Timeline of Indian innovation

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Timeline of Indian innovation encompasses key events in the history of technology in the subcontinent historically referred to as India and the modern Indian state.

The entries in this timeline fall into the following categories:

This timeline examines scientific and medical discoveries, products and technologies introduced by various peoples of India. Inventions are regarded as technological firsts developed in India, and as such does not include foreign technologies which India acquired through contact.

7000 BCE

• Indus Valley civilization (IVC) has yielded evidence of dentistry being practised as far back as 7000 BC. An IVC site in Mehrgarh indicates that this form of dentistry involved curing tooth related disorders with bow drills
  operated, perhaps, by skilled bead crafters.

• Ayurveda: Ayurveda is a system of medicine with historical roots in the Indian subcontinent. The origins of Ayurveda have been traced back to around 5,000 BCE, when they originated as an oral tradition.

3100 BCE

• Indus Valley civilization (3300–1900 BCE) and pre-Vedic Eastern states of India, the Vedic period (1500–500 BCE), and the śramaṇa
  movement.

• Ancient
  sewage system. See also Sanitation of the Indus Valley Civilisation
  .
• Penner, Krishna and Godavari
  . Diamonds have been known in India for at least 3,000 years but most likely 6,000 years.
• Mohenjodaro in Pakistan. The three features of stepwells in the subcontinent are evident from one particular site, abandoned by 2500 BCE, which combines a bathing pool, steps leading down to water, and figures of some religious importance into one structure. The early centuries immediately before the common era saw the Buddhists and the Jains of India adapt the stepwells into their architecture. Both the wells and the form of ritual bathing reached other parts of the world with Buddhism. Rock-cut step wells in the subcontinent date from 200 to 400 CE. Subsequently, the wells at Dhank (550-625 CE) and stepped ponds at Bhinmal
  (850-950 CE) were constructed.

• millimeters. Ian Whitelaw (2007) holds that 'The Mohenjo-Daro ruler is divided into units corresponding to 1.32 inches (33.5 mm) and these are marked out in decimal subdivisions with amazing accuracy—to within 0.005 of an inch. They correspond closely with the "hasta" increments of 1 3/8 inches traditionally used in South India in ancient architecture. Ancient bricks found throughout the region have dimensions that correspond to these units.' Shigeo Iwata (2008) further writes 'The minimum division of graduation found in the segment of an ivory-made linear measure excavated in Lothal was 1.79 mm (that corresponds to 1/940 of a fathom), while that of the fragment of a shell-made one from Mohenjo-daro was 6.72 mm (1/250 of a fathom), and that of bronze-made one from Harapa was 9.33 mm (1/180 of a fathom).' The weights and measures of the Indus civilization also reached Persia and Central Asia
  , where they were further modified.
• Weighing scale: The earliest evidence for the existence of weighing scale dates to 2400 BC-1800 BC in the Indus valley civilization prior to which no banking was performed due to lack of scales.

700 BCE

• Apastamba Sulba Sutra (c. 600 BC) contains a numerical proof of the general Pythagorean theorem, using an area computation. Van der Waerden believed that "it was certainly based on earlier traditions". Carl Boyer states that the Pythagorean theorem in Śulba-sũtram
  may have been influenced by ancient Mesopotamian math, but there is no conclusive evidence in favor or opposition of this possibility.

• Charak were translated into Arabic language during the Abbasid Caliphate (750 CE). These translated Arabic works made their way into Europe via intermediaries. In Italy, the Branca family of Sicily
  and Gaspare Tagliacozzi of Bologna became familiar with the techniques of Sushruta.

• alphabet that are valid according to the language's syntax. A grammar does not describe the meaning of the strings
  or what can be done with them in whatever context—only their form.
• Guru of Sikhism, made references to soapberry tree and soap in the 16th century.^[6]

• Carvaka schools of atomism date back to the 4th century BCE. The Nyaya and Vaisheshika
  schools later developed theories on how atoms combined into more complex objects.

• Crucible steel: Perhaps as early as 300 BC—although certainly by 200 BC—high quality steel was being produced in southern India, by what Europeans would later call the crucible technique. In this system, high-purity wrought iron, charcoal, and glass were mixed in a crucible and heated until the iron melted and absorbed the carbon.

100

• Arabic numeral
  system. It was developed in the Indian subcontinent between the 1st and 6th centuries CE.

