From the first stone tools in East Africa to the World Wide Web, every invention began somewhere. This map puts 115 early innovations, 314 landmark inventions since 1500 and 1,443 inventions from Wikidata back where they came from, and follows the centre of invention as it moved across the world.
Ask where the plough, paper or the telephone came from and you get a story about one place and, often, one clever person. The real history is messier. Farming was invented at least 11 times on five continents, writing at least four times, zero three times. For most of history the busiest workshops of the world were in West Asia and then China. Europe took over only around 1500, and North America in the second half of the twentieth century.
The map below has three layers. Diamonds are the big early innovations, which I placed and dated by hand from nine Wikipedia pages, showing a range or several places wherever the pages do. Squares are the entries since 1500 in Wikipedia's Timeline of historic inventions. Circles are inventions from Wikidata, the open database behind Wikipedia, sized by how many language editions of Wikipedia write about them. Drag the slider through 3.3 million years, press play, filter by kind of invention, and click anything to see how it was placed.
Diamonds: early innovations, placed and dated from the text of nine English Wikipedia pages; a pale ring shows how rough the place is (a region, a country, a continent), outlined diamonds mark innovations that arose independently in several places (click one to list them all), and dotted lines join early finds or candidate places for the same thing. Squares: Timeline of historic inventions, 1500 onwards. Circles: Wikidata inventions with 5 or more sitelinks, sized by sitelinks; solid where Wikidata gives a place of invention, a ring where the point is the inventor's birthplace, faint where it is only the centre of the country of origin. The slider shows everything up to the year chosen, with the most recent stretch brightest; undated Wikidata inventions appear only under All time. Sources: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0), Wikidata (CC0). Outlines and city names: Natural Earth. Base map tiles © Esri.
Take the landmark list (the early innovations up to 1500, then the timeline entries) and work out the average position of everything invented in each period. In the deep past the centre sits in Africa, where the first tools were made. From 10,000 to 5000 BC it moves to West Asia: 44% of innovations in that period and 51% from 5000 to 2000 BC came from the Fertile Crescent, Mesopotamia, Egypt and their neighbours. From AD 1 to 1500, 50% of the landmark inventions are Chinese: paper, woodblock printing, porcelain, the banknote, gunpowder, movable type.
Where the landmark inventions came from, by period
Share of each period's early innovations (before 1500) and Wikipedia timeline entries (from 1500) by world region, present-day borders. Rows the page gives as alternatives share one count. Hover for numbers.
Then the centre jumps. From 1500 to 1700 every landmark on the list is European, and Europe still holds 77% of them from 1850 to 1900. North America's share grows from 21% in that half-century to 55% from 1950 to 2000, the first period in which it leads. East Asia comes back too, but more slowly than the story you may have heard: 12% of the list from 1950 to 2000. Wikidata, counted the same way, tells the same story: 96% European from 1800 to 1850, and North America ahead from 1950 (45%, to Europe's 40%).
The path of the centre of invention
Average latitude and longitude of each period's landmark inventions, numbered as on the map. A centre can fall in the sea or a desert where nothing was invented: it is a balance point, not a place.
Both lists speed up enormously. Wikidata has 177 dated inventions from the nineteenth century and 282 from the twentieth, but only 34 from before 1500. Some of that is real acceleration; some is that recent inventions are better documented and have named inventors to hang them on.
Inventions per century, 1000 BC to the present
Landmark list (early innovations, then timeline entries) and dated Wikidata inventions. The 21st century is 2000 to 2026 only. Hover for numbers.
The early pages are clear that some of the biggest innovations were not passed from one people to the next but arose separately. Farming is the great example: the Neolithic Revolution page lists centres from the Fertile Crescent and the Yangtze to the New Guinea Highlands, the Andes, the Ethiopian highlands, the Sahel and West Africa, and eastern North America. Click a card to see the places on the map.
