In the early twentieth century, most ships were powered by coal and steam. The first diesel engine was built by Rudolf Diesel in 1897. It became part of almost all types of ships and a driving force of globalization.
The Walchensee Hydroelectric Power Station was built between 1918 and 1924 under the supervision of Oskar von Miller, a Bavarian engineer and founder of the Deutsches Museum.
When Jacques Piccard started his first deep-sea expedition in 1960, the world’s oceans still seemed healthy and clean.
In 1884 Ottmar Mergenthaler patented the Linotype machine in the United States. With it characters are cast in type metal as a complete line rather than as individual characters.
Nanotechnology can revolutionize the production of materials and offer ecological solutions but it may have unexpected consequences or lead to mismanagement.
In the year 2000, Bill Clinton introduced a preview of the Human Genome Project and promised rapid progress for the diagnosis and treatment of illnesses such as cancer, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s disease.
The atmosphere can hold up to 1,500 billion tons of carbon dioxide and still keep global warming under 2°C; the consequences become uncontrollable once this limit is breached.
In the eighteenth century, cheap raw materials from the Americas and other emerging markets drove European world trade. The transatlantic triangular trade between Europe, Africa and America was established.
The advent of improved drilling technology made the extraction of geological resources easier. However, today we have almost stretched the limits of the earth’s system to its breaking point.
The discovery of the nuclear chain reaction enabled the construction of atomic bombs and nuclear power plants—something never intended by the scientists.
