Leeds, England. John Smeaton invents the vacuum pump.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe follows the current of Sturm Und Drang

The French political philosopher Charles-Louis de Secondat, aka Baron Montesquieu, published “The Spirit of the Laws,” which inspired the Founding Fathers of the United States to draft the American Constitution, which protected the spirit of individual liberty. Individual liberty (the freedom to stray, to disobey, to experiment with new social forms) and skepticism toward revealed religion have also been typical of Native American cultures in North America for centuries. It may be no coincidence, in this sense, that in 1725, the French explorer Bourgmont brought a Native American delegation (Osage and Missouri Indians) to Paris and organized public meetings in Paris to connect with these “savage diplomats.” These meetings were attended by illustrious European intellectuals. We don’t know exactly who they met, but Montesquieu was in Paris at the time and was studying these issues, so it would seem strange that he didn’t attend. In any case, his book’s speculations on the modalities of savage government seem to be an exact reproduction of what the European philosopher might have heard from Native Americans. It would be excessive to say that the Enlightenment took its first steps in Native American communities, but it is possible to imagine a possible, non-Eurocentric future history in which such a hypothesis would not be treated as scandalous and absurd by definition.

Court patronage: Enlightened despots Frederick the Great in Berlin, Peter the Great and Catherine the Great in St. Petersburg, and Louis XV and XVI in Paris funded academies and gave intellectual impetus to the Enlightenment.

The first double-blind, randomized controlled trial, which later became the norm in medicine: in the Royal Navy, a doctor provided placebos and various experiments with supposed drugs to treat scurvy. The result was that a mixture of lemon and orange juice kept scurvy at bay. The Royal Navy soon acquired supplies of oranges, which led to a protectorate over Sicily. In 1747, James Lind, a naval surgeon aboard the Salisbury, selected 12 men suffering from scurvy with similar symptoms. Instead of the usual diet of salted meat and biscuit, he fed them a uniform staple diet of sweetened oatmeal, mutton broth, boiled biscuits, barley, sago, rice, raisins, sultanas, and wine. And then another part of the diet, diversified in pairs: two sailors receive a quart of cider a day each, two more receive vinegar, two more diluted sulfuric acid (these two are not lucky…), two more a pint of seawater a day (and I don’t envy them either), two more a mixture of nutmeg, garlic, mustard, gum myrrh, cream of tartar, and barley tea, and finally the last two (lucky ones) are given two oranges and a lemon a day. In just six days, the last pair of men recovers and can resume work on board, much to the relief of the others who see their “treatment” suspended.

The philosopher La Mettrie, at the court of Frederick the Great, wrote an article entitled “L’homme machine” in which he argued that man is a machine.

Johann-Sebastian Bach wrote the counterpoints of BWV1079: Can Triplex for 6 Voices, or Canonical Variations, also known as the Musical Offering.

Muhammad ibn Saud, ruler of the village of ad-Diriyyah, allies himself with Abd-al-Wahhab, a fundamentalist Islamic cleric; the agreement, which will remain in force for centuries, stipulates that the Saudis accept the Wahhabi interpretation of Islam and that the Wahhabis allow themselves to be governed by the Saudis.

Bolognese physician Vincenzo Menghini roasts the blood of various mammals, including humans (it’s unclear how he obtained it), as well as the blood of birds and fish. He then inserts a magnetic knife into the solid residue and observes with satisfaction that various particles are attracted to the blade: from 140g of blood, he extracts 28g of ferromagnetic material.

The Jacobites (from James VII, Catholic King of Scotland, deposed by the English Parliament in 1688) of Charles Stewart Edwards (coming from Italy where he was protected by the Pope) conquer the whole of Scotland and head towards London, then stopping in Derby, 200 km from the capital; in retreat, the Highlanders will be defeated and exterminated by the English army (of William of Orange) at Culloden.

Pieter van Musscenbroech creates the Leyden jar, the first capacitor

Blacksmith Edmund Lee invents the self-regulating wind machine perpendicular to the wind: the first servo system

Two Scottish Presbyterian clergymen, Alexander Webster and Robert Wallace, decided to found an insurance company that would provide financial coverage for the widows of deceased clergymen. To calculate insurance premiums, they laid the foundations of modern statistics, leveraging the recent discoveries of Jacob Bernoulli. Today, Scottish Widows is one of the largest insurance companies in the world, with assets exceeding $100 billion (and of course, it no longer insures only the widows of Scottish clergymen…).

