. 1582 Gregorian calendar reform instituted. Ten days dropped from the year. October 5-14, 1582 do not take place. 1583 In his Opus novum de emendatione temporum, Joseph Scaliger attempts to produce a complete and self-contained chronology of world history including translation tables for integrating all existing chronologies. His Thesaurus temporum (1606) collects and arranges all of the available ancient chronological sources. 1606 Henri Voisin de la Popelinière, History of Histories. 1608 Galileo plots the speed of a rolling ball on a time axis. 1627 Religious and political ferment in 1633 Domenicus Petavius argues that orienting a chronological system around the birth of Christ is pure convention. His Rationarium temporum rigorously separates questions of history from those of chronology and maintains that chronology is a purely technical specialty. 1654 James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, publishes a widely influential calculation of Biblical chronology, placing the beginning of time at 23 October 4004 BC. Twenty-five years later, Thomas Guy begins printing Bibles annotated with Ussher's chronology; Bibles inscribed with Ussher's dates remain in print until the early 20th century. 1655 In Praeadamitae, Isaac Lapeyrère argues that Scripture authorizes belief in human existence prior to Adam. 1658 Three years after La Peyrère's Praeadamitae, the Jesuit missionary Martino Martini published the first Chinese chronology in the West: Historiae sinicae decas prima. Father Martini based his work on the traditional Chinese chronologies and came to the shocking conclusion that authentic Chinese history goes back to the year 2952 B.C., i.e., 600 years prior to the year fixed by the Hebrew Bible for the Great Flood. This meant that 1663 Christopher Wren's weather clock is one of a plethora of new mechanic self-registering devices that produce automated moving graphs of various natural forces; Wren's weather clock, for example, generates a continuous line graph of temperature and wind direction. 1670 Baruch Spinoza's Tractatus theologico-politicus criticizes the tradition of religious prophecy and argues for a historical interpretation of Scripture. 1680 In an attempt to synchronize Biblical history with new geological ideas, Thomas Burnet's The Sacred Theory of the Earth argues that the great deluge was the result of waters underneath the earth's surface breaking through the earth's crust, thereby destroying what Burnet believed to be the earth's pre-flood state—a perfectly smooth, featureless surface, like that of an egg. The book's frontispiece is a series of drawings depicting the cycle of stages in the geological history of the Earth beginning at Creation and culminating in the Apocalypse. 1681 Jacques Bossuet's Discours sur l'histoire universelle. 1687 Isaac Newton's Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica proposes a theory of absolute time. 1690 After Cromwell's invasion of 1697 Pierre Bayle's Dictionnaire historique et critique treats figures from secular and religious sources within a single scholarly apparatus. The second edition concludes with an exhaustive 10-page "Chronological Table of all the Eminent Persons Treated in this Dictionary." The table begins with Adam and ends in 1700. 18th CENTURY The convention of dating events BC becomes popular. 1724 In La Scienza Nuova, Giambattista Vico criticizes both the astronomical and mathematical basis of 17th-century chronology and proposes a new universal chronology based on a theory of cyclical human progress. La Scienza Nuova includes a chronological table that aligns the histories of the Hebrews, Chaldeans, Scythians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans beginning with the Deluge. 1753 Jacques Barbeu-Duborg, the French translator and disciple of Benjamin Franklin, creates his Carte chronologique, a 54-foot timeline of history from Creation contained in an iron case. ↓ image below mid-1700s Building on da Vinci and Galileo's early use of vertical and horizontal axes, mathematician Leonard Euler establishes the modern convention that axes must be perpendicular. 1760-7 Laurence Sterne's novel, Tristram Shandy, includes a set of sketches indicating the non-linear path of a well-told story; narrative digressions appear as deviations from a straight line. ↓ image below 1765 The German philosopher and scientist J. H. Lambert is credited with observing that diagrams may do "incomparably better service" to the sciences than tables. Lambert's Pyrométrie (1779) includes tabular data of the rise and fall of annual temperatures, from which a curved line can be easily extrapolated. 1765 Joseph Priestley, an English chemist, publishes the first of several timelines that contemporary audience would recognize as such: "A Chart of Biography" compares the life spans of 2,000 celebrated men from 1200 BC to 1750 AD, using bars set against a linear time axis to denote their life spans. ↓ image below 1765 John Harrison awarded prize for successful invention of a marine chronometer. 