Time ruler

Pick a year. See the whole world in it.

History is filed by subject, so you meet one thing at a time. But everything that ever happened had something else happening beside it — and the only thing they share is a date.

What 1815 looks like

1815
47 places on the globe · 77 more in the list
JuneWaterloo, and two days earlier Ligny and Quatre Bras — the whole campaign inside a week, a few miles apart.
Sept–JunThe Congress of Vienna, redrawing Europe while the fighting was still going on. Ninety-eight language editions — better known than the battle.
AprMount Tambora erupts in Indonesia. Nobody at Waterloo knew, and it took the following summer away from them.
JanNew Orleans, fought after the war it belonged to had already been ended by a treaty nobody had heard yet.
DecThe Anglo-Nepalese War, still under way at the other end of the world.
Nothing connects these except the year. That turns out to be enough.

Open the globe and pick a year →

Or read it as a page: every year, one page each — from the first recorded battles to last year.

Try it here. This box asks Wikidata directly, so it takes a few seconds and can list a little more than the globe, which answers from its own index.

Try: 18151492791969264 BC1348

How it works

Move the ruler at the bottom of the globe — drag it for a long jump, tap the arrows for a single year, or type the year straight into the field: 1815, or 264 BC. The globe answers as you move. There is no button to press and nothing to wait for.

That is possible because the globe asks nobody. Every dated event lives in a single file the app loads once — 90,705 of them, from 4000 BC to today, forty-eight thousand events and forty-two thousand foundations — and finding the ones that touch a year takes a few thousandths of a second.

Every point opens the Wikipedia article. The colour says what kind of thing it was — war, violence, disaster, accident, politics — in five families rather than thirteen, because thirteen shades on a globe have to be counted and nobody counts colours.

Two kinds of thing

What you see in a year is not all of one sort. Events — battles, sieges, treaties, massacres, earthquakes, shipwrecks — are things that happened, and they are drawn in warm colours by family: war, violence, disaster, politics. Foundations are the year something was built: a castle, a tower, a bridge, a university. Those are cooler and slightly smaller, because they crowd into the same few centuries and should sit beside the events rather than on top of them.

A foundation appears in its year and then is gone — it does not stay lit for the nine centuries the building went on standing. That is a deliberate choice: showing everything that existed in a given year would be a fine thing to see, but it needs dates of destruction, and Wikidata almost never has them. Without those, the twentieth century becomes a crust of everything ever built.

The balance is what it is: in 1150 the world shows seventeen events and two hundred and seventy-four foundations. More was built than was recorded as happening — or at least, more of the building was written down.

An event is a stretch, not a spark

The Thirty Years' War is not a fact about 1618. Every event is stored with a beginning and an end, and it stays on the globe for as long as it was going on — drawn fainter when it started before the year you are looking at, because something still under way is not the same as something that just happened.

It matters most where the record is thin. At 1350 you see five hundred and thirty-three things, and four hundred and fifty of them had begun earlier; counting only what started that year would show eighty-three, and the Middle Ages would look like a handful of sparks.

What it will not do

Where to start

Try a year you already know something about — the one you were born, or one you studied. The interesting part is never the thing you were looking for: it is the two things beside it that nobody mentioned in the same breath.

Open the globe →