1860s: Henry Chadwick
Keeping records of sports
Henry Chadwick> begins to keep systematic records of player achievements in baseball.
1860: Robert FitzRoy
Charting and forecasting the weather
Robert FitzRoy uses a network of telegraph stations to assemble systematic charts and make forecasts of British weather.
1879: Gottlob Frege
Axiomatizing knowledge through logic
Frege created a formal system and language in which mathematical and other knowledge could be represented in terms of an extended form of logic.
1879: John Shaw Billings
Indexing all medical literature
Index Medicus, a comprehensive index of medical scientific journal articles, is published by John Shaw Billings.
The Jacquard loom weaves patterns specified by punched cards.
Leopold Gmelin publishes his handbook of organic chemicals.
Thomas Young formalizes the idea of three components to color.
Babbage constructed a mechanical computer to automate the creation of mathematical knowledge.
Samuel Morse sends the first public telegraph message.
Births and deaths begin to be systematically recorded by the UK government.
Louis Daguerre creates the daguerreotype method of photography.
The first edition of Who's Who, which compiled biographical information on royals, members of Parliament, and others, is published.
Paul Julius Reuter uses pigeons to fly stock prices between Aachen and Brussels.
Edward Calahan invents a telegraph-like system to transmit every price change from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.
Roget's Thesaurus—first compiled in 1805—is published.
Henry Chadwick begins to keep systematic records of player achievements in baseball.
Dmitri Mendeleev creates his periodic table of chemical elements.
Robert FitzRoy uses a network of telegraph stations to assemble systematic charts and make forecasts of British weather.
Lord Kelvin creates an analog computer for predicting ocean tides.
Dewey invented the Dewey Decimal System for classifying the world's knowledge and specifying how to organize books in libraries.
The US Geological Survey is authorized by Congress to create a geological map of the entire US.
Reuben H. Donnelly prints the first "Yellow Pages" business directory.
By an act of US Congress, collection of data on notifiable diseases by the Public Health Services begins.
Peano publishes axioms to give a complete formalization of arithmetic.
The first phone directory is issued, listing 50 subscribers in New Haven, Connecticut.
Hollerith puts all the data from the US Census onto punched cards, which can then be tabulated automatically. The company he started is an ancestor of IBM.
Frege created a formal system and language in which mathematical and other knowledge could be represented in terms of an extended form of logic.
Fred Jane collecting worldwide data and publishes Jane's All the World's Fighting Ships.
Index Medicus, a comprehensive index of medical scientific journal articles, is published by John Shaw Billings.
With extensive information supplied by a network of volunteers, the OED is a systematic project to get complete knowledge of all the words in the English language.
This art-quality 4'10" x 16" poster timeline of the History of Systematic Data and the Development of Computable Knowledge includes nearly 200 entries spanning millennia of events that have shaped the modern world of data and knowledge. Presented in its original version at the 2010 Wolfram Data Summit, this fascinating and impressive large-scale poster is the perfect piece of intellectual art for your library, office, or other wall, and is a unique gift for any enthusiast of data, technology, and its history.