Baseball is first mentioned and described in the book “A Little Prettay Pocket Book” in England; it was published in America in 1762. The description is not yet complete compared to the contemporary sport: the rounders and the diamond are missing, which would not be introduced until 1842 by the American Alexander Cartwright.

The first Saudi kingdom. It takes its name from the founding dynasty: the Saud family. It will have alternating fortunes and will be ruled by the Ottoman Empire for several centuries. The modern Saudi kingdom (KSA – Kingdom of Saudi Arabia) was founded in 1932 by Abdul Aziz bin Al Saud.

Clairaut calculates with excellent approximation the ellipsoidal shape of the Earth, which Newton had only approximated in Principia Mathematica.

From his lunar observations, Halley concludes that the Moon is accelerating its motion around the Earth (now we know that it is actually the Earth that is slowing down its rotation due to the lunar tidal attractions).

Christian Goldbach, in a letter to Leonhard Euler, hypothesized what would become known as Euler’s Conjecture: every number greater than two is the sum of three prime numbers, or every even number greater than two is the sum of two prime numbers.

Swedish astronomer Anders Celsius introduces the famous temperature scale

Quaker Benjamin Robins published the treatise New Principles of Gunnery in England, in which he used his meticulous observations, Boyle’s Law, and the centripetal forces drawn from Newton’s Principia, to calculate the velocity and trajectory of a projectile as it exits the muzzle. He also calculated air resistance, which could be up to 120 times the projectile’s weight, radically changing the theoretical Galilean trajectory. He also calculated the effects of rifled barrels, projectile rotation, and gyroscopic effects. He even recommended oval-shaped projectiles and internally rifled barrels.

Dublin: First complete performance of George Frideric Handel’s operas, including the famous Hallelujah!

The Woolwich Academy of Engineering and Artillery is founded

Russian explorer Vitus Bering and his expedition winter on Bering Island, off Kamchatka. They suffer from hunger and attacks by arctic foxes. In revenge, Bering’s men torture the captured foxes, blinding them, and cutting off their tails, before releasing them as a warning to the other foxes. Bering himself will die on the island.

John Harrison completes the H-2 (sea-clock)

Benjamin Huntsman in Sheffield, UK, rediscovers crucible steel (it had already been invented by the Indians, wootz steel, 2000 years earlier); the invention causes a real revolution: in one year 200 tons of stainless steel will be produced, in 1840 the production was already 80,000 tons per year.

Vitus Y.Bering explores Kamchatka

Frederick the Great ascends the throne in Prussia

Ludovico Antonio Muratori discovered the so-called Muratorian Canon at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, the oldest known document containing the four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

The Bourbons on the throne of Naples.

Swiss scientist Daniel Bernoulli understood that the Utility function has a logarithmic relationship with the Wealth function. Bernoulli therefore recognized the relative value of utility, which decreases as the wealth at stake increases. He also recognized risk aversion, meaning we are willing to pay more than we (statistically) should for certain utility. Two centuries later, with von Neumann and Mongenstern and then with Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, it would be proven that we also have the hope of large gains, for which we are willing to pay more than we should. Insurance and pension systems profit from the first flaw (of System 2 according to Kahneman and Tversky’s nomenclature), while lotteries profit from the second.

First railway in White Haven (UK), horse-drawn

In his treatise Hydrodynamica, Daniel Bernoulli formulated Bernoulli’s Principle and founded the mathematical study of fluids and the Kinetic Theory of Gases.

Nis, between Belgrade and Istanbul, is captured by the Habsburg army. This is the only real success in the war with the Ottomans of 1737–1739. The Ottomans will retake it in October of the same year.

War of Ottoman aggression against Habsburg Austria.

Luigi Galvani uses the nerves of a frog to demonstrate the electrical nature of animal motion

Benjamin Franklin

Tsunami on Sado Island, Japan, with a 90m high wave

A hurricane in the Indian Ocean triggers a tidal wave, killing 350,000 people in Bangladesh.

