Late 16th century – European sailing ships become advanced enough to reliably cross oceans.
17th century
1604 – The world's first recorded overland
Nottingham, England, for the transport of coal.[6][7][8]
1616 - The first recorded mechanical ropeway was by CroatianFausto Veranzio who designed a bicable passenger ropeway
1620 –
Cornelius Drebbel builds the world's first known submarine
, which is propelled by oars (although there are earlier ideas for and depictions of submarines).
1644 - Adam Wybe builds world's first cable car on multiple supports. It was the biggest built until the end of the 19th century.[9]
1655 - Stephan Farffler was a Nuremberg watchmaker of the seventeenth century whose invention of a manumotive carriage in 1655 is widely considered to have been the first self-propelled wheelchair.
1662 – Blaise Pascal invents a horse-drawn public bus which has a regular route, schedule, and fare system.
1822 – Stephenson built a locomotive and designed the railway for Hetton Colliery which is first railway not to use any horse-traction but it did have several rope hauled sections.
1822 – First Meeting of Liverpool Manchester Railway Company Permanent Committee.[17]
1825 - Stephenson's
Stockton & Darlington Railway which opens as first public railway and uses horses and self-propelled steam engines and stationary engines with ropes along a single track. No stations and no timetables as anyone could hire the track to use their own vehicle on it.[18]
1826 – Bill passed for Liverpool and Manchester Railway at second attempt and George Stephenson commences work on 35-mile twin track line permitting simultaneous travel in both directions between the 2 towns. Means of traction not specified to reduce opposition.[19]
Rainhill Trials to find best self-propelled engine for Liverpool Manchester line are won by Robert Stephenson's Rocket proving there is no need for horse traction or static engines on the main line.[21]
Rocket becomes basic formula for all future steam engines with boiler tubes, blast pipe, and the use of coal rather than coke.
1830 – Liverpool and Manchester Railway opens. First public transport system without animal traction, first public line with no rope hauled sections for main journey, first twin track, first railway between 2 large towns, first timetabled trains, first railway stations, first train faster than a mail coach, first tunnels under streets, first proper modern railway which formed the template for all subsequent railways.[22]
1838 – Isambard Kingdom Brunel's SS Great Western, the first purpose-built transatlantic steamship, inaugurates the first regular transatlantic steamship service.
1839 - An early electric boat was developed by the German inventor
Neva River
.
1840s – Railway Mania sweeps UK and Ireland. 6,220 miles (10,010 km) of railway line were built
Gross-Lichterfelde tramway in Lichterfelde near Berlin in Germany built by Werner von Siemens who contacted Pirotsky. It initially drew current from the rails, with overhead wire
being installed in 1883.
1882 - The
Elektromote
" in a Berlin suburb. This experiment continued until 13 June 1882
1883 -
overhead wire
.
1884 - Thomas Parker built a practical production electric car in Wolverhampton using his own specially designed high-capacity rechargeable batteries.
1895 - First motorbus. The first internal combustion omnibus of 1895 (Siegen to Netphen) In Siegerland, Germany, two passenger bus lines ran briefly, but unprofitably, in 1895 using a six-passenger motor carriage developed from the 1893 Benz Viktoria.[34]
A 0 series Shinkansen high-speed rail set in Tokyo, May 1967Concorde 001 first flight in 1969Space shuttle launchC5 enthusiasts gather at the Brooklands MuseumFirst fully low floor tram in Bremen
2022 – A study estimates the air pollution impacts on climate change and the ozone layer from rocket launches and re-entry of reusable components and debris in 2019 and from a theoretical future space industry extrapolated from the "billionaire space race". It concludes that substantial effects from routine space tourism should "motivate regulation".[78][79]
2023 – A study outlines challenges of
CO2 removal to compensate for non-CO2 forcing, and related policy-options. With constant air transport demand and aircraft efficiency, decarbonizing aviation would require nearly five times the 2019 worldwide biofuel production, competing with other hard-to-decarbonize sectors and land-use (or food security).[80]
harms from personal car automobility finds cars have killed 60–80 million people since their invention, with automobility causing roughly every 34th death, and summarises interventions that are ready for implementation to reduce the, largely crash-linked or pollution-mediated, deaths from automobility-centrism and dependency.[83][84]
hydrogen-powered trains debuts in Germany.[90] The state company owning the railway later switches to electric models since they are "cheaper to operate".[91] Two other hydrogen trains have been reported as of 2023: Mireo Plus H by Siemens in Germany (under development) and an urban train by the Railway Rolling Stock Corporation in China.[92]
2023 – The first test-runs of a superconducting maglev test line, called a hyperloop, are carried out in Datong, China (50 km/h of ~1,000 km/h). Hyperloop One conducted the world's first test carrying passengers in pods, reaching a speed of 172 km/h in Los Angeles in 2020, but reportedly abandoned the goal of transporting humans as of 2023.[93]
2023 – A comeback of sleeping trains in Europe is reported as demand for more comfortable travel modes than overnight buses and sustainable transport rises. A new generation of such trains is released.[94][95][96][97]
Autonomous vehicles
Milestones in autonomous sustainable / public transport vehicles are also listed in this section.
2020 - CR400BF-C '
Fuxing Hao', a variant of CR400 Fuxing series, running on Beijing–Zhangjiakou intercity railway is the world first high-speed rail service capable of driverless automation in commercial operations. The specific Grade of Automation (GoA) was not announced.[98][99]
Early 2020s - Multiple electric,
autonomous buses open for public transport – albeit with a local professional driving-assistant – are being launched around the world[100][101] after the first such bus started operating for the general public in a Swiss town in 2018.[102][contradictory
]
2021 – The pilot project of the "world's first
automated, driverless train" is launched in the city of Hamburg, Germany. The conventional, standard-track, non-metro train technology could, according to reports, theoretically be implemented for rail transport worldwide and is reported to also be substantially more energy efficient.[103][104][contradictory
Suriray, "Perfectionnements dans les vélocipèdes" (Improvements in bicycles), French patent no. 86,680, issued: 2 August 1869, Bulletin des lois de la République française (1873), series 12, vol. 6, page 647.
Louis Baudry de Saunier, Histoire générale de la vélocipédie [General history of cycling] (Paris, France: Paul Ollendorff, 1891), pages 62–63.
^C. N. Pyrgidis. Railway Transportation Systems: Design, Construction and Operation. CRC Press, 2016. P. 156
^Ye. N. Petrova. St. Petersburg in Focus: Photographers of the Turn of the Century; in Celebration of the Tercentenary of St. Petersburg. Palace Ed., 2003. P. 12
^Johnston, Ben (12–15 September 2010). "Battery Rail Vehicles". railknowledgebank.com. Archived from the original on 24 October 2020. Retrieved 19 May 2023.
^"Austria rail operator OeBB unveils new night trains". techxplore.com. Retrieved 12 November 2023. Austrian rail operator OeBB on Saturday unveiled its new generation of sleeper trains—a response to demands from travelers for less pollutant alternatives to planes and petrol or diesel cars. Night trains are starting to make a comeback in Europe thanks to their low-carbon footprint…
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