These are mostly years in which a surprising number of important things happened. For the most part, wars are excluded. Go ahead and argue with my choices in comments.
1687: Isaac Newton invents physics.
1776: American Revolution, Wealth of Nations, first commercial Watt steam engine, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
1789: French Revolution, first American president, Bill of Rights proposed.
1831: HMS Beagle, Faraday's dynamo, Garrison's Liberator, Hunchback of Notre Dame.
1848: Communist Manifesto, gold discovered in California, Seneca Falls, Revolutions of 1848.
1859: Suez canal, Origin of Species, first American oil well, Tale of Two Cities, Riemann Hypothesis, On Liberty.
1900: Quantum mechanics, Interpretation of Dreams, ABO blood typing system, Wizard of Oz, premiere of Tosca.
1905: Albert Einstein's annus mirabilis.
1928: Penicillin, Coming of Age in Samoa, River Rouge plant completed, Passion of Joan of Arc, Mickey Mouse, OED, first regular TV broadcast, All Quiet on the Western Front, sliced bread (against which all future inventions would be compared).
1939: Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Stagecoach, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Goodbye Mr. Chips, The Rules of the Game, nuclear fission, Batman, World War II, first televised baseball game, first published stories by Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein.
1958: First credit card, DARPA, integrated circuit, NASA, USS Nautilus, laser, first communications satellite, first transatlantic jet service.
1969: First human on the moon, Boeing 747, Stonewall, Woodstock, Miracle Mets, ARPANET, Unix, Abbey Road.
This is brilliant, what an interesting post.
But I'm a lifelong Cubs fan, so I hate you for including 1969.
It's too soon to be able to assess 2016 objectively. 🙂
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Never lived in Chicago & don't follow pro sports much, but consider myself a Cubs fan because of the late great Steve Goodman's song dedicated to the team.
Presumably not the "Go Cubs Go" song, but a dying fan's last request:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HTRxAHfwPY
1913 - Fritz Haber developed a method for producing ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen, which could be used to manufacture artificial fertilizer. This saved some 2.7 billion lives by helping the world grow nutritious food.
It is estimated that 50% of every human now alive is constituted from nitrogen from this process.
I was originally going to say 1955, when Jonas Salk gave the polio vaccine to the world, but Haber has him beat.
The Haber Process also allowed Germany to make gunpowder without access to foreign sources of saltpeter. One result was 40,000,000 dead in WWI. Haber also pioneered the use of poison gas in WWI. A Jew who converted to Christianity and who considered himself a German patriot, Haber was forced to leave Germany after the rise of Nazism.
He was supported in England by Chaim Weitzman, later the first president of Israel, who had developed a process for extracting fixed nitrogen from seaweed in support of the British War effort. You can almost re-imagine World War I as a nitrogen fixing battle between a Jew and an ex-Jew who later learned he couldn't escape.
1952: Norman Borlaug develops high-yield, short-stemmed, disease-resistant wheat, kicking off the "Green Revolution." Along with all that fertilizer, this allows farmers to grow enough food to practically eliminate starvation and reduce malnutrition due to food shortages.
(also: Queen Elizabeth II)
+1
Plus 1 on the Haber process. Without it the Earth's population would be maybe 3 billion now.
I fail to see that as a bad thing. Particularly from an emissions standpoint.
The only reason we have an issue with population is because we have a deficit in the technology needed to support it. The moral way to frame the problem is to focus on technology and infrastructure, because that's where the solution lies.
The planet has room and resources to support everyone alive. We need to transition more quickly to make that support work in sustainable way.
You need to add that1939 was the year of the first published stories by Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov, as well as one of the best by L. Sprague deCamp, "Lest Darkness Fall." All very important to me.
Good catch! I've added this. Pretty good year for the popular arts.
> _Lest Darkness Fall_
Wait, wasn't that Asimov? Ohhhh _Nightfall_ was Asimov.
Yes, "Nightfall" was Asimov. 1941 I think.