The Board of Longitude meets for the first time (23 years after its creation by the Longitude Act, as no viable proposal had previously been presented) to consider John Harrison’s idea

Harrison’s H-1 clock makes its first sea voyage aboard the Centurion, sailing from England to Lisbon and back. John Harrison’s clock undergoes its first sea trial. This solves the problem of calculating longitude, which plagued navies around the world. Latitude can be measured with the Pole Star (in the Northern Hemisphere), but to calculate longitude, one must know the precise time due to the Earth’s rotation (or use alternative methods, as proposed by Galileo). There’s a wonderful little book by Dava Sobel on the subject. The simple clockmaker John Harrison defeats seemingly more advanced technologies on a subject even Newton and Galileo had explored. The problem was particularly acute among navies. The H-4 clock (the fourth version) was tested with great success by Captain James Cook on the 1772-1775 voyage.

Prince Eugene of Savoy, hero of the Habsburg wars against the Ottomans, dies. His importance is summed up in a New York Times headline in the final week of World War I, following the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire: “AUSTRIA’S WARS IN 300 YEARS. Defeated except when Prince Eugene of Savoy commanded.”

Euler, with his publication “Mechanics,” for the first time applied mathematical analysis in a comprehensive manner to interpret the geometric language adopted by Newton in the Principia. A modern version was created in 1983 by Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar.

Euler publishes Mechanics, a treatise that, for the first time, systematically treats the geometric language adopted by Newton in the Principia, translating it into analytical terms (mathematical analysis). Leibniz had already begun the work in 1689, and only Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar completed a modern exposition, in 1983, in his “Newton’s Principia for the General Reader” (although what he means by “general reader” is certainly not what the general reader means…).

Girolamo Saccheri aspired to free Euclidean geometry from every flaw: he attempted to prove the fifth postulate; at the end of this attempt he published “Euclides ab omni naevo vindicatus” (Euclid emended from every flaw); without knowing it, I had discovered hyperbolic geometry.

George Washington was born in Westmoreland County, Virginia, and before becoming a legend of the American nation, he was privately educated by his father, Augustine, and his older half-brother, Lawrence. A stubborn critic of England’s policies, during the Continental Congress he was appointed Commander of the Continental Army in the war against the hated overseas power, proving himself a great general and managing to transform inexperienced colonists into bold soldiers.

The Swede Carl Linne’ (born in Rashult, in the Skona region, in southern Sweden, son of a Protestant priest) begins to produce catalogs of animal and plant species; gradually his hunger grows.

Antonio Vallisneri (Trassilico, May 3, 1661 – Padua, January 18, 1730) died in Padua. He is known for being one of the first medical researchers to propose abandoning Aristotelian theory in favor of an experimental approach based on the scientific principles advocated by Galileo Galilei. Vallisneri argued that scientific knowledge is acquired through experience and reasoning. This is the principle he followed in his anatomical sections and descriptions of insects. For this reason, his medical career was at the center of a thorny controversy, as many of his contemporaries could not abandon the medieval theories then dominant, even in the face of experimental evidence.

Johann Lambert and the Italian Jesuit and mathematician Giovanni Sacchetti first conceived of non-Euclidean geometry, later developed in detail by Riemann, Gauss, Bolyai, and Lobachevsky in the early 19th century. This would later form the basis of Schwarzschild’s insight, which in 1900 proposed that the geometry of the universe is not flat according to Euclid, but curved according to non-Euclidean geometries.

Ibrahim Muteferrika introduces printing to the Ottoman world. Ibrahim Muteferrika is an Ottoman officer born in Transylvania, a Christian. He will present Sultan Mahmud I with his treatise, “Rational Foundations of the Politics of Nations,” in which he analyzes the causes of Ottoman backwardness, pointing to laws and rules conceived by reason and the technological-military divide.

Brazil. The Portuguese brought coffee cultivation to the country (coffee originally from the Horn of Africa). During the same period, the English cultivated tea (originally from China) in India, and cocoa (originally from Central and South America) in Africa.

At Isaac Newton’s funeral, the coffin is carried by two dukes, three earls, and the Lord Chancellor himself. Voltaire, a Frenchman, is also present, astonished by the veneration accorded to a man of science of humble birth. He writes: “I have seen a professor of mathematics, simply because he was particularly good at his profession, buried like a king who had provided for the well-being of his subjects.” The body is laid to rest for four days at Westminster Abbey. In the West, science and government have formed an alliance. This will make the difference.

