SAMARKAND BRANCH OF TASHKENT

UNIVERSITY OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES

NAMED AFTER MUHAMMAD AL-KWARIZMI

SELF-STUDY WORK
Genjebaev Abu-Bakir PE 23-17

Samarkand 2024
 The development of Technologies

3.3 million years ago: The first tools

The history of technology begins even before the beginning of our own species.
Sharp flakes of stone used as knives and larger unshaped stones used as hammers
and anvils have been uncovered at Lake Turkana in Kenya. The tools were made 3.3
million years ago and thus were likely used by an ancestor such as Australopithecus.

• 1 million years ago: Fire

When humanity first used fire is still not definitively known, but, like the first
tools, it was probably invented by an ancestor of Homo sapiens. Evidence of
burnt material can be found in caves used by Homo erectus beginning about 1
million (and maybe even 1.5 million) years ago.

• 20,000 to 15,000 years ago: Neolithic Revolution

During the Neolithic Period several key technologies arose together. Humans
moved from getting their food by foraging to getting it through agriculture.
People came together in larger groups. Clay was used for pottery and bricks.
Clothing began to be made of woven fabrics. The wheel was also likely invented
at this time.

6000 BCE: Irrigation

The first irrigation systems arose roughly simultaneously in the civilizations of
the Tigris-Euphrates river valley in Mesopotamia and the Nile River valley
in Egypt. Since irrigation requires an extensive amount of work, it shows a high
level of social organization.
• 4000 BCE: Sailing
The first sailing ships were used on the Nile River. Since the Nile does not allow
as much space for free sailing as the ocean, these ships also had oars for
navigation.
• 1200 BCE: Iron
About this time, the production of iron became widespread as that metal
supplanted bronze. Iron was much more abundant than copper and tin, the two
metals that make up bronze, and thus put metal tools into more hands than ever
before.
• 850 CE: Gunpowder
Alchemists in China invented gunpowder as a result of their search for life-
extending elixirs. It was used to propel rockets attached to arrows. The
knowledge of gunpowder spread to Europe in the 13th century.
• 950: Windmill
Nearly 5,000 years after the first sailing ships, the wind was first used to operate a
mill. The first windmills were in Persia. They were horizontal windmills in which
the blades were set on a vertical shaft. Later, European windmills were of the
vertical type. It has been speculated that the windmill may have been invented
independently in Persia and in Europe.
• 1044: Compass
The first definitive mention of a magnetic compass dates from a Chinese book
finished in 1044. It describes how soldiers found their way by using a fish-shaped
piece of magnetized iron floating in a bowl of water when the sky was too cloudy
to see the stars.
• 1250–1300: Mechanical clock
Hourglass and water clocks had been around for centuries, but the first
mechanical clocks began to appear in Europe toward the end of the 13th century
and were used in cathedrals to mark the time when services would be held.
• 1455: Printing
Johannes Gutenberg completed the printing of the Bible, which was the first book
printed in the West using movable type. Gutenberg’s printing press led to an
information explosion in Europe.
• 1765: Steam engine
James Watt improved the Newcomen steam engine by adding a condenser that
turned the steam back into liquid water. This condenser was separate from the
cylinder that moved the piston, which meant that the engine was much more
efficient. The steam engine became one of the most important inventions of
the Industrial Revolution.
• 1804: Railways
English engineer Richard Trevithick improved James Watt’s steam engine and
used it for transport. He built the first railway locomotive at an ironworks in
Wales.
• 1807: Steamboat
Robert Fulton put the steam engine on water. His steamboat that was eventually
called the Clermont took 32 hours to go up the Hudson River from New York City
to Albany. Sailing ships took four days.
• 1826/27: Photography
In the early 1820s, Nicéphore Niépce became interested in using a light-sensitive
solution to make copies of lithographs onto glass, zinc, and finally a pewter plate.
He then had the great idea to use his solution to make a copy of an image in a
camera obscura (a room or box with a small hole in one end through which an
image of the outside is projected). In 1826 or 1827, he made an eight-hour-long
exposure of the courtyard of his house, the first known photograph.
• 1831: Reaper
For thousands of years, harvesting crops was very labour-intensive. That changed
with Cyrus McCormick’s invention of the mechanical reaper. The earliest reaper
had some mechanical problems, but later versions spread throughout the world
• 1844: Telegraph
Samuel Morse was a successful painter who became interested in the possibility
of an electric telegraph in the 1830s. He patented a prototype in 1837. In 1844 he
sent the first message over the first long-distance telegraph line, which stretched
between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore. The message: “What hath God
wrought.”
• 1876: Telephone
Once it was possible to send information through a wire in the form of dots and
dashes, the next step was actual voice communication. Alexander Graham
Bell made the first telephone call, on March 10, 1876, when he asked his assistant
