For the purpose of establishing anchor points to better understand and relate to the world, I will be memorizing a timeline of events.
Only the first year of an event is memorized. I will have a list of years and an associated event.
I am beginning by creating a spreadsheet with one column for the year and one column for the event. Each century has its own tab (for more recent history). I am sourcing these events from Wikipedia, laboriously going to each year page along with the associated _in_science and _in_the_United_States pages. Suggestions are welcome for other Wikipedia pages that may be of interest.
Encoding: Major system. 00-99 Location - Person. The first two digits will be a location I’ve been, the second will be a person from my PAO. This person, at the given location, will perform an action and object constituting the mnemonic for the event.
Practice: If I give the location stations, I will walk it during my downtime. Either way, I will use Anki spaced repetition.
Here’s my first chunk of target information. I have not yet memorized it.
| Year |
Event |
| 1900 |
Gamma Rays discovered by Paul Villard |
| 1901 |
American President William McKinley is assassinated |
| 1902 |
First science fiction film premieres: A Trip to the Moon |
| 1903 |
Orville Wright flies first controlled heavier-than-air flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina |
| 1904 |
Aleister Crowley writes The Book of the Law |
| 1905 |
Las Vagas founded |
| 1906 |
Mathematician Kurt Gödel born |
| 1907 |
Oklahoma has become the 46th U.S. state |
| 1908 |
Ford Model T begins mass production |
| 1909 |
NAACP is founded |
| 1910 |
First volume of Principia Mathematica published |
| 1911 |
Roald Amundsen becomes the first person to reach the South Pole |
| 1912 |
Titanic sinks |
| 1913 |
Thubten Gyatso, 13th Dali Lama, declares independence of Tibet |
| 1914 |
First world war begins |
| 1915 |
Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin publishes optical illusion which becomes known as Rubin vase |
| 1916 |
Father of information theory, Claude Shannon, is born |
| 1917 |
US enters first world war |
| 1918 |
Charles Strite invents the pop-up toaster. |
| 1919 |
May Fourth Movement in China |
| 1920 |
Hydrocodone synthesized |
| 1921 |
The TB vaccine, BCG vaccine, first used on humans |
| 1922 |
Founding of Soviat Union |
| 1923 |
The first issue of TIME magazine is published |
| 1924 |
death of Vladimir Lenin |
| 1925 |
F. Scott Fitzgerald publishes The Great Gatsby |
| 1926 |
weather map is televised for the first time |
| 1927 |
The Jazz Singer popularizes talkies |
| 1928 |
Alexander Fleming discovers penicilin |
| 1929 |
Kurt Gödel proves his completeness theorem. |
| 1930 |
Gandhi leads salt march |
| 1931 |
Kurt Gödel publishes the 2 incompleteness theorems in 1931 |
| 1932 |
Dust Bowl starts in United States |
| 1933 |
Hitler appointed Chancellor of Germany |
| 1934 |
Apollo Theater opens in Harlem, New York City. |
| 1935 |
The first canned beer is sold in Richmond, Virginia |
| 1936 |
Jesse Owens wins four gold medals at Summer Olympics |
| 1937 |
Amelia Earhart vanishes |
| 1938 |
Orson Welles broadcasts The War of the Worlds |
| 1939 |
Start of WWII |
| 1940 |
George Stibitz first demonstrates remote operation of a computer |
| 1941 |
First Turing complete computer |
| 1942 |
DDT is first used as a pesticide. |
| 1943 |
Abraham Maslow proposes the Hierarchy of Needs theory of psychology |
| 1944 |
Hans Asperger describes Asperger syndrome |
| 1945 |
End of World War II |
| 1946 |
Harold Gillies performs first phalloplasty |
| 1947 |
International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is founded. |
| 1948 |
Publication of Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. |
| 1949 |
NATO formed |