1769 Louis-Sébastien Mercier publishes perhaps the first future fiction. The Year 2440 describes French society and culture after seven centuries of progress. 1778 In his Les Époques de la nature, the French naturalist Buffon argues that the Earth may be as much as 75,000 years old. In unpublished manuscripts, he speculates that it may be more than 3 million years old. 1781 Immanuel Kant criticizes 1784 Immanuel Kant, An Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View. 1786 Joseph Priestley's timeline was shortly followed by political economist William Playfair's invention of the bar chart, an innovation whose merits remained unrealized for several decades. As a young man, Playfair worked in the shop of James Watt, the inventor of the steam engine, where he was likely acquainted with Watt's self-registering device for measuring steam pressure. 1791 Last volume of Johann Gottfried Herder's Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind published. 1793 Introduction of French Revolutionary calendar declaring September 1792 as the beginning of the new "Year One." 1794 The patenting and marketing of graph paper—preprinted with a rectangular coordinate grid—attests to the growing use of Cartesian coordinates in scientific data analysis. 1794 Condorcet's Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of Mankind, a ten-stage account of human perfectibility from primitive to philosophical times. 1795 Thomas Malthus, Essay on the Principle of Population, argues that while human population tends to increase geometrically,the means of human subsistence can only increase arithmetically. 1797 The Encyclopædia Britannica contains a fold-out chart designed by Adam Ferguson "representing at one view the rise and progress of the principal state and empires of the known world" from the Deluge in 1656 Anno Mundi to 1900 Anno Domini (the years after 1797 are blank). 1809 Jean-Baptiste Lamarck publishes Zoological Philosophy containing an evolutionary family tree branching out from simpler to more complex organisms. 1814 Josiah Holbrook's broadside, Geography and Chronology are the Two Lights to History, depicts time as a branched tree, in an attempt to literalize Christ's statement in the New Testament: "I am the vine, ye are the branches." Each limb of the tree represents one hundred years, and each branch 10; the root structure encompasses the period before Christ. 1815 William Smith's detailed and systematic geological maps of 1824 Leopold von Ranke's History of the Latin and Germanic Nations from 1494 to 1514 offers the famous dictum that history "only wants to show what actually happened." 1830 Charles Lyell's "uniformitarian" thesis. His Principles of Geology argues that all geological forms may be explained in terms of common natural processes assuming a long enough time scale. 1831 The last of G.W.F. Hegel's lectures, on which his Philosophy of History (1837) was based. 1834 Felix Bodin's Le Roman de l'avenir gives the first historical account of futuristic fiction. 1840s First publication of Disturnell's Railway and Steamship Books. May 1844 Religious leader William Miller acknowledges to his Adventists followers that his prediction that the world would end by March 1844 was erroneous; Miller promises the end by October 1844. When October passes without incident, the (non)event becomes known by Adventists as "The Great Disappointment." 1849 Auguste Comte, Positivist Calendar of 558 Worthies of All Ages and Nations. 1851 First use of the term "prehistoric" in English. 1857 Florence Nightingale, a major innovator of statistical graphs and diagrams, submits her "Diagram of the Causes of Mortality in the Army in the East" as part of her Report to the Royal Commission on the Health of the Army. The diagrams demonstratethat over the course of the Crimean War, British deaths owe principally to "preventable or mitigable" diseases rather than battlefield wounds. ↓ image below 1859 Charles Darwin's Origin of Species traces species' genealogies back more than 300 million years. 1859 In his Critique of Political Economy, Karl Marx describes four great stages of history organized by modes of production. 1869 Charles Joseph Minard's Carte figurative de pertes successives en hommes de l'Armée Française dans la campagne de Russie 1812-1813. Among the finest of Minard's graphical works, this chart plots the catastrophic loss of men in relation to place, time, and temperature during Napoleon's march to 1871 Sebastian Adams, Synchronological Chart or Map of History, an encyclopedic chart based on Ussher's dating system. A later version by Charles Deacon and Edward Hull continues to be available and reprinted under the title Wall Chart of World History. 