The Great Geek Manual

1774
The element Oxygen is independently discovered for the third time by Joseph Priestley, a British Presbyterian minister and amateur chemist. Priestley discovered that mercury heated in air becomes coated with a red rust, which, heated separately, would convert back to mercury and give off “air.” Studying this “air,” Priestley observes that candles burn very brightly in it. Upon further experimentation, he also discovers that a mouse in a sealed vessel could breathe much longer with the gas present than a mouse sealed in a vessel without it. Joseph Priestley will publishes his conclusions in 1775, giving the element a name and, historically, receiving most of the credit for its discovery.

1790
The first United States census, which is mandated by the country’s constitution, is conducted under the direction of Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson. The enormous undertaking of conducting the national census will be one of the driving forces behind the development of the earliest computers. A century later, the tabulating machines for which Herman Hollerith received the first three computer patents in history will be used to compile the results of the nation’s eleventh census. The introduction of the computers will reduce the time taken to tabulate the results from the seven years it took for the 1880 results to just two and a half years.
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Though we became experimental creatures of our own devising, it’s important to bear in mind that we had no inkling of this process, let alone its consequences, until only the last six or seven of our 100,000 generations. We have done it all sleepwalking. Nature let a few apes into the lab of evolution, switched on the lights, and left us there to mess about with an ever-growing supply of ingredients and processes.

The effect on us and the world has accumulated ever since. Let’s list a few steps between the earliest times and this: sharp stones, animal skins, useful bits of bone and wood, wild fire, tame fire, seeds for eating, seeds for planting, houses, villages, pottery, cities, metals, wheels, explosives. What strikes one most forcefully is the acceleration, the runaway progression of change – or to put it another way, the collapsing of time. From the first chipped stone to the first smelted iron took nearly 3 million years; from the first iron to the hydrogen bomb took only 3,000.

- A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright, 2005.