1798 — Thomas Malthus publishes An Essay on the Principle of Population. Full first-edition text, Electronic Scholarly Publishing Project
1859 — Charles Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species. First-edition facsimile, Darwin Online
1869 — Francis Galton publishes Hereditary Genius. Full text, Galton.org archive
1883 — Galton coins the term "eugenics" in Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development. Full text (1883 first edition), Galton.org
1905 — Alfred Binet (with Théodore Simon) publishes the first practical intelligence-testing scale in France. Binet & Simon, "New Methods for the Diagnosis of the Intellectual Level of Subnormals," trans. text, Classics in the History of Psychology
1910 — The Eugenics Record Office is founded at Cold Spring Harbor, NY, institutionalizing American eugenics research. Eugenics Record Office records finding aid, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Library & Archives — see also the Eugenics Archive image/document collection, DNA Learning Center
1916 — Lewis Terman publishes the Stanford-Binet revision, The Measurement of Intelligence. Full scanned text, Internet Archive
1917–18 — U.S. Army Alpha/Beta tests administered to WWI recruits under Robert Yerkes. Yerkes, Psychological Examining in the United States Army (1921), full text, Internet Archive
1924 — U.S. Immigration Act (Johnson–Reed Act) imposes national-origin quotas informed by eugenic testimony before Congress. Statute text, 43 Stat. 153, U.S. Statutes at Large via Library of Congress
1927 — U.S. Supreme Court decides Buck v. Bell, upholding compulsory sterilization, 8–1. Full opinion text, Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center
1936 — Alan Turing publishes "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem," describing the universal Turing machine. Full paper PDF
1937 — The Pioneer Fund is incorporated in New York. Organizational profile and incorporation history, Southern Poverty Law Center Extremist Files
1939–45 — World War II; Nazi Germany's racial-hygiene and genocide programs; Turing's wartime codebreaking at Bletchley Park; Wiener's anti-aircraft predictor work. Bletchley Park official wartime history archive
1942 — Turing and colleagues extend codebreaking to the German Naval Enigma. Bletchley Park: Naval Enigma history
1946–53 — The Macy Conferences on Cybernetics convene. Conference history and transcript index, American Society for Cybernetics
1948 — Claude Shannon publishes "A Mathematical Theory of Communication." Full paper PDF, Bell System Technical Journal · Norbert Wiener publishes Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Publisher record, MIT Press
1950 — Turing publishes "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" in Mind. Full paper, Oxford Academic · Wiener publishes The Human Use of Human Beings. Full scanned text, Internet Archive
1952 — Turing is prosecuted for "gross indecency" (homosexuality) under UK law. Case background and archival records, UK National Archives education resource
1954 — Turing dies. Turing Digital Archive, King's College Cambridge — personal and inquest-related papers · 2013 Royal Pardon, UK Government official announcement
1955 — McCarthy, Minsky, Rochester, and Shannon draft the Dartmouth proposal, coining "artificial intelligence." Full proposal text PDF, Stanford/John McCarthy archive
1956 — The Dartmouth Summer Research Project convenes. Dartmouth Conference archival materials, Computer History Museum · William Shockley founds Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Mountain View. Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory history, Computer History Museum
1957 — The "Traitorous Eight" leave Shockley Semiconductor to found Fairchild Semiconductor. Fairchild Semiconductor founding history, Computer History Museum
1965–72 — Shockley begins publicly advocating dysgenic and race-science positions. William B. Shockley Papers finding aid (correspondence, speeches, articles), Stanford University Libraries Special Collections
1968 — Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore found Intel. Official company history, Intel Corporation
1969 — Minsky and Papert publish Perceptrons. Publisher record, MIT Press
1973 — The Lighthill Report criticizes AI research progress in the UK, precipitating funding cuts and the first "AI winter." Full report text, Chilton Computing archive
1989 — The UK Eugenics Society renames itself the Galton Institute. Institutional history, The Galton Institute
1994 — Herrnstein and Murray publish The Bell Curve. Full scanned text, Internet Archive
2010 — DeepMind Technologies Ltd is incorporated in London. UK company incorporation record, Companies House
2012 — Krizhevsky, Sutskever, and Hinton's "AlexNet" wins the ImageNet competition, reigniting deep-learning research. Original paper, NeurIPS Proceedings
2014 — Google acquires DeepMind. Official Google acquisition announcement · Nick Bostrom publishes Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. Publisher record, Oxford University Press
2015 — OpenAI is founded as a nonprofit. Original founding announcement, OpenAI
2017 — Vaswani et al. publish "Attention Is All You Need," introducing the transformer architecture. Full paper, arXiv · Google employees circulate an open letter protesting Project Maven. Open letter text as published by the New York Times
2018 — Google lets its Project Maven contract lapse and publishes its AI Principles. Official AI Principles, Google
2019 — OpenAI restructures, creating a "capped-profit" subsidiary. Official structural announcement, OpenAI
2020 — Timnit Gebru's departure from Google, following internal conflict over the "Stochastic Parrots" paper, draws international attention. Gebru's own account of her termination email, republished via Platformer — instructors should also assign Google's public response for balance.
2020 — UCL announces the renaming of buildings and lecture theatres associated with Galton and Pearson following an institutional inquiry into UCL's eugenics history. Official UCL Provost statement
2021 — Bender, Gebru, McMillan-Major, and "Shmargaret Shmitchell" publish "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots." Full paper, ACM Digital Library · Anthropic is founded. Official company page · Kate Crawford publishes Atlas of AI. Publisher record, Yale University Press
2021 — DAIR (Distributed AI Research Institute) is founded by Timnit Gebru. Official institute page
2022 — OpenAI releases ChatGPT (November 30). Original release announcement, OpenAI · Kenyan Facebook content moderators, organized with the NGO Foxglove, file suit against Meta and Sama in Kenyan court. Case background and filings, Foxglove
2023 — TIME publishes Billy Perrigo's investigation into Kenyan OpenAI data labelers. Full article, TIME · OpenAI's board removes and then reinstates CEO Sam Altman (November). Official OpenAI statement announcing the leadership transition · The EU reaches political agreement on the AI Act. Official Council of the EU press release
2023 — Google Brain and DeepMind merge to form Google DeepMind. Official Google announcement
2024 — Torres and Gebru publish "The TESCREAL Bundle." Full paper, First Monday · Microsoft signs a 20-year power purchase agreement with Constellation Energy tied to the restart of Three Mile Island Unit 1 for AI data-center demand. Official joint announcement, Constellation Energy
2025 — Bender and Hanna publish The AI Con. Book site with excerpts and sourcing · Sophia Goodfriend joins Pembroke College, Cambridge, as Harry Frank Guggenheim Research Fellow. Official Pembroke College announcement
2026 — Ongoing debates over AI energy demand, military AI contracting, and frontier-lab governance continue into the current term. Instructors should replace this entry each year with
