About the project

I always missed having one place where you could see the history of human invention as a whole — from the first stone tools to the technologies of our own time, and even a little beyond.

I have come across many books about inventions and the history of science and technology, but almost every one of them is inevitably limited to a particular era, region or field of knowledge. I wanted to look at all of it as one long process: to lay out discoveries and inventions on a single timeline and watch how the human-made world gradually changed. What came first and what came later, which ideas are separated by millennia and which appeared almost at the same time.

In its final form, the timeline is planned to hold around 400 events — inventions, discoveries and technological steps that, in my view, show the course of this development especially well.

There is another, much more personal reason for this project. My son is eight, and I wanted to help him get a feel for the scale of time. To understand that the things we take for granted have not always existed, that behind each of them stands someone's insight, trial, mistake or discovery, and that today's world is the result of an enormous chain of human ideas.

The site itself also became an experiment with artificial intelligence for me. I wanted to use AI not just to write code, but to go through the whole journey of building the project together with it — from gathering and checking information to the texts and illustrations.

The work with images turned out to be especially interesting. The project takes a long time to make, and generative models keep changing along the way. I wanted to see how well ChatGPT could hold a single visual language across hundreds of illustrations: how often I would have to remind it of the chosen style, correct anatomy, historical details or objects that crept in by accident. And at the same time, to see whether the images made near the end of the project would look noticeably different from the ones it began with. The result is a kind of history not only of human technology, but, a little, of generative AI itself.

Finally, it seemed unfair to stop at the present day. So the timeline continues into the future. I asked ChatGPT to imagine which discoveries, technologies and events might lie ahead of us. Of course, this is no longer history but a forecast — which makes it all the more interesting to come back to this part of the project years from now and see what turned out to be surprisingly accurate and what remained just our fantasy.

And here an important disclaimer is needed. I am not a historian, an anthropologist or a specialist in the history of science and technology. In preparing the material we tried to consult sources, compare data and check facts, but there are surely mistakes here — both in the texts and in the images. Somewhere you may well find an object that did not yet exist in that era, or a wrong detail of clothing, a tool or a technology. Sometimes we notice such mistakes and fix them; sometimes they surely remain. If you spot one, you can press the “Report an error” button on the site. I will be grateful for every such note — they will help make the project gradually more accurate.