About 2.3 million years ago our very earliest ancestors invented their first primitive tool, the split stone, which they used for cutting and scraping. For the next 1 million years early humans gradually learned to customize stone tools and use fire.
Modern humans first appeared about 200,000 years ago. About 50,000 years ago they (or should that be we?) began to use language, symbols and more complex tools.
As inventions and discoveries added to one another, human civilization, technology and science advanced and evolved. The word "science" is derived from the Latin word "scientia" which means "knowledge." Science is probably the most important and helpful area of study for the human race.
Most Famous Scientists and Inventors in History
The beginnings of science and the scientific method largely came from the ancient Greek world, which encompassed the eastern part of the Mediterranean.
The names of the great scientists and philosophers of that time, such as Pythagoras, Archimedes, Aristotle, Eratosthenes and Thales, are still known today, over 2000 years later.
Most Famous Scientists and Inventors in History
The beginnings of science and the scientific method largely came from the ancient Greek world, which encompassed the eastern part of the Mediterranean.
The names of the great scientists and philosophers of that time, such as Pythagoras, Archimedes, Aristotle, Eratosthenes and Thales, are still known today, over 2000 years later.
The fall of Constantinople in 1453 resulted in a large number of refugees fleeing to Europe, bringing with them Greek and Roman books that had been archived in Constantinople, unused for centuries. This, and the invention of the printing press in about 1450 accelerated the pace of learning in Renaissance Europe.
Unfortunately for science, only a few people thirsted for scientific knowledge and progress, while most intellectuals focused on artistic or liberal arts disciplines.
It was only in the 17th century that a rapid scientific revolution finally took place.
Timeline of a Scientific Revolution
• 1600 – Galileo Galilei discovers the principle of inertia, building the stage for a rational view of motion.
• 1600 – William Gilbert finds that Earth has magnetic poles and acts like a huge magnet.
• 1600 – Galileo Galilei discovers that projectiles move with a parabolic trajectory.
• 1608 – Hans Lippershey invents the refracting telescope, which Galileo Galilei soon puts to use.
• 1609 – Galileo Galilei observes moons of Jupiter, disproving church dogma that all movement in the universe is centered on Earth.
• 1609 – Johannes Kepler publishes his first two laws of planetary motion showing that planets move in elliptical orbits around the sun.
• 1610 – John Napier publishes tables of logarithms, showing how they can be used to accelerate calculations.
• 1619 – Kepler publishes his third law of planetary motion relating the time taken for a planet to orbit the sun with its distance from the sun.
• 1621 – Willebrord Snell discovers the laws of light refraction.
• 1628 – Kepler publishes his planetary tables, the calculations for which would have taken years without Napier's logarithms.
• 1629 – Nicolaus Cabeus finds there are two types of electric charge and notes both attractive and repulsive forces acting.
• 1632 – William Oughtred invents the slide rule. With the combined power of logarithms and slide rules, calculation speeds explode.