"Lest Darkness Fall" by L. Sprague deCamp was one of the first, still one of the best, of alternate history stories.
I never read "Lest Darkness Falls" so just found it online. I'm really enjoying it. Here is a quote that still applies today
“No! Not with the religious persecution we have to put up with!” “I thought the Gotha let everybody worship as they pleased.” "That’s just it! We Orthodox are forced to stand around and watch Arians and Monophysites and Nestorians and Jews going about their business unmolested, as if they owned the country. If that isn’t persecution, I’d like to know what is!”
“You mean that you’re persecuted because the heretics and such are not?”
“Certainly, isn’t that obvious? What’s your religion, by the way?”
Excellent list! I think you can make especially strong cases for 1789, 1848, and 1900. And I've always delighted in the list of films that came out in 1939.
Most of the items that you mention are things that most people would would consider good, or at least progress, but I notice that your stated criterion is "important". By that standard I think you can also make a case for 1968, with all the political and social upheaval in the United States, and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. It was certainly a watershed year in my lifetime.
I mostly stuck with good stuff, not bad, and I also mostly didn't include political/war stuff because that's just happening constantly.
Here's hoping that the Communist Manifesto falls in the minority bad stuff category.
Had he read Adam Smith's "The Theory of Moral Sentiments," Karl Marx's "Das Kapital" would have been a critique of CAPINOs (Capitalist in name only) in lieu of being an expression of his ignorance of capitalism. Unfortunately, his ignorance was just one more contribution to their ignorance.
Maybe. But blaming Marx for Lenin's communism is like blaming Jesus for the Spanish Inquisition.
To me, communism was one of those many good ideas that didn't work out in practice. And anyway, Marx was right in many ways about capitalism, especially about its built in propensity to destroy itself by creating unsustainable levels of inequality.
"Maybe. But blaming Marx for Lenin's communism is like blaming Jesus for the Spanish Inquisition."
+1
Well said!
Or is it the other way round? It depends on what evidence you pay attention to and what evidence you ignore.
From my perspective, blaming Jesus for the Spanish inquisition is like blaming capitalism for unsustainable levels of inequality.
In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith wrote: "How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature which interest him in the fortune of others and render their happiness necessary to him though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it."
In Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Freidman wrote that the doctrine of "social responsibility", that corporations should care about the community and not just profit, is highly subversive to the capitalist system and can only lead towards totalitarianism.
So, is Smith right that capitalism about the wealth of nations, or is Freidman right that capitalism is about the wealth of the wealthy?
Asking who to believe, Smith or Freidman, is like asking who to believe, Jesus or Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker.
Well said, azumbrunn, but off target.
The evidence shows that capitalism without strong regulation and support of unions results in increased wealth disparity and governments dominated by the rich.
Here's hoping that the Communist Manifesto falls in the minority bad stuff category.
Karl Marx's thinking has two categories: a descriptive element analyzing the economic systems as they were, and a prescriptive element laying out what should be done to improve, or in his mind perfect, the economic systems we live in. The former was brilliant, and still yields valuable insights.
It's the latter that gets Marx in trouble. As good as he was at systemic analysis, he was terrible at understanding human nature. The society he envisioned assumed that greed could be drained from human nature.
I largely agree with other commenters that it isn't really fair to blame Marx for the additions that Lenin made to his theories. However, those flawed assumptions meant that any attempt to implement Marx's prescriptive ideas was either doomed to failure, or necessitated Leninist deviations. I should note that, by "doomed to failure," I include northern European social democratic parties that were Marxist in their thought, but resolutely democratic in their politics, and installed very successful systems that fell well short of Marx's ideals. If we're going to blame Marx for Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, we should give him credit for these.
Love seeing the Mets make the cut for 1969!
So... which of these were contributions from the non-European world?
Yes. It does focus on the "Western World" and technology (or the tools that let technology flourish now).
Inoculations started in Africa to treat smallpox (don't know details).
