Timeline: Before 1940

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

1642

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

1673

• Leibniz shows a wooden model of his multiplying calculator to the Royal Society in London. → Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

1679

• Leibniz writes De progressione dyadica on binary arithmetic, including a binary calculating machine using marbles. → Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

1703

• Leibniz publishes his explanation of binary arithmetic for the Paris Academy. → Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

1736

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

1804

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

1805

• Around 1805 Gauss uses a fast Fourier method to compute asteroid orbits but never publishes it. → Cooley, Tukey, and the Fast Fourier Transform

1811

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

1843

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

1844

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

1847

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

1854

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

1865

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

1868

• Sholes, Glidden and Soulé receive their typewriter patent → The Typewriter and the Keyboard

1871

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

1874

• Remington’s Sholes and Glidden typewriter, with the QWERTY keyboard, goes on sale → The Typewriter and the Keyboard

1889

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

1890

• Hollerith’s tabulators process the US census; a rough count is out in six weeks, the full tabulation takes about six years. → Herman Hollerith and the Punched Card

1895

• Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine found the International Institute of Bibliography in Brussels to build a universal card catalogue → Paul Otlet and Emanuel Goldberg

1908

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

1909

• Percy Ludgate publishes the design of his Analytical Machine in Dublin → Percy Ludgate

1910

• Willy Heidinger founds DEHOMAG in Berlin as licensee for Hollerith’s punched-card machines → DEHOMAG: IBM’s German Subsidiary

1911

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

1912

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

1914

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

1922

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

1924

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

1925

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

1928

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

1929

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

1931

• Bush’s Differential Analyzer solves differential equations mechanically at MIT. → Vannevar Bush and the Memex
• Elizebeth Friedman heads her own codebreaking unit at the Treasury, breaking rum-runners’ ciphers. → Elizebeth Smith Friedman: The Hidden Codebreaker
• Kurt Gödel proves the incompleteness theorems. → Gödel and the Incompleteness Theorems
• Vannevar Bush’s differential analyzer runs at MIT. → Analog Computers
• Emanuel Goldberg demonstrates his photocell microfilm search machine at a photography congress in Dresden → Paul Otlet and Emanuel Goldberg

1932

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

1933

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

1936

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

1937

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

1938

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

1939

• Bell Labs demonstrates Homer Dudley’s Voder, a keyboard-played speech synthesizer, at the New York World’s Fair. → The History of Speech Synthesis
• Hewlett and Packard formalize their partnership on 1 January with $538. → Hewlett-Packard
• Germany’s census asks for Jewish ancestry on a supplementary card; DEHOMAG machines process the returns → DEHOMAG: IBM’s German Subsidiary

Other Timelines

Chronologies kept by the Computer History Museum in Mountain View:

• Timeline of Computer History: people, machines and events across computing, filterable by theme.
• The Silicon Engine: semiconductors from the first documented semiconductor effect in 1833 to the integrated circuit.
• The Storage Engine: data storage from punched cards onward.
• Internet History, 1962 to 1992: the networks that became the internet.
• Apple@50: Apple from its founding in 1976.
• This Day in History: computing events by calendar day.

---

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