The Innovation Timeline
Thousands of years of innovation.
Innovation did not begin with the patent office. This timeline runs from the archaeological record of ancient Africa through to work published this decade.
- The Ishango Bone
A baboon fibula marked with three organised columns of tally notches, excavated by Jean de Heinzelin at Ishango on Lake Edward.
Documented - Iron production at Meroë
Large-scale iron smelting, evidenced by slag mounds and excavated furnace bases across the Meroitic capital.
Documented - The monolithic stelae of Aksum
Granite stelae up to about 24 metres long, carved to represent multi-storey buildings with false doors and windows, and erected over rock-cut tomb chambers.
Documented - Tetracycline in the bones of ancient Nubia
Bone from ancient Nubian remains was found to contain tetracycline — the antibiotic itself, deposited in the skeleton in quantities that indicate sustained dietary exposure.
Documented - Great Zimbabwe's dry-stone architecture
Coursed dry-stone granite walls up to 11 metres high and 5 metres thick, laid without mortar, enclosing a capital of a major trading state.
Verified - The rock-hewn churches of Lalibela
Eleven churches cut downward out of solid rock — walls, roofs, columns, windows and drainage carved from the living stone rather than constructed on it.
Documented - Sahelian mud-brick engineering at Djenné
Sun-dried ferey bricks and banco render over a timber armature of protruding palm beams, producing walls that regulate interior temperature and can be resurfaced every year.
Documented - The manuscript libraries of Timbuktu
Hundreds of thousands of handwritten manuscripts, including works on astronomy and medicine, held in family and institutional libraries.
Verified - The walls and earthworks of Benin City
A vast network of banks and ditches enclosing the city and hundreds of surrounding communities — one of the largest earthwork systems in the world.
Documented - Dry scouring of clothes
A process for cleaning garments without immersion in water — the ancestor of dry cleaning — patented by a New York tailor.
Documented - Multiple-effect evaporator
A sealed series of vacuum pans in which the vapour boiled off in one pan supplies the heat for the next, at successively lower pressures.
Verified - Automatic engine lubricator
A cup that fed oil steadily to the engine's moving parts using the engine's own steam pressure, while it ran.
Verified - Caesarean section in Bunyoro-Kitara
A European medical student, Robert Felkin, watched a caesarean performed in Bunyoro in which both mother and child survived, and published a detailed account of the procedure.
Documented - Process for manufacturing carbon filaments
A method of encasing the filament blank in a cardboard envelope during carbonisation so it heats evenly and holds its shape.
Verified - Automatic shoe-lasting machine
A machine that held the last, pleated the leather over it, positioned the sole and drove the nails.
Verified - Cabinet bed
A roll-top desk with storage that unfolded into a full bed, and folded back with the bedding stowed inside.
Verified - Automatic elevator door mechanism
A mechanism that opened and closed the shaft door automatically in step with the cage's position.
Verified - Railway induction telegraph
A system that sent telegraph signals between a moving train and the track-side wires by electromagnetic induction, without physical contact.
Verified - Improved ironing board
A narrow, curved, padded and reversible board mounted on collapsible supports.
Verified - High-temperature preheated furnaces of the Haya
Haya smiths built furnaces that preheated the air blast by drawing it through tuyères set inside the burning charcoal, reaching very high temperatures.
Supported - Safety hood (breathing device)
A hood with long intake tubes hanging near the floor, where smoke is thinner, plus a moist absorbent lining.
Verified - The Ball Method for chaulmoogra oil
A chemical process isolating the ethyl esters of chaulmoogra oil's fatty acids, producing an injectable, water-miscible preparation.
Documented - Three-position traffic signal
A T-shaped signal with a third, intermediate all-stop position that halted traffic in every direction before the change.
Verified - Sterilised spices and reliable curing salts
A vacuum chamber that drew ethylene oxide through spices to sterilise them cold, and a flash-drying process that combined curing salts into a single crystal so they acted in the right order.
Documented - Banked blood and plasma distribution
Systematic methods for separating, preserving, testing and distributing plasma at scale, set out in Drew's doctoral thesis and applied in Blood for Britain.
Documented - The blue baby operation
A shunt joining a systemic artery to the pulmonary artery, restoring blood flow to the lungs — developed in the laboratory by Vivien Thomas after Helen Taussig identified the physiological problem.
Documented - Truck-mounted mechanical refrigeration
A compact, shock-resistant, removable refrigeration unit designed to be mounted on a truck body.
Verified - The West Area computers become programmers
Dorothy Vaughan taught herself FORTRAN and machine operation, then taught her staff, converting a pool of hand calculators into the programming staff of the new Analysis and Computation Division.
Documented - The precision wire resistor
A wire-wound resistance element designed so its value held under thermal and mechanical stress, and could be manufactured cheaply and consistently.
Documented - Chemotherapy against solid tumours
Systematic patient trials of chemotherapeutic agents, including methotrexate, against solid tumours — and a method of testing candidate drugs on tissue taken from the patient's own tumour before treating them.
Documented - Foil-electret microphone
A polymer film holding a permanent electrostatic charge, removing the need for an external bias voltage.
Verified - Software for the Centaur upper stage
Easley developed and analysed code supporting Centaur's design and performance analysis, and later applied the same computational approach to energy-conversion and battery-storage studies.
Documented - Closed-circuit home security system
A motorised camera scanning a set of peepholes, feeding a bedroom monitor, with two-way voice, remote door release and a panic alarm.
Verified - Far-ultraviolet camera/spectrograph
An electrographic camera converting far-UV photons into electrons recorded directly on film.
Verified - The Green Belt seedling method
Pay rural women a small sum per seedling that survives, and let them run the nurseries. Restoration becomes household income and a claim on the land.
Documented - Geodetic Earth modelling for satellite positioning
Programming and refinement of geodetic computations from satellite altimetry data to model the geoid.
Documented - Illusion transmitter
A pair of concave mirrors that produce a real optical image appearing to occupy space in front of the display, transmissible to a remote location.
Verified - The ISA bus and the open PC architecture
A standard internal expansion bus letting third parties build cards — graphics, sound, networking, storage — that any PC could accept.
Verified - Pressurised water gun (Super Soaker)
A hand-pumped pressurised reservoir that releases a continuous high-volume stream on the trigger.
Verified - Laserphaco Probe for cataract surgery
A probe combining a laser fibre with irrigation and aspiration channels to vaporise and flush out the clouded lens.
Verified - Voice over Internet Protocol systems
A large portfolio of patented methods for delivering reliable voice and multimedia over IP networks.
Verified - A windmill built from salvage
A wind turbine assembled from a bicycle frame and dynamo, a tractor cooling fan, PVC pipe blades and blue-gum poles, driven by a library physics textbook he could only partly read in English.
Documented - Light-activated cancer therapy with phthalocyanines
Phthalocyanine dyes that accumulate in tumour tissue and are inert until illuminated at a specific wavelength, at which point they generate reactive oxygen that kills the cell.
Documented - M-PESA mobile money
A system that stores and transfers value as SMS-based credit through a network of ordinary shopkeepers acting as cash-in and cash-out agents — banking without banks or smartphones.
Documented - Ushahidi crisis mapping
An open-source platform that collects reports by SMS, email and web and places them on a map in near real time — crowdsourced situational awareness.
Documented - CardioPad tele-cardiology tablet
A touchscreen tablet with ECG electrodes that records a heart trace locally and transmits it over the mobile network for specialist reading.
Documented - Neurogrid neuromorphic system
A mixed analogue-digital multichip system in which silicon transistors operating in their analogue regime emulate the physics of neurons and synapses directly, rather than computing equations about them.
Documented