China invented gun powder.
Zero was invented in Sumer, and independently by the Maya.
The decimal point was invented in India.
There was a lot going in the rest of the world, even before written history. But that's a different list.
China may have invented gunpowder, but it didn't result in the changes that its introduction to Europe and the Mid-East caused. Francis Bacon claimed that the three great technologies of the western world were gunpowder, the compass and the printing press, all with Chinese origins.
I'm not saying that the things on this list aren't important, although I cast some serious side-eye at so many cultural things - they're important, yes, but if we're talking about "most important years in the last 4ish centuries"... I don't think artistic expression makes the list except perhaps insofar as it co-occurred in the same year as other important stuff.
But my point was that this list is put together from a very Western European centric perspective. Are plenty of those things world-changing? Yes! But that there are essentially ZERO things from outside of the Western European cultural diaspora is glaringly obvious. I know these end of year lists are done in good fun, but it's still illustrative of a lack of diversity in perspective.
That's an important thing to acknowledge.
1977: Last "natural" case of smallpox, in Somalia. Three years later, the WHO would declare that "Smallpox is Dead."
https://www.who.int/news-room/spotlight/history-of-vaccination/history-of-smallpox-vaccination#:~:text=In%201980%2C%20WHO%20declared%20smallpox,and%20disfigurement%20in%20its%20wake.
Great to see Faraday's dynamo in there.
Next year Kevin will have a different quasi-random list of years.
Whatever the best past years may be, my hope is that 2024 will be one with the best news for Kevin & Marian Drum.
Don't forget calculus.
That's filed under 1687.
1781: A new planet is discovered for the first time in history, by a German composer and band leader in Bath. Washington finally defeats a British army. Los Angeles founded.
1776 also saw the founding of San Francisco.
The late 1800's and early 1900's were really amazing....the discovery of electrons, elements, atomic structure (early notions were a bit crude), isotopes, electromagnetism (yes, magnets were know earlier), radios, and the development of tools to study this set the stage for the modern world. Cathode ray tubes were turned into TV sets. Radios were turned into radios. Mass spectrometers led to rapid DNA sequencing. We just needed better electronics and computing power to get there.
The time was ripe for massive scientific advances between 1880 and 1930. I've seen people say that we overestimate the talent of the chemists and physicists of that era, and underestimate the talents of those since, because of that environment. The description I've read is, "It was possible then for a B grade physicist to do A caliber work, but now it's hard for an A grade physicist to do C grade work."
I'd probably have included 1989. Not sure what year gets bumped. Maybe 58? 1957 was the bigger year if we're talking technology (Sputnik) and nobody really important was born that year.
/s
I was born in 1957 and so was my wife.
Me too. I don't know why our birth years are less important than the blogger's. Not fair.
Big fan of Tosca here.
Suggestion: delete "(against which all future inventions would be compared)."
There's no real reason to call out this one item with an editorial comment, and the fact that it is in the list is sufficient editorial comment.
Agreeing that people shouldn't enslave each other seems like a pretty big milestone, and finding someway to reference that milestone seems like it would be nice. (aka, your list isn't woke enough 😉
Arguably not as earth shaking as the other events you’ve noted, but reading you has convinced me that control of leaded gas explains a lot of our politics and our social problems, so perhaps the founding of the EPA in 1970 belongs in there.
"Woodstock"? Really?
Half a million people gathering for a celebration with virtually no organization, virtually no conflict (substance abuse issues aside), and a security force referring to themselves as "The Please Force." To me, that's an impressive testament to the true nature of the human character. Unfortunately, it was a one-time event because it was over before the parasites got their chance to exploit the opportunity.
in 1900 planck applied boltzmann's atomism/statistical techniques to the solution of the ultraviolet catastrophe in black-body radiation
i know this falls under quantum mechanics, but this seems to be its foundational event
and boltzmann committed suicide at least partially because his ideas were rejected by the scientfic establishment, so maybe throw the guy a bone
Good list. I waas thinking of 1815 because the Basttle of Waterloo set up politics in Europe until WW1, the end of the War of 1912 ended US expansion north thereby allowed Canadato be created and the Mount Tambora volcanic explosion, the largest explosion ever recorded in human history that caused the 1816 "year with no summer" around the world. I understand why you didn't, given your criteria.
