Inventions & launches
Placed0
In a row0
Order by the year each thing arrived. Drag or tap it onto the line
Invention
?
Invention
Inventions & launches
Order by the year each thing arrived. You place all 84 cards on one timeline, one at a time. You start with three lives, and ten right in a row wins a lost one back.
84
Cards
3
Lives per run
release years and dates
Ordered by
Cards only
Card reveal
How the inventions timeline game works
Inventions, discoveries and product launches make up this deck, each with the inventor, company or a short note printed underneath. Order them by the year each one arrived. You begin with one card on the timeline and its year showing. Place every new card in the gap where you think it falls among the others. A right answer shows its year, and a wrong one still moves the card to its real position but takes one of your three lives.
The deck covers centuries of progress, passing through the industrial age, wartime science, home computing and the smartphone era. The last stretch is the most crowded, with apps and devices piled almost on top of one another. Names under the cards are handy if you know when the person lived. Everyday objects are the classic trap: some feel modern and are old, while others feel timeless and arrived later than you'd guess.
Want a longer game? On the deck tree you can tick this deck alongside any other one measured in release years and dates, and they shuffle into a single timeline together.
How players are doing
This deck has been played 157 times. An average run places 5.7 cards, and 66% of all placements land in the right spot. Nobody has placed every card yet.
The cards players get wrong most often:
- Air conditioning missed 70% of the time, usually by about 2 places
- Smallpox vaccine missed 69% of the time, usually by about 3 places
- Telegraph message missed 67% of the time, usually by about 2 places
The safest card is Radio transmission, placed right every time it has come up.
What's in the deck
Here are 28 of the 84 cards you might be dealt, with 56 more in the deck. Their values stay hidden until you place them.
- Printing press Johannes Gutenberg
- Spinning jenny James Hargreaves
- Battery Alessandro Volta
- Sewing machine Elias Howe
- Telephone Alexander Graham Bell
- Benz Patent-Motorwagen Karl Benz
- Radio transmission Guglielmo Marconi
- Bakelite Leo Baekeland
- Insulin isolated Banting & Best
- Nylon DuPont
- Jet aircraft Heinkel He 178
- Transistor Bell Labs
- Velcro George de Mestral
- Computer mouse Douglas Engelbart
- Email with the @ sign Ray Tomlinson
- Rubik's Cube Ernő Rubik
- MRI scanner Damadian & Lauterbur
- Compact disc player Sony CDP-101
- World Wide Web Tim Berners-Lee's proposal
- GPS becomes fully operational US Department of Defense
- Wi-Fi IEEE 802.11 standard
- Wikipedia Wales & Sanger
- Blu-ray Sony consortium
- Android Open Handset Alliance
- iPad Apple
- Tesla Model S Tesla
- TikTok ByteDance
- AlphaFold protein structures DeepMind
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