The pages also hedge where the evidence is thin. Glass was made first "in either Mesopotamia or Ancient Egypt", coins in "Phoenicia or Lydia", the water clock in Babylonia or perhaps the Indus Valley. The map shows each candidate, and in the analysis they share one count. Where a page lists several early finds, as with the wheel (clay models by the Black Sea, wagon pictures at Uruk and Bronocice, ruts in Germany and the Ljubljana Marshes wheel), all are shown and none is crowned.
Group every Wikidata invention whose point is a place of its own (where it was made, or the inventor's birthplace) by the nearest city within 25 km, and London comes first with 47, then New York (37), Paris (27) and Vienna (16). Most of these are birthplaces: 39 of London's 47 are people born there, from Charles Babbage to Tim Berners-Lee. So this is as much a map of where inventors were born as of where things were invented.
Cities with the most Wikidata inventions
Points within 25 km of a Natural Earth city of 150,000 people or more. Dark: inventor born here; light: invented or discovered here. Click a bar to zoom the map.
Read the Wikidata layer with care. Of its 1,021 mapped inventions, 91% are in Europe or North America, where 14% of the world's people live today. Sub-Saharan Africa has 4 and South Asia 8. That is not because nothing was invented there. Wikidata, like English Wikipedia, was written mostly by Europeans and Americans about things they knew, and it frames invention as the work of a named individual with a patent and a birthplace: 83% of its inventions have a named inventor, and 93% of those on the map are placed by that person's birthplace. The early innovations, by contrast, mostly have no inventor at all: they were made by peoples, not persons.
Share of mapped inventions and share of today's people, by region
Wikidata inventions with a point (1,021), the Wikipedia timeline since 1500 (305), and present-day population (Natural Earth estimates). Present-day population is only a rough yardstick for the past.
The individual-credit habit throws up oddities. Wikidata names one inventor for the car, the Flemish Jesuit Ferdinand Verbiest, who built a small steam vehicle in China, so the car's dot sits on his birthplace in Belgium. It credits gunpowder, which the Wikipedia timeline dates to ninth-century China, to Berthold Schwarz, a legendary German monk. And 421 of its 1,443 inventions have no place at all, while only 40% have a date. I have left these as Wikidata records them and flagged how every point was placed.
Farming was invented at least 11 times. Wikidata knows 4 inventions from sub-Saharan Africa.
Early innovations. I read nine English Wikipedia pages (Timeline of historic inventions, Timeline of prehistory, Neolithic Revolution, Domestication, History of writing, Wheel, Bronze Age, List of Indian inventions and discoveries, Islamic Golden Age) and wrote down 155 rows for 115 innovations, each with its date or date range and place exactly as the page gives them and the passage it rests on; a script checks every passage against the saved page text. The coordinates are mine and rough: a site, the middle of a region, the middle of a country, or a continent, shown with a matching ring. Where a page gives several places I kept them all and labelled them as independent origins, alternatives, or early finds. Control of fire has no place in the page and is shown, with a wide ring, in Africa, where the page puts the period's other tools.
The timeline since 1500. The 314 dated entries from 1500 onwards in the Timeline of historic inventions, placed by a place the entry names, by matching a person it names to a Wikidata inventor's birthplace, or, for 120 entries (38%) that do neither, by hand at the centre of the country where the named inventor or company did the work. Those hand placements come from general knowledge, not the page, and are flagged.
Wikidata. A query returned 24,186 items that have an inventor or discoverer (P61) or a time of invention or discovery (P575). Most are not inventions: islands, comets, theorems, artworks, minerals, diseases. I kept items whose class is a kind of technology (machine, vehicle, weapon, instrument, medicine, software, writing system, material...) or, for items with no class, whose name is a technology word, then read through the better-known ones by hand: 2,334 survive, 1,443 with 5 or more sitelinks. Each is placed at its location of invention or discovery (P189, P1071) if it has one (52), else its first-listed inventor's birthplace (949), else the centre of its country of origin (21). Discoveries (the electron, radioactivity) and foods and dishes are left out; some borderline items will be wrong either way.
The centre of invention is the average latitude and longitude of the period's points, each counted once (alternatives share a count). It is a summary of a curated list, not a census, and the list's own choices (what counts as "historic", who wrote it) shape the result as much as history does.