Whoa!!! An absolute must is to include the discovery of the DNA double helix structure by Watson and Crick in 1953 ("Molecular structure of nucleic acids; a structure for deoxyribose nucleic acid", Nature. 171:4356, 737–738), which prompted the understanding to the triplet codon for all the amino acids and led to the essential "dogma" of molecular biology (nucleic acids code the proteins that are fabricated at the ribosome).
This is not to deny the controversy about the unpublished work of Rosalind Franklin which they used. But everything in modern biology, AND I MEAN EVERYTHING, is in debt to this history-altering discovery.
I am not so sure why the paper itself is given such a significance.
It was already known that DNA is the material of inheritance, and the working of DNA->RNA->protein was not based on any undertsanding the structure.
People liked the structure, maybe that is enough.
The final quote of the paper is "It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material". For a good reason, because having 2 complementary strands clearly can serve as a basis for copying the DNA sequence. The double helix structure was key. Without this, the copying and transmission of genes cannot be understood.
" The double helix structure was key. Without this, the copying and transmission of genes cannot be understood."
That is imply not true.
Around 99% of mulecular biology today can be fully understood with any knowledge of DNA structure. Certianly the DNA->RNA-Protein bit.
The pairing of bases is useful for undertsanding how DNA is duplicated, but even that could be worked out without the structure. For example. they worked out the genetic code and production of proteins without knowing anything about the structure of the ribosomes and even the existence of T-RNA, which how it is actually implemented.
I am not sure why you insist, since it is undeniable that the complementary strand of the double helix are key to understand how the transmission of genetic information works.
The base pairs are formed between TA and GC. Take one double strand DNA:
...TGCTAATC...
...ACGATTAC...
Separate the double strang into two single strands:
...TGCTAATC...
+
...ACGATTAC...
Synthesize two new complementary strands by satisfying the base pairing:
...TGCTAATC...
ACGA.....
+
TGCT...
...ACGATTAC…
The final result is two identical double strand DNA:
...TGCTAATC...
...ACGATTAC...
+
...ACGATTAC...
...TGCTAATC...
That doesn't explain why you need the structure.
You need the pairing to understand inheritance, but that can be worked out without the structure.
For protein production (DNA->RNA->protein) you don't need DNA structure or pairing at all. You DNA-RNA pairing, and again that can be worked out without the structure.
DNA is the blueprint to make proteins (as you write, DNA->RNA->protein) but it is also the genetic information that is copied and transmitted when we make babies (1/2 DNA from the father + 1/2 DNA from the mother --> DNA of the baby). In both cases, structural base pairing is necessary.
If one wants to understand "why" there is pairing of each bases from two single strand DNA, then the double helix structure makes this clear. Otherwise, pairing is just some "rule" without molecular explanation. Pauling (who was a genius) knew about the base pairing, but predicted a wrong DNA structure, and his ideas went nowhere. Having the correct structure served as a predictive generator of many hypothesis that were subsequently verified.
I agree that a person may do molecular biology without knowing this today, but all the fundamental understanding and knowledge that this person relies on originates from the early 1950's.
You are using and off definition of the word "understand".
By your definition, Darwin couldn't understand evolutuion, because he didn't know about DNA.
I don't think that is a sensible definition. You can undertsand systems without knowing exact details, though obviously you understand them better if you know the details. For DNA, if you figure oout the pairing you understand the main point. The structure is not really that helpful in this case.
"Pauling (who was a genius) knew about the base pairing, .."
