Our Evolving Culture

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1492 In 1492, in the service of Spain, the Genoese navigator Christopher Columbus took the caravels Nina and Pinta along with the Santa Maria on his historic voyage across the Atlantic.

1588 The invincible Spanish Armada, with about 130 ships, sailed to conquer England. Its defeat by the English navy, with its smaller but more maneuverable ships, would change the balance of world naval power.

1775 American rebels gave the name Enterprise to a 70-ton sloop captured from the British. It was later burned to prevent recapture.

1807 Robert Fulton's steamboat Clermont ran from New York City to Albany in 32 hrs. A sailboat would have taken four days.

1831 The U.S. Navy had a fourth ship by the name Enterprise, a 194-ton schooner.

1877 The fifth ship by the name Enterprise was a 1,375-ton steam-powered sloop of war.

Mid-1800s The French and British vied to build the better ironclad battleship. In 1862 the Union's Monitor and the Confederacy's Merrimack clashed in the first battle of ironclads in history. The result was indecisive.

1938-1958 In World War II, the U.S.S. Enterprise was an aircraft carrier. She sank 71 enemy ships and downed 911 planes. Severely damaged by kamikaze attack at the end of the war, she would later be sold for scrap.

1961 The latest U.S.S. Enterprise was commissioned, the first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier ever built.

1981 The space shuttle took a new ship shape into a new sea.

Final frontier? U.S.S. Enterprise

PAPER

A.D. 105 Invention According to tradition, an imperial eunuch named Cai Lun invented paper. The material, however, has been found in Chinese tombs dating to the 2nd century B.C. By the end of the 8th century, Chinese paper craftsmen had set up shop in the Middle East.

11th century Movable type was developed in China by the year 1048 and the metal variety in Korea by 1403. However, it was impractical for the ideographs both used (as many as 400,000 characters). Rubbing off wood blocks and stone, practiced since the 7th century, was the preferred technology of a versatile book trade.

1150 Technology transfer The Arabs took paper from Iraq and Egypt to North Africa and Muslim Spain.

13th century Italy gets paper Finally Europe had a cheap alternative to vellum and parchment. (It took the skins of 80 lambs to create a 200-page parchment manuscript.)

1300s Block printing arrived in Europe, perhaps brought by merchants and bureaucrats of the expanding Mongol Empire. And paper was available for use.

1455 Johann Gutenberg invented an efficient press in Germany and used movable type to publish Bibles, transforming Europe.

1591 Those rotten journalists A Chinese border official complained of irresponsible "news-bureau entrepreneurs" who give no consideration to "matters of [national] emergency."

1605 Newspapers The first weekly appeared in Antwerp; it would be 1650 before the first daily was published, in Leipzig.

1776 Thomas Paine His printed pamphlet Common Sense would inspire the Declaration of Independence; his American Crisis rallied Washington's troops at Valley Forge.

1811 Industrial Revolution The steam engine began to power the press; the rotary press (invented in 1846) allowed runs of 20,000 sheets an hour.