From primitive cave paintings to deciphering the DNA helix, this chronological guide describes the important sketches, plans, and drawings that had profound and dramatic effects on history and the way people viewed the world.

Includes index.

Chauvet cave drawings (c. 30,000 BC) -- Triple spiral (c. 3200 BC) -- Marshall Islands stick navigation charts (c. 2000-500 BC) -- Babylonian "Pythagoras theorem" (c. 1900-1700 BC) -- Phaistos disc (c. 1700 BC) -- Egyptian Book of the Dead (c. 1550-50 BC) -- Sheet music (c. 1400 BC) -- Battering ram (c. 865-860 BC) -- Babylonian map of the world (c. 600 BC) -- Classical orders of architecture (c. 600-100 BC) -- Acupuncture points (c. 305-204 BC) -- Elements of geometry, Euclid (c. 300 BC) -- Rosetta stone (196 BC) -- The Ptolemaic system, Claudius Ptolemy (c. AD 150) -- Porphyrian tree, Porphyry of Tyre (c. AD 300) -- Nazca lines (c. AD 400-650) -- Dunhuang star map (c. AD 649-684) -- Lunar eclipse, Abu Rayhan al-Biruni (1019) -- Heraldry (1127) -- Compendium of the genealogy of Christ, Peter of Poitiers (c. 1230) -- Carta Pisana (chart of Pisa) (c. 1275-1300) -- Optics, Roger Bacon (c. 1267-69) -- Dante's Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri (1308-21) -- Windmill-powered "car"/submarine, Guido da Vigevano (1328) -- Astrarium, Giovanni de 'Dondi (1364) -- The Voynich manuscript (c. 1404-38) -- The castle of perseverance (c. 1405-25) -- Exploded-view diagram, Mariano Taccola (c. 1450) -- Aztec calendar (1479) -- Vitruvian man, Leonardo da Vinci (c. 1487) -- Helicopter and flying machine, Leonardo da Vinci (c. 1493-1505) -- Foetus in the womb, Leonardo da Vinci (c. 1510) -- Triangulation, Regnier Gemma Frisius (1533) -- Astronomicum Caesareum, Petrus Apianus (1540) -- Human body, Andreas Vesalius (1543) -- Heliocentric universe, Nicolas Copernicus (1543) -- Camera obscura, Regnier Gemma Frisius (1544) -- The Four Books of Architecture, Andrea Palladio (1570) -- Flush toilet, John Harington (1596) -- Kepler's law of planetary motion, Johannes Kepler (1609) -- Telescope, Galileo Galilei (1610) -- Moon drawings, Galileo Galilei (1610) -- Movement of objects, René Descartes (1644) -- Pendulum clock, Christiaan Huygens (1657) -- Micrographia, Robert Hooke (1665) -- Prism "crucial experiment", Isaac Newton (1666-72) -- Bacteria, Antony van Leeuwenhoek (1683) -- Steam engine, Thomas Newcomen (1708-12) -- Machine gun, James Puckle (1718) -- Color wheel, Moses Harris (1766) -- A new chart of history, Joseph Priestly (1769) -- Bifocals, Benjamin Franklin (1784) -- Bar chart, William Playfair (1786) -- Line graph, William Playfair (1786) -- Brooks slave ship, Thomas Clarkson (1788) -- Cotton gin, Eli Whitney (1794) -- Phrenology, Franz Joseph Gall (1796) -- Electrical circuit diagram, Alessandro Volta (1800) -- Steam locomotive, George Stephenson (1815) -- Clifton suspension bridge, Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1830) -- Evolutionary tree, Charles Darwin (1837) -- Morse code, Samuel Morse (1840) -- Dinosaur (Megalosaurus), Richard Owen (1854) -- Rose (or polar area) diagram, Florence Nightingale (1858) -- Graded sewing patterns, Ebenezer Butterick (1863) -- Pedal bicycle, Pierre Lallement (1866) -- Periodic table, Dmitri Mendeleev (1869) -- Weather map, Francis Galton (1875) -- Telephone, Alexander Graham Bell (1876) -- Light bulb, Thomas Edison (1880) -- Venn diagrams, John Venn (1880) -- Emoticons, Puck Magazine (1881) -- Treasure Island map, Robert Louis Stevenson (1883) -- Pictogram graphs, Michael George Mulhall (1884) -- Car, Karl Benz (1886) -- Right-hand rule, John Ambrose Fleming (c. 1890) -- Powered plane, Wright Brothers (1903) -- London underground map (1908) -- Spacetime diagrams, Hermann Minkowski (1908) -- Flow chart, Frank Gilbreth and Lillian Moller Gilbreth (1921) -- Id, ego, super-ego, Sigmund Freud (1921-23) -- Television, John Logie Baird (1926) -- Nazi propaganda map, Rupert von Schumacher (1934) -- London A-Z, Phyllis Pearsall (1936) -- Cubism and abstract art, Alfred Barr (1936) -- V2 rocket, German Armed Forces (1942) -- Feynman diagrams, Richard Feynman (1949) -- DNA double helix, James Watson, Francis Crick, and Odile Crick (1953) -- Flat-pack furniture, Gillis Lundgren, IKEA (1956) -- Vostok 1, Sergei Korolev (1961) -- Cuban Missile Crisis, Central Intelligence Agency (1962) -- ARPANET, Bolt, Beranek, and Newman (1969) -- Intel 4004 CPU, Ted Hoff, Stanley Mazor, Masatoshi Shima, Frederico Faggin, Philip Tai, and Wayne Pickette (1971) -- Pioneer plaque, Carl Sagan, Frank Drake, and Linda Salzman Sagan (1972) -- Mobile phone, Martin Cooper/Motorola (1973) -- Apple Computer, Steve Jobs (1980) -- Chernobyl radioactive fallout map (1986) -- World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee (1989) -- iPod, Steve Jobs (2001).