Frederick Banting and Charles Best successfully isolate insulin for the first time
Within a year, people suffering from diabetes were being treated with insulin for a disease that had been considered fatal.
Technology & innovation
The Panama Canal officially opens
France began work on the canal in 1881, but stopped due to engineering problems and a high worker mortality rate. The United States took over the project in 1904 and opened the canal on August 15, 1914.
Ford Motor Company institutes world’s first moving assembly line for the Model T
The assembly line, driven by conveyor belts, reduced production time for a Model T to just 93 minutes by dividing the process into 45 steps.
Frank Shuman builds the world’s first solar thermal power plant in Egypt
Frank Shuman was an American inventor, engineer, and solar energy pioneer known for his work on solar engines. Shuman built the world’s first solar thermal power station in Maadi, Egypt in 1913, using used semi circle shaped troughs to power a 60-70 horsepower engine that pumped 6,000 gallons of water per minute from the Nile River to adjacent cotton fields.
Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch invent the Haber-Bosch Process allowing for mass-scale production of ammonia-based fertilizer
The Haber-Bosch process, is an artificial nitrogen fixation process and is the main industrial procedure for the production of ammonia today.
The 12-minute-long silent film, The Great Train Robbery becomes the first narrative movie ever
The Great Train Robbery’s popularity led directly to the opening up of permanent movie theaters and the possibility of a future film industry.
James Blyth of Scotland builds world’s first ever wind turbine used for electricity generation
Blyth’s 10-meter high, cloth-sailed wind turbine was installed in the garden of his holiday cottage at Marykirk in Kincardineshire and was used to charge accumulators developed by the Frenchman Camille Alphonse Faure, to power the lighting in the cottage, thus making it the first house in the world to have its electricity supplied by wind power. Blyth offered the surplus electricity to the people of Marykirk for lighting the main street, however, they turned down the offer as they thought electricity was “the work of the devil.”
American inventor Charles Fritts created the first commercial solar panel
Though his solar panels were very inefficient and thus not economically-viable for most uses, they were a critical early step in the development of renewable energy technology.
The Transcaucasus Railway is completed
The Transcaucasus Railway was the first railway in South Caucasus. It was funded by the Russian Empire as a strategic railway connecting the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea.
The world’s first underground railway, the London Underground, opens
The world’s first underground railway, it opened in January 1863 between Paddington and Farringdon in London using gas-lit wooden carriages hauled by steam locomotives.