History Timeline
27 anchor events from the Great Pyramid to the smartphone: pick any two and get the years between them and how long ago each was, with the counting shown.
Example — Years between the first powered flight (1903) and the Moon landing (1969)66 years
| Event | Year |
|---|---|
| Great Pyramid of Giza completed | c. 2560 BC |
| First recorded Olympic Games | 776 BC |
| China unified under the Qin dynasty | 221 BC |
| Julius Caesar assassinated | 44 BC |
| Fall of the Western Roman Empire | 476 |
| Charlemagne crowned emperor | 800 |
| Battle of Hastings | 1066 |
| Magna Carta sealed | 1215 |
| Black Death reaches Europe | 1347 |
| Gutenberg's printing press | c. 1440 |
| Columbus reaches the Americas | 1492 |
| Jamestown founded | 1607 |
| Newton publishes Principia | 1687 |
| US Declaration of Independence | 1776 |
| Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species | 1859 |
| Edison's practical light bulb | 1879 |
| Eiffel Tower completed | 1889 |
| First powered aeroplane flight | 1903 |
| First World War begins | 1914 |
| Second World War ends | 1945 |
| Structure of DNA published | 1953 |
| First Moon landing | 1969 |
| Berlin Wall falls | 1989 |
| World Wide Web opens to the public | 1991 |
| September 11 attacks | 2001 |
| First iPhone announced | 2007 |
| COVID-19 declared a pandemic | 2020 |
How we got it — the example, step by step
- Subtract the years: 1969 − 1903 = 66 years.
- The Moon landing was 57 years before 2026; the first flight was 123 years before 2026 — and 57 + 66 = 123, which is the check.
Check it backwards
Years-ago for the later event, plus the gap, equals years-ago for the earlier event — the page computes all three so they must agree.
Questions people also ask
Why is there no year 0 in the counting?
The calendar goes from 1 BC straight to AD 1. A gap that crosses from BC to AD is one year less than plain subtraction gives, and the tool says so when it happens. The two 'c.' dates on the list (the Great Pyramid, Gutenberg) are conventional approximations and are marked as such.