Isaac Newton is buried in Westminster Abbey, where Charles Darwin, James Clerk Maxwell, and Michael Faraday also rest. Isaac Newton died of gout and lung inflammation. At Isaac Newton’s funeral, Voltaire reported: “I saw a professor of mathematics, simply because he was particularly good at his profession, buried like a king who had provided for the well-being of his subjects.” In the West, science and government have formed an alliance. This will make the difference.

Isaac Newton dies of gout and lung inflammation

The first public telling of the tale of the apple falling to the ground, which inspired Isaac Newton to develop the theory of gravitation. Voltaire recounts the story in his Essay on Epic Poetry. Voltaire relies on a firsthand account from Catherine Barton. Another similar account will be provided by William Stickeley in 1726.

Isaac Newton, shortly before his death, summed up his life thus: “What the world will think of me I know not. I seem to myself to have been only a boy playing on the sea-shore, amusing himself with finding, now and then, a pebble a little smoother, or a shell a little prettier than usual, while the great ocean of truth lay undiscovered before him.” NB: Regarding the date of Newton’s death: during his lifetime, two calendars were in use in Europe: the Julian calendar (“Old Style”) in Protestant and Orthodox regions, including Great Britain; and the Gregorian calendar (“New Style”) in Roman Catholic Europe. At Newton’s birth, Gregorian dates were 10 days ahead of Julian dates: so his birth is recorded as December 25, 1642, Old Style, but can be converted to a New Style (modern) date of January 4, 1643. By his death, the difference between the calendars had increased to 11 days. Furthermore, he died just after the start of the New Style year on January 1, but before the start of the Old Style new year on March 25. His death occurred on March 20, 1726, according to the Old Style calendar, but the year is usually adjusted to 1727. A full conversion to the New Style gives the date March 31, 1727.

Johann Heinrich Schulze of Magdeburg created photographic images of words by placing paper masks on the surface of a bottle containing chalk, aqua regia, and silver. However, despite the centuries-long use of the camera obscura among painters for the accurate representation of landscapes, photography would not be invented until much later. Joseph Nicephore Niepce used silver chloride for his original images, and Louis Daguerre used silver plates sensitized with iodine vapor.

One of the first (the third known) pianos is built. It is now in Leipzig. The first was made by Bartolomeo Cristofori in 1720 and is now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The second is in Rome and dates back to 1722.

Third Edition of Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica

James Bradley discovers stellar aberration: the position of a star appears to be slightly different in different seasons due to the Earth’s revolution around the Sun.

Immanuel Kant’s hypothesis (in 1755) on the formation of the celestial system as the vortical motion of a primitive nebula seems to have been anticipated by Isaac Newton, who spoke about it to Conduit on 7 March 1725. When the latter asked him why he had not published it, Newton replied that he did not deal with conjectures.

Peter the Great dies. Upon the death of Peter the Great, Emperor of Russia, his wife Catherine ascended the throne. Peter’s reign, having become sole tsar in 1696, was marked by a series of far-reaching military, political, economic, and cultural reforms based on Western models. Major victories against Persia and the Ottoman Empire greatly expanded his empire, and the defeat of Sweden in the Great Northern War secured Russia direct access to the Baltic Sea. Here, Peter founded the new capital, Saint Petersburg, marking Russia’s entry into the ranks of the great European powers—politically, culturally, and geographically. In 1721, Peter replaced the traditional Russian title of tsar with the more European title of emperor. He died four years later.

Tsar Peter the Great dies

Jubilee celebrated by Benedict XIII

The German (Prussian) philosopher Immanuel Kant was born in Konigsberg, East Prussia.

Delft, Netherlands. Scientist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, the father of microbiology, dies at the age of 90. He will be buried three days later in the local Oude Kerk.

Peace of Nystadt, the Northern War ends: Russia replaces Sweden as the great Baltic power; the Holy Roman Empire extends from Trieste to Dunkirk to Danzig.

Ottoman ambassador Yirmisekiz Celebi Mehmed is sent to Paris to seize Western military advantages. Celebi returns with words of enthusiasm for Western technology, but these principles fall on deaf ears.

England. Tea imports from India amount to one million pounds annually. In 1678, they were 4,700 pounds annually. Tea replaced coffee for the English, who were pioneers in coffee consumption. This is because tea comes from British India, while coffee has been banned from the English since the Peace of Breda.