200

• Cataract surgery: Cataract surgery was known to the Indian physician Sushruta (3rd century CE). In India, cataract surgery was performed with a special tool called the Jabamukhi Salaka, a curved needle used to loosen the lens and push the cataract out of the field of vision. The eye would later be soaked with warm butter and then bandaged. Though this method was successful, Susruta cautioned that cataract surgery should only:. Greek philosophers and scientists traveled to India where these surgeries were performed by physicians. The removal of cataract by surgery was also introduced into China from India.
• Sugar: First ever sugar granules appear in gupta empire from where the technology spread

500

• Zero, symbol: Indians were the first to use the zero as a symbol and in arithmetic operations, although Babylonians used zero to signify the 'absent'. In those earlier times a blank space was used to denote zero, later when it created confusion a dot was used to denote zero (could be found in Bakhshali manuscript). In 500 AD circa Aryabhata
  again gave a new symbol for zero (0).

• Brahmagupta formula, Brahmagupta matrix, and Brahmagupta theorem
  : Discovered by the Indian mathematician, Brahmagupta (598–668 CE).
• cube roots
  .
• Arabian empire. Muslims carried Shatranj to North Africa, Sicily
  , and Spain by the 10th century where it took its final modern form of chess.
• Mughal emperors of India; a notable example being that of Akbar, who played living Pachisi using girls from his harem
  . A variant of this game, called Luodo, made its way to England during the British Raj.
• Spinning wheel: Invented in India between 500 and 1000 A.D.
• Finite Difference Interpolation: The Indian mathematician Brahmagupta presented what is possibly the first instance of finite difference interpolation around 665 CE.
• Varahamihira and in the 10th century by Halayudha, commenting on an obscure reference by Pingala
  (the author of an earlier work on prosody) to the "Meru-prastaara", or the "Staircase of Mount Meru", in relation to binomial coefficients. (It was also independently discovered in the 10th or 11th century in Persia and China.)

• Fibonacci numbers: This sequence was first described by Virahanka (c. 700 AD), Gopāla (c. 1135), and Hemachandra (c. 1150), as an outgrowth of the earlier writings on Sanskrit prosody by Pingala
  (c. 200 BC).
• Hindu cosmological time cycles explained in the Surya Siddhanta
  (700 BCE-600 CE), give the average length of the sidereal year (the length of the Earth's revolution around the Sun) as 365.2563627 days, which is only a negligible 1.4 seconds longer than the modern value of 365.256363004 days. This remains the most accurate estimate for the length of the sidereal year anywhere in the world for over a thousand years.

• Chakravala method: The Chakravala method, a cyclic algorithm to solve indeterminate quadratic equations is commonly attributed to Bhāskara II, (c. 1114 – 1185 CE) although some attribute it to Jayadeva (c. 950~1000 CE). Jayadeva pointed out that Brahmagupta's approach to solving equations of this type would yield infinitely large number of solutions, to which he then described a general method of solving such equations. Jayadeva's method was later refined by Bhāskara II in his Bijaganita treatise to be known as the Chakravala method, chakra (derived from cakraṃ चक्रं) meaning 'wheel' in Sanskrit, relevant to the cyclic nature of the algorithm. With reference to the Chakravala method, E. O. Selenuis held that no European performances at the time of Bhāskara, nor much later, came up to its marvellous height of mathematical complexity.

1300

• arctangent is now attributed to Madhava of Sangamagrama (c. 1340 – 1425) and his Kerala school of astronomy and mathematics. He made use of the series expansion of to obtain an infinite series expression for π. Their rational approximation of the error for the finite sum of their series are of particular interest. They manipulated the error term to derive a faster converging series for π.They used the improved series to derive a rational expression, for π correct up to eleven decimal places, i.e. . Madhava of Sangamagrama and his successors at the Kerala school of astronomy and mathematics used geometric methods to derive large sum approximations for sine, cosine, and arctangent. They found a number of special cases of series later derived by Brook Taylor series
  . They also found the second-order Taylor approximations for these functions, and the third-order Taylor approximation for sine.

• Seamless
  seams, during that era. These Indian metallurgists pioneered the method of lost-wax casting
  in order to produce these globes.

• Prefabricated home and movable structure: The first prefabricated homes and movable structures were invented in 16th-century Mughal India by Akbar. These structures were reported by Arif Qandahari in 1579.

