From Cave Paintings to the Internet A Chronological and Thematic Database on the History of Information and Media Statistics / Demography Outline

The Roman Census
(Circa 500 BCE)

The First Census of Which Records are Preserved
(2 CE)

The Domesday Book
(December 1085 – August 1086)

The Black Death
(1347 – 1353)

The Beginning of the Collection of Medical Statistics
(1592 – 1593)

Demography & Vital Statistics
(1662)

The Great Plague of London
(April 1665 – September 1666)

The First Census in North America
(1666)

The Great Fire of London
(September 2 – September 5, 1666)

Political Arithmetick
(1690)

The Breslau Tables
(1693)

One of the Earliest Applications of Statistics to a Socio-Medical Problem
(1723)

Theory of Annuities
(1725)

Proving the Need for a Healthy and Industrious Population
(1742)

The First Correct Life Tables
(1746 – 1760)

The Earliest Formal Treatment of "Data-Processing"
(1755)

Bayes's Theorem
(1763)

Foundation of Statistical Graphics: the Line Chart and Bar Chart
(1785 – 1786)

The First U.S. Census
(August 2, 1790)

Discovery of the Method of Least Squares
(1795)

Malthus on Population
(1798)

The First Census of England, Scotland and Wales
(1801)

Invention of the Pie Chart
(1801)

First Publication of the Method of Least Squares
(1805)

Foundation of the Birth Control Movement
(1822)

The First Opinion Poll
(1824)

The "Average Man"
(1835)

Mathematical Model of a Continuously Growing Population
(1838)

The First of the Industrial Insurance Companies that Processed Immense Amounts of Data
(May 30, 1848)

Having Refused to Support Babbage, the British Government Pays for a Difference Engine Produced in Sweden
(1859)

The First Instance of a Printing Calculator Used Extensively to do Original Work
(1864)

Mathematical Study of Anthropological Data
(1871)

300 Clerks Reviewing 2,500,000 Policies with 24 Calculators
(1877)

A Librarian Suggests the Idea for Electric Punched Card Tabulating
(1882)

Electromechanical Punched Card Tabulating
(1890)

The Automatic Punched Card Feed
(1900)

Hollerith Sells the Tabulating Machine Company to Flint
(1911)

The First National Opinion Poll?
(1916)

Communication Theory as a Statistical Problem
(1942)

Contract for Production of the UNIVAC
(1948)

Among the Earliest Extant Programs for a Stored-Program Computer
(March 15 – March 21, 1949)

The First Electronic Computer Commercially Manufactured in the United States
(March 31, 1951)

"Computational Analysis of Present-Day American English"
(1967)

The Digital Domesday Project--Doomed to Early Digital Obsolescence
(1984 – 1986)

The Bureau of Labor Statistics Begins Publishing on its Website
(January 1995)

The First Intelligible Word from an Extinct South American Civilization?
(August 12, 2005)

Statistical Analysis Correctly Forecasts the Election of Obama
(March 3, 2008)

China Becomes the Top User of the Internet
(January 14, 2009)

1.7 Billion Internet Users
(September 30, 2009)