A little more on the timeline I put together...

The purpose of the timeline is to provide a visual tool for looking at
events across a relatively long period of time and identify patterns and
interrelationships involving a broad range of factors. Identification of
patterns is particularly important when attempting to look at the future of
complex social, technological, economic, and other systems.

It is important to emphasize that the timeline is intended to provoke
thought and speculation about the future. Information about the future that
is charted on the timeline is intended not as an absolute prediction of what
the future will hold, but rather a representation of possibilities that need
to be further examined using other futures research methods.

The first edition of the timeline was produced around 1993-94 as I was
pulling together a lot of quantitative and qualitative data on some futures
research projects I was working on. I found that I was having trouble making
comparisons and identifying potential correlations for a combination of data
involving time series and individual historical events. 

I started pasting (literally glue and paper) the time series charts and
historical events on a grid and quickly realized that was foolish, so I went
to laying out charts/graphs and individual events in a graphics program on
which I created a time scale.

As I added more data, I began to organize it across the five major domains
that futurists often use -- Social, Technological, Economic, Environmental,
and Political (STEEP). These domains were then divided into secondary
categories like war, revolution, American politics, religion, etc. so that
closely related events could be clustered.

An idealized Kondratieff cycle (K Wave) was added because I was interested
in seeing how this cycle might be related to certain technological and
economic events. Schumpeter's theories on capitalism and cycles of "creative
destruction" were of particular interest. The band of green, gold, and brown
with E.A., L.A., E.D., and L.D. (Early Advance, Late Advance, Early Decline,
and Late Decline) were added to help identify the four "seasons" of the K
Wave more easily when looking at other data on the timeline.

Idealized S-curves for various categories of technological advancements are
used to tie together major developments in each of those areas. The S-curves
are used because they visually represent the performance improvements of
various developments in each major class of technology. The length of each
idealized S-curve is 60 years -- according to some theories on technological
change, roughly the amount of time that a major category of technology can
be expected to evolve. 

Placing the technologies on S-curves helps in the comparison of developments
across various technological categories. For example, if you look at the
first three technology S-curves (steam engines, steamships, and railroads),
you can see where Fitch's steamboat (1787), Fulton's steamboat (1807), and
first steam locomotive (1787) fall on their own curves but all where they
would fall on the related Steam Engine S-curve.

S-curves are also used to represent broad clusters of technologies (lead
technologies) that have profound social, economic, technological, and
political impacts. The lead technology S-curves are also idealized and span
110 years -- roughly the period of time spanning two cycles of the K Wave.