1700

• British East India Company during the Anglo-Mysore Wars. The Mysore rockets of this period were much more advanced than what the British had seen, chiefly because of the use of iron tubes for holding the propellant; this enabled higher thrust and longer range for the missile (up to 2 km range). After Tipu's eventual defeat in the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War and the capture of the Mysore iron rockets, they were influential in British rocket development, inspiring the Congreve rocket, and were soon put into use in the Napoleonic Wars
  .

• Microwave communication: The first public demonstration of microwave transmission was made by Jagadish Chandra Bose, in Calcutta, in 1895, two years before a similar demonstration by Marconi in England, and just a year after Oliver Lodge's commemorative lecture on Radio communication, following Hertz's death.
• Jagdish Chandra Bose announced the development of an "iron-mercury-iron coherer with telephone detector" in a paper presented at the Royal Society, London. He also later received U.S. Patent 755,840, "Detector for electrical disturbances" (1904), for a specific electromagnetic
  receiver.

• Boson: The name boson was coined by Paul Dirac to commemorate the contribution of the Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose. In quantum mechanics, a boson (/ˈboʊsɒn, ˈboʊzɒn/) is a particle that follows Bose–Einstein statistics. Bosons make up one of the two classes of particles, the other being fermions.
• Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman
  , who discovered it in 1928. When a beam of light traverses a dust-free, transparent sample of a chemical compound, a small fraction of the light emerges in directions other than that of the incident (incoming) beam. Most of this scattered light is of unchanged wavelength. A small part, however, has wavelengths different from that of the incident light; its presence is a result of the Raman effect."
• Ramanujan conjecture, Ramanujan prime, Ramanujan–Soldner constant, Ramanujan theta function, Ramanujan's sum, Rogers–Ramanujan identities, Ramanujan's master theorem: Discovered by the Indian mathematician, Srinivasa Ramanujan
  .
• Chandrasekhar limit and Chandrasekhar number: Discovered by and named after Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1983 for his work on stellar structure and stellar evolution.
• Crescograph: The crescograph, a device for measuring growth in plants, was invented in the early 20th century by the Bengali scientist Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose.
• Pseudomonas putida: Indian (Bengali) inventor and microbiologist Ananda Mohan Chakrabarty created a species of man made micro organism to break down crude oil. He genetically engineered a new species of Pseudomonas bacteria ("the oil-eating bacteria") in 1971. United States Supreme Court granted Chakrabarty's invention patent even though it was a living species. The court ruling decreed that Chakrabarty's discovery was "not nature's handiwork, but his own..." The inventor Chakrabarty secured his patent in 1980(see Diamond v. Chakrabarty)
• Yellapragada Subbarow discovered the function of adenosine triphosphate as an energy source in the cell, and developed methotrexate for the treatment of cancer.
• nucleic acids, which carry the genetic code
  of the cell, control the cell's synthesis of proteins.
• Abhyankar's conjecture, Abhyankar's lemma, Abhyankar–Moh theorem: Developed by Shreeram Shankar Abhyankar.
• Saha ionization equation: The Saha equation, derived by the Bengali scientist Meghnad Saha (6 October 1893 – 16 February 1956) in 1920, conceptualizes ionizations in context of stellar atmospheres.
• Basu's theorem: The Basu's theorem, a result of Debabrata Basu (1955) states that any complete sufficient statistic is independent of any ancillary statistic.
• kala azar
  ) and a new disease, post-kalaazar dermal leishmanoid.' Brahmachari's cure for Visceral leishmaniasis was the urea salt of para-amino-phenyl stibnic acid which he called Urea Stibamine. Following the discovery of Urea Stibamine, Visceral leishmaniasis was largely eradicated from the world, except for some underdeveloped regions.
• Penrose-Hawking singularity theorems of general relativity
  .
• USB (Universal Serial Bus), AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port), PCI Express
  , Platform Power management architecture and various chipset improvements.

• Hyderabad-based Microsoft India Development Center at HITEC City
  in India.
• Dehradun, India
  .
• Lunar water: Although the presence of water ice on the Moon has been conjectured by various scientists since the 1960s, inconclusive evidence of free water ice had also been identified the first incontrovertible evidence of water on the Moon was provided by the payload Chace carried by the Moon Impact Probe released by Chandrayaan-1 confirmed and established by NASA.

See also

• History of science and technology in India
• Nalanda University
• List of Indian inventions and discoveries
• Timeline of historic inventions

References