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IV

Hall IV

We changed the world

From the archivist

Some inventions did not add a thing to the world; they changed how everything else moved. A printed page, a message between two machines. This hall keeps the turning points, and asks what they cost.

32 fragments in this hall · Asia 10 · Americas 11 · Europe 9 · Africa 1 · Oceania 1

A small bundle of einkorn wheat photographed on a white background: three or four slender, flattened ears of golden grain, tied at the stems with dark twine, from which long straight pale awns fan out like a brush. A scale bar marked 1 cm sits in the lower left corner.

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c. 8500 BCE

Einkorn and emmer: the first wheats

Karacadağ mountains, southeastern Türkiye · Asia

Three ears laid one above the other on a bright red background. At the top, a teosinte ear, thin and short, made of a single row of hard green seed cases stacked like braided beads. In the middle, a hybrid of teosinte and maize, longer, with several rows of pale kernels still half enclosed in green husks. At the bottom, a modern maize ear, thick and long, covered with tight rows of plump, naked pale yellow kernels.

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c. 7000 BCE

Maize, from teosinte

Near Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico · Americas

A small, thick tablet of pale clay, almost square, photographed against a dark grey background. Its face is divided into boxes by incised lines; inside them, signs pressed and drawn into the clay: ears of grain, round holes and crescent notches for numbers, a vessel, a triangle, a rectangular grid. On the lower left, a rolled seal has left a faint scene with an animal whose tail curls into a spiral.

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3300 to 2900 BCE

The first writing: proto-cuneiform tablets of Uruk

Warka, Al-Muthanna Governorate, Iraq · Asia

A tall black basalt stele, rounded at the top, standing in a pale gallery. In the relief at its summit a bearded king stands with one hand raised before a seated god who holds out a rod and a ring; below, the whole polished shaft is covered in close columns of tiny cuneiform signs.

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1792 to 1750 BCE

The Code of Hammurabi

Made in present-day Iraq; found at Susa (Shush), Iran; now in the Louvre, Paris · Asia

A thin, ragged sheet of pale beige paper laid flat on black cloth inside a shallow frame of light wood, in a museum case. Its edges are torn into irregular lobes and it is pierced by many small dark holes; close up, loose fibres show in its rough surface. No writing is visible.

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200 BCE to 105 CE

Paper: a sheet of pounded rags and bark

Luoyang, Henan, China · Asia

The opening of a paper scroll printed in black ink: on the right, a woodcut of the Buddha seated behind an altar table under a canopy, surrounded by monks, guardian figures and a lion, with an elderly disciple kneeling at the lower left; on the left, columns of Chinese characters.

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868 CE

The Diamond Sutra of 868

Mogao Caves, Dunhuang, Gansu, China · Asia

A single page of a Chinese book in black ink on white, ruled into vertical columns of large regular characters read from top to bottom and right to left, with the book's title and a page number in the narrow margin column. Towards the left of the page, partway down a column, the entry headed fire drug method begins: sulphur, one catty four ounces; saltpetre, two and a half catties; coarse charcoal powder, five ounces; followed by pitch, dry lacquer and other ingredients.

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1044 CE

The fire drug: the first written formulas for gunpowder

Kaifeng, Henan, China · Asia

An open cage of black wrought iron, roughly the size of a large chest, standing on a low dark plinth against the pale stone wall of a cathedral aisle. Inside it, large toothed wheels of iron and two wooden barrels wound with thick pale rope; on the left, a tall swinging arm ends in two flat black paddles. Ropes rise from the barrels to heavy stone weights hanging above, and behind the clock is a marble memorial tablet; a small sign reads Please do not touch.

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1300 to 1386 CE

The hours struck by iron: the mechanical clock of Salisbury

Salisbury Cathedral, Salisbury, Wiltshire, United Kingdom · Europe

An old book of yellowed paper lying open in a glass case, its two pages printed in columns of black Chinese characters inside thin ruled frames, some characters slightly uneven in size and inking, with small red marks added by hand beside the text.

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1377 CE

The Jikji

Cheongju, North Chungcheong, Republic of Korea; the book is in Paris · Asia

A large open book on a clear display stand in a dim library room: two pages of dense black Latin type set in two columns each, with a red and blue initial and a few red headings, the thick paper edges and leather binding catching the light.