The wikipedia page says he suggested a triple helix, which obviously doesn't fit with pairing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Pauling
So apparently he didn't take his own ideas seriously.
Apparently, he also thought the phospate is neutral, which was already known to be wrong (the A in DNA means Acid, i.e. tend to lose protons and become negative). It seems he didn't get along with DNA.
I would have included 2000 because it was the first time a US presidential election was successfully stolen via a Republican Supreme Court. It changed everything!
Odd that nothing important happened in vast swathes of the world outside the US and Europe.
1887: Srinivasa Ramanujan born. He would die 32 short years later, having solved several "unsolvable" mathematical problems, made important contributions to number theory, mathematical analysis, and other fields, despite no formal training in mathematics.
There's also the whole Gandhi timeline, which includes significant events in Africa.
Even in the US the list misses vast swathes of the most important things. No mention of the end of slavery, Jackie Robinson, Martin Luther King, Jr. (Garrison does get a nod.) To exclude war and politics is one thing (though American and French Revolutions make the list), but to exclude events with profound effect on society is another. Maybe not so much perplexing as it is telling.
I got here after a different (private) conversation about the prevalence of narrow minds. About those people (not us). But I think narrow minds abound. We live in our niches. Yeats remains the oracle of our day.
That said, The Rules of the Game made the list, so there's that.
Keep in mind that all lists are designed for one purpose: to incite argument. This succeeds on that score.
For 1848, you can add that this was the year Thoreau delivered a "first draft" of Civil Disobedience, at the Concord Lyceum. That makes a nice bookend with The Communist Manifesto, and inspired a lot more good things!
https://commons.digitalthoreau.org/civil/a-note-on-the-text/
1947:
*India and Pakistan gain independence
*The UN passes a resolution creating Jewish (Israel) and Palestinian states.
*Prussia ceases to officially exist.
*The Truman Doctrine and the beginning of the Cold War
*Introduction of the Marshall Plan
*Diary of Anne Frank is published
*The National Security Act creates the CIA, the DoD, and other agencies.
*The House Un-American activities committee convenes. First blacklist issued.
*First televised White House address
*Wedding of Elizabeth (later queen of England) and Phillip (televised)
If you're gonna bring up 1947, you gotta mention Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier.
Also, though less well-known, Japanese-American Wat Misaka broke the color barrier in the NBA (called BAA at the time) later in the year.
@ Joseph Harbin:
Thanks, I’m not very good with sports history (even if the incidents in question relate to broader societal struggles),
😐
Yes. The Misaka item is a (minor) sports story. Robinson's was a watershed moment that truly changed the world.
George Marshall was Time Person of the Year, and for the 2nd time. He was honored earlier for his work leading the war effort. (Ike got the Supreme Commander job because FDR didn't want to lose Marshall in Washington.) Between his work as Chief of Staff of the Army under FDR and in the Cabinet under Truman, Marshall had a staggeringly important role in how the war and the postwar order turned out. He had a far bigger impact on the world than most presidents.
Another baseball note: Joe DiMaggio won the MVP that year despite Ted Williams winning the Triple Crown and leading the league in virtually every batting category. In '41, Williams hit .406 yet finished 2nd to DiMaggio in MVP voting. Williams finished 2nd to Joe Gordon in '42, and 2nd in '57 to Mickey Mantle, despite having better seasons. Williams should have won 6 MVPs instead of 2. Each time he finished 2nd, one of the Yankees won. Even a Yanks' fan like me can't deny it: the man was robbed time and again.
1687: And calculus. And optics. And the principle of universal gravitation. And solving the orbit problem.
1876, Bell creates the first Telephone, and Edison creates the first industrial research laboratory, Melo Park, which produces in 1877 the Phonograph and in 1880 a practical system for electrical illumination.
1969 is the best in my 70 years. 1974 was also good, and last decade as a volunteer and native plant enthusiast
So you're saying the most important authors of literature of the last hundred years were Erich Maria Remarque, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Heinlein? Yeesh.