1870s Eadweard Muybridge and E. J. Marey each begin work in "chronophotography." 1874 Friedrich Nietzsche's critique of historicism in The Use and Abuse of History. 1876 Charles Renouvier's counterfactual Uchronie includes a chart depicting the theoretical relationship between the actual course of history and possible alternative paths. ↓ image below 1878 The word "graph" is coined in English by the mathematician James Joseph Sylvester. (Lambert referred to his graphs as "figuren," Watt as "diagrams," and Playfair as "lineal arithmetic.") 1880s Wilhelm Wundt's experiments to determine the duration of the present. 1880 English Parliament gives legal sanction to Greenwich Mean Time. 1884 International Meridian Conference establishes the Prime Meridian at Greenwich Observatory in 1889 In Time and Free Will, Henri Bergson argues for a distinction between the homogeneous mathematical conception of time and heterogeneous experience of duration. He insists that the experience of time cannot be represented in a linear fashion. 1895 H. G. Wells's Time Machine. 1897 Stéphane Mallarmé's Un Coup de dés. 1899 Ernst Te Peerdt, The Problem of the Representation of Instants of Time in Painting and Drawing. 1901 Andrew Ellicott Douglass founds the field of dendrochronology by inventing a system whereby known sequences of events (floating chronologies) can be fixed to specific years (absolute chronologies) via the scientific analysis of tree rings. 1903 George Beard's American Nervousness. 1904 Henry Adams' "Law of Acceleration." 1905 Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity. 1912 Raymond Poincaré convenes the International Conference on Time. 1912 Emile Durkheim's Elementary Forms of Religious Life argues that the calendar expresses the rhythm of collective activity. 1912 Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger's treatise on Cubism, Du Cubisme, articulates the Cubist approach as "moving around an object so as to record successive views of it which, when combined in a single image, reconstitute it in time." 1913 In their 19th-century notebook sketches, evolution theorists represented cross-generational reproduction with concentric circles. In the case of this eugenics diagram, Arthur Estabrook and Charles Davenport use these visual cues to chart the members of the 1917 Edmund Husserl elaborates his notion of the "specious present" as he completes his series of lectures entitled The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness. 1918 Eugène Minkowski begins How We Live the Future (and Not What We Know of It). 1918 First volume of Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West is published. 1920 The final installment of H.G. Wells' bi-weekly periodical, Outline of History: A Plain History of Life and Mankind, includes a comprehensive timeline that comprehensively depicts events from 1,000 BC to the present day. 1922 James Joyce's Ulysses. 1925 Sigmund Freud, "A Note on the Mystic Writing Pad." 1926 Gertrude Stein: "Beginning again and again is a natural thing even when there is a series. Beginning again and again and again explaining composition and time is a natural thing." 1927 Marcel Proust completes On the Remembrance of Things Past. 1928 Werner Heisenberg argues that conventional understandings of time, space, and causation do not apply at the subatomic level. 1929 Invention of the quartz clock. 1930 English philosopher Olaf Stapleton investigates the future of the human race through fiction. Stapleton's two-billion year narrative, Last and First Men, includes a series of timelines highlighting the difficulty of translating conventional scales of human history into an evolutionary framework. 1930-1932 Victor Houteff publishes his religious philosophy in The Shepherd's Rod Vol. 1-2; his illustrative timelines convey the fast-approaching end of the world. Followers of his teachings include David Koresh. 1931 1933 In a presentation to the Board of Trustees at the 1940s Radiocarbon dating. 1946 Fernand Braudel theorizes the history of the longue durée. 1948 The Olympic Games in 1948 Invention of the atomic clock. In 1967, the length of the second will be redefined by use of this device. 1950 Studies of the damage wrought by atom bombs prompt timelines broken into infinitely smaller fragments of time. ↓ image below 1968 Electronic time-keeping devices entirely replace live judges in certifying race winners at the Olympics in 1997 The year of the Apocalypse according to Dionysius Exiguus. 2000 Throughout the late 20th century, professional semioticians struggle with the problem of constructing an iconographic language capable of communicating radiation dangers long after the death of current languages. Several of these symbolic systems are prepared for nuclear facilities, including the 2000 The year 2000. ...
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