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About the Historical Tech Tree

1. Introduction

The historical tech tree is a project by Étienne Fortier-Dubois to visualize the entire history of technologies, inventions, and (some) discoveries, from prehistory to today. Unlike other visualizations of the sort, the tree emphasizes the connections between technologies: prerequisites, improvements, inspirations, and so on.

These connections allow viewers to understand how technologies came about, at least to some degree, thus revealing the entire history in more detail than a simple timeline, and with more breadth than most historical narratives. The goal is not to predict future technology, except in the weak sense that knowing history can help form a better model of the world. Rather, the point of the tree is to create an easy way to explore the history of technology, discover unexpected patterns and connections, and generally make the complexity of modern tech feel less daunting.

The idea of tech trees comes from games, especially the Civilization series. But game tech trees optimize for fun, not accuracy. They have often been criticized, and for good reason: they embed assumptions about the nature of technological progress that can be problematic. For example, they force technology to advance in a predetermined way; they rely on certain cultural ideas about progress; and they're simplistic.

This historical tech tree presented here is not a game tree. It is also constrained by assumptions, but different ones.

2. Assumptions and design choices

Some of the core assumptions of the tree include:

  1. Definition of technology: There is such a thing as "technology" as distinct from the full set of events and ideas in history.
  2. Discretization: Technologies can be discretized into single events to a reasonable degree.
  3. Dates: These discrete technologies can be assigned a specific date on a timeline.
  4. Connections: Technologies "descend" from one another, thus creating a tree structure (or, in more precise terminology, a directed acyclic graph).

Each of these assumptions in turn requires making some design choices, keeping in mind the goal of building a practical visualization. There are tradeoffs for each.

2.1. Definition of technology

In the ideal case, a technology is a piece of knowledge (an idea) that is created intentionally by humans for a practical purpose (not for its own sake) and is implemented in some kind of physical substrate.

  • Defining things is hard, so the above is not a perfect definition. Something may be called a technology without satisfying all characteristics. For example, some technologies like vulcanization and penicillin were discovered by chance, and some, like software or specific techniques, are arguably not physical, but they're still generally considered technologies.
  • But other things are generally not, such as works of art and games (which are created for their own sake), biological traits (not human and not intentional), and philosophical, theological, or political ideas (not physical and often not practical).
  • An illustrative example comes from music. Musical instruments are technologies, since they're constructed for the practical purpose of making music; but the components of music itself, such as specific works, genres, recordings, and techniques for playing or composing, are done for their own sake, so are not considered technologies. For further discussion, see my article What Counts as a Technology?
  • Scientific and mathematical discoveries are an edge case. Some particularly important ones are included in the tree when they are linked to technologies and as a result help understand the overall history. There is no intention of comprehensiveness for discoveries, however, since that would make the project intractable.

2.2. Discretization

The level of discretization chosen is approximately the same as Wikipedia's: if a technology has its own Wikipedia page, it's a strong signal that it should be in the tree.

  • This means the tree does not reach a sufficiently high resolution to describe unimplemented ideas, prototypes, failed commercialization attempts, patents, etc. In return, the benefit is that building the tree is feasible at all!
  • Independent inventions happen often, but are usually included only once. Exceptions exist for cases like the invention of writing, where each independent event played a different technological role in its part of the world.

2.3. Dates

Most technologies could be assigned several different dates, but a constraint of a timeline is that one date must be picked.

  • For prehistoric, ancient, and medieval tech, the date is often the oldest archeological or documentary evidence available, with the understanding that the technology may in fact be much older. The date could change in the future as we uncover new evidence. Such dates are often approximations.
  • For more recent tech, a choice must often be made between unimplemented ideas, prototypes, failed commercialization attempts, patents, etc. By default, the preferred date is the first practical version, but it's not always straightforward to determine that. If different versions of a tech each played a key role in their field, then they can all be included individually.

2.4. Connections

There isn't really such a thing as a technology that appears out of nowhere: virtually every innovation comes from several existing ones, or at least from something that exists in nature. The tech tree is based on the idea that we can find most of these connections and represent them.

  • Since the tree doesn't represent non-technologies, there are many connections from and to things like nature or artworks that aren't represented.
  • Connections are sometimes obvious, but not always, and they're not always well documented! The tree should therefore be considered to be missing many of them.

3. Contributing

3.1. Suggesting content

At the time of publicly releasing this project on May 26, 2025, the tree contained about 1,750 technologies and 2,000 connections between them. They were all compiled manually by myself. Going forward, the tree is open to contributions from visitors, with the goal of coming up with the most complete possible diagram of technology, though whether it can one day be "fully" complete is an open question.

To contribute, you can use the forms below or contact the author.

3.2. Financial support

Hosting the tree incurs some costs. If you want to support the project financially, the easiest way is to get a paid subscription to my Substack. I'll likely add other options in the future, so please let me know if you'd like to support the project in some other way!

4. Image credits

The vast majority of the images used to illustrate technologies are from Wikimedia Commons, and are in the public domain or under Creative Commons licenses.

You can view the credits and links to the original images on the Image credits page.

5. See also

  • Original announcement (soon)
  • Article in Asterisk Magazine (soon)
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Last updated: May 30, 2025