Tom Watson to come to him: “Mr Watson—come here—I want to see you.”
• 1876: Internal-combustion engine
German engineer Nikolaus Otto built an engine that, unlike the steam engine,
used the burning of fuel inside the engine to move a piston. This type of engine
would later be used to power automobiles.
• 1879: Electric light
After thousands of trials, American inventor Thomas Edison got a carbon-
filament light bulb to burn for 13½ hours. Edison and others in his laboratory
were also working on an electrical power distribution system to light homes and
businesses, and in 1882 the Edison Electric Illuminating Company opened the first
power plant.
• 1885: Automobile
The internal-combustion engine improved, becoming smaller and more
efficient. Karl Benz used a one-cylinder engine to power the first
modern automobile, a three-wheeled car that he drove around a track. However,
the automobile did not make a commercial splash until 1888, when his wife,
Bertha, exasperated with Karl’s slow methodical pace, took an automobile
without his knowledge on a 64-mile trip to see her mother.
• 1901: Radio
Guglielmo Marconi had been experimenting with radio since 1894 and was
sending transmissions over longer and longer distances. In 1901 his reported
transmission of the Morse code letter S across the Atlantic from Cornwall to
Newfoundland excited the world.
• 1903: Airplane
On December 17 Orville Wright made the first airplane flight, of 120 feet, near
Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. He and his brother Wilbur made four flights that day.
On the last, Wilbur flew 852 feet.
• 1926: Rocketry
As a young boy in the late 1890s, Robert Goddard was inspired by H.G.
Wells’s The War of the Worlds and the possibilities of space travel. As a middle-
aged man in the mid-1920s, he achieved the first test flight of a liquid-
fueled rocket, from his aunt’s farm in Auburn, Massachusetts. The rocket flew 12.5
meters (41 feet) in the air.
• 1927: Television
After the development of radio, the transmission of an image was the next logical
step. Early television used a mechanical disk to scan an image. As a teenager in
Utah, Philo T. Farnsworth became convinced that a mechanical system would not
be able to scan and assemble images multiple times a second. Only
an electronic system would do that. In 1922 the 16-year-old Farnsworth worked
out a plan for such a system, but it wasn’t until 1927 that he made the first
electronic television transmission, a horizontal line.
• 1937: Computer
Iowa State mathematician and physicist John Atanasoff designed the first
electronic digital computer. It would use binary numbers (base 2, in which all
numbers are expressed with the digits 0 and 1), and its data would be stored
in capacitors. In 1939 he and his student Clifford Berry began building
the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC).
• 1942: Nuclear power
As part of the Manhattan Project to build the first atomic bomb, it was necessary
to understand nuclear reactions in detail. On December 2 underneath the football
stands at the University of Chicago, a team of physicists led by Enrico
Fermi used uranium to produce the first self-sustaining chain reaction.
• 1947: Transistor
On December 23 Bell Labs engineers John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William
Shockley gave the first public demonstration of the transistor, an electrical
component that could control, amplify, and generate current. The transistor was
much smaller and used less power than vacuum tubes and ushered in an era of
cheap small electronic devices.
• 1957: Spaceflight
The Soviet Union surprised the world on October 4, when it launched the first
artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, a small 83.6-kg (184.3-pound) metal sphere.
The space race began between the Soviet Union and the United States, opening
up a new front in the Cold War.
• 1974: Personal computer
The first computers that emerged after World War II were gigantic, but, with
advances in technology, especially in putting many transistors on
a semiconductor chip, computers became both smaller and more powerful.
Finally, they became small enough for home use. The first such personal
computer was the Altair, which was soon supplanted in 1977 by the Apple II, the
TRS-80, and the Commodore PET.
• 1974: Internet
Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn produced the TCP/IP (Transmission Control
Protocol/Internet Protocol), which describes how data can be broken down into
smaller pieces called packets and how these packets can be transmitted to the
right destination. TCP/IP became the basis for how data is transmitted over
the Internet.
• 2012: CRISPR
American biochemist Jennifer Doudna and French microbiologist Emmanuelle
Charpentier developed CRISPR-Cas9, a method for editing genes—that is,
making changes to DNA sequences. Gene editing has the potential to treat many
diseases but also opens up the ethical gray area of creating designer humans.
• 2017: Artificial intelligence
The team behind the AlphaGo artificial intelligence program announced that it
had become the world’s best go player. Go is a game with very simple rules but
many possible positions. The previous year AlphaGo had defeated the great
player Lee Sedol in a match 4–1. AlphaGo then played itself and, through
continual improvement, was able to defeat the version that had defeated Lee,
100–0. Through machine learning, AlphaGo had become better at the game than
any human.