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c. 1455 CE

The Gutenberg Bible

Mainz, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany · Europe

An eighteenth-century copperplate engraving in grey line. A town of European-looking buildings, a palace with a flag and several churches stands on high cliffs above a wide river; small figures climb a path to the town, and canoes and long covered boats crowd the water in the foreground. A legend in the upper left corner lists the king's palace, the churches, a Portuguese fort, a spring, and 'slaves carrying water to the city'. The scene was engraved in Europe after a seventeenth-century Dutch description, not drawn on the spot.

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1526

Afonso of Kongo: "our country is being completely depopulated"

Mbanza Kongo, Zaire Province, Angola · Africa

Inside a glass case, a small working model of a steam engine, about the height of a child, built into an open frame of dark wood. At its foot on the left, a round boiler in a firebox; above it a vertical cylinder; across the top, a wooden beam rocking on a pivot, with a chain at each end, one to the cylinder's piston and one to a pump rod on the right. A cistern sits on a shelf in the middle and a tall funnel of grey metal rises above the frame.

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1712 to 1769

Fire made to work: from Newcomen's engine to Watt's condenser

Coneygree, Tipton, near Dudley, West Midlands, United Kingdom · Europe

A watercolour of the deck of a great steamship: on long wooden planks stands a heavy grey iron machine of toothed wheels, pulleys and drums, with a ladder leaning against it; to the left, a large pink buoy and a round wire cage hang by the rail, and masts, rigging and a pale cloudy sky rise behind.

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1858 to 1866

The cable under the Atlantic

Valentia Island, County Kerry, Ireland; and Heart's Content, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada · Europe

A yellowed patent sheet headed A. G. Bell, Telegraphy, No. 174,465, patented March 7, 1876: at the top, three boxes of small electromagnets linked by a winding wire; below, figure 7, two cone shaped mouthpieces facing each other, each against an electromagnet, joined by a single wire; at the foot, the signatures of the witnesses and of the inventor.

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1876

The telephone: a patent and a sentence

Boston, Massachusetts, United States · Americas

Side view, on a plain white background, of a light three-wheeled carriage. A single spoked wheel at the front, about the size of a bicycle wheel, is steered by a vertical rod with a small crank handle; two much larger, thin-spoked wheels carry the back. On a slatted wooden floor sits a padded black bench; behind and below it are the engine and its fittings, a brass cylinder, a glass globe, copper vessels, and a horizontal flywheel at the rear.

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1886 to 1888

Three wheels and a petrol engine: the Benz Patent-Motorwagen

Mannheim, Baden-Württemberg, Germany · Europe

A black and white photograph from December 1901 on bare, stony ground at Signal Hill: four men in dark coats and caps struggle to raise a large pale kite against the wind beside a stone building with chimneys, while a man in a hat and long coat watches from the left and a wooden fence stands behind them.

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1901

The letter S across the Atlantic

St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada · Americas

A tall, narrow column of dark rusted steel stands upright on a lawn, much taller than the bushes around it, against a grey, overcast sky. It is thickened at the top by a heavy collar and a crown of bolts, and at mid-height and at its foot by bolted flanges. Behind it rises the pale tiled wall of a modern university building.

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1909 to 1913

Bread from the air: the Haber-Bosch synthesis of ammonia

Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany · Europe

Seen across a river on a clear spring day, the ruin of a brick and stone building with empty window openings and broken upper walls, crowned by the bare steel ribs of a dome; green trees and a modern office block stand behind, and people walk along the embankment in front.

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1945

The Hiroshima Peace Memorial (Genbaku Dome)

Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, Hiroshima, Japan · Asia

Black and white photograph against a black sky: a pale dome of fire, wider than it is tall, its surface mottled with bright spots, sits on a flat dark horizon; along its base a ragged white rim of dust and debris is being thrown up from the ground.

