Timeline of Discovery

This evening I made a Timeline of Discovery, listing historical inventions, discoveries, events, etc. that I find personally interesting.

I started doing it because I saw a project, Markwhen, on Hacker News, that turns a simple markdown-like format into HTML timelines and I wanted to try it out.

It turned out not to be exactly what I wanted, because it makes a page that is "too interactive", and I couldn't work out how to input dates before 0 AD, so I got Cursor to write me a custom static-site generator instead.

I found that Cursor picked up the input format very well, and sometimes just typing the year was enough for it to guess both the discovery I was going to write and the associated Wikipedia link! Which I then just press tab to insert.

A fun game is to type in random years and see what it proposes, sometimes it is just bogus.

Maybe my timeline could do with a log scale on the X axis, that would make it possible to add things further in the past without leaving big blank sections.

I kind of want to make a similar timeline but showing the life (birth to death) of interesting people from history, and with ranges like markwhen renders, instead of dots, to make it visually obvious whose life overlapped with whose.

Also a similar timeline but for civilisation-level developments, something like the Histomap but going back further into the past, and with less detail.