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1945

Trinity: the first nuclear explosion

Trinity Site, White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, United States · Americas

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1948

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Palais de Chaillot, Paris, France · Europe

A black and white studio portrait of Alan Turing in 1951: a man in his late thirties with dark, neatly parted hair, in a tweed jacket, white shirt and dark tie, turned slightly to the left and looking past the camera with a faint smile.

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1950

"Computing Machinery and Intelligence" (Turing, 1950)

Manchester, United Kingdom · Europe

Against a black background, a polished metal sphere with a seam around its middle reflects the room around it like a mirror; four long thin antennas sweep back from it at an angle, two above and two below.

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1957

Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite

Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan · Asia

A black and white diagram titled ARPANET Logical Map, March 1977: dozens of named sites across the United States, such as UCLA, SRI, MIT, Harvard and the Pentagon, joined by straight lines, each with boxes listing its computers, and wavy lines marking satellite circuits to Hawaii and to Norway.

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1969 to 1990

A map of a new network: ARPANET

Los Angeles, California, United States · Americas

Colour photograph from 1969 at dusk: a huge radio dish, its open steel lattice seen from behind, tilted up on a squat tower with lit windows, silhouetted against a sky fading from orange at the horizon to violet; a thin crescent Moon hangs high above it.

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1969

The Parkes dish and the Moon walk seen by the world

Parkes Observatory, New South Wales, Australia · Oceania

A colour photograph from 2007: an elderly man with white hair and a white beard, in a grey suit and a rust coloured tie, smiles as he holds to his ear a large cream coloured handset shaped like a brick, with a keypad and a short antenna on top; behind him, a stage backdrop covered with sponsors' logos.

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1973

A telephone call from the street

New York City, New York, United States · Americas

Colour photograph of a satellite inside a vast dark test chamber. The spacecraft, wrapped in gold and silver foil, has a box-shaped body with a cluster of short cream-coloured rods pointing forward and two long, flat solar panels spread like wings to either side. Cables and a frame of foil-covered tubes hang above it; far below, a small figure in a white clean-room suit and cap stands beside the support.

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1978 to 2000

A place for everyone on Earth: the Global Positioning System

Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, United States · Americas

A photograph of a printed network diagram headed, in the lower left corner, ARPANET as of Aug 25, 1983: dozens of small boxes in blue and red ink, each labelled with a site abbreviation such as UCLA, STAN, MIT, HARV, PENT or NSA, joined by thin numbered lines, with a legend on the left and pencil notes in the margins.

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1983

The network of networks: the switch to TCP/IP

Marina del Rey, California, United States · Americas

A black NeXT cube computer in a glass display case beside its monitor and keyboard; a white label on the cube reads, in red handwriting, This machine is a server, DO NOT POWER IT DOWN; in front lie an open book and a printed sheet with a hand drawn diagram.

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1990 to 1993

The first web server

Meyrin, Canton of Geneva, Switzerland · Europe

A tall black computer cabinet in two panels on a dark blue plinth in a museum hall, marked IBM at the top left and RS/6000 SP at the top right, with a small label in front; behind it, a panel with a drawing of a hand pressing an off switch, and to the right a screen showing a chess piece.

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1997

Deep Blue and Kasparov

Equitable Center, 787 Seventh Avenue, New York, United States · Americas

Long exposure photograph at night over flat coastal ground: a bright orange streak rises from the horizon in a tall curve and leaves the frame at the top; a shorter streak high in the sky and a third one on the right, falling back towards the ground, trace the returning first stage's burns; small lights dot the horizon under a hazy, starless sky.

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2015

The first orbital-class booster to come back: Falcon 9 flight 20

Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, United States · Americas

Diagram of a finished Go game on a 19 by 19 wooden-coloured grid, black and white stones each numbered in the order they were played, from 1 to 211; the caption reads Lee Sedol (W) vs AlphaGo (B), Game 2. Black stone 37 sits alone on the right side, on the fifth line from the edge.

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2016

AlphaGo and Lee Sedol

Seoul, Republic of Korea · Asia

Transcription · Post on Twitter (now X)

today we launched ChatGPT. try talking with it here:
chat.openai.com

Sam Altman @samaNovember 30, 2022 at 7:38 PM UTC

2022

ChatGPT, the machine that answered in words

Mission District, San Francisco, California, United States · Americas