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A connection

How did Water Purification lead to The World Wide Web?

8 steps · 7 domains · 3,989 years

  1. Water Purification~2,000 BC (recorded practice) · 2,000 BCMaking water safe to drink by killing the invisible organisms in it — usually just by boiling — the cheapest life-saving act there is.
  2. 有赖于它的是—— 使之可造 ↑
    Control of Fire~1,000,000 BC · 1,000,000 BCThe ability to keep, feed, and eventually start a fire at will — humanity's first external source of energy.
  3. 使之可造 ↓

    Distillation lives or dies on gentle, steady heat — hot enough to boil the light fraction, never so hot it boils everything at once.

    Distillation~800 AD (alembic systematized in the Islamic world) · 800 ADBoiling a mixture and catching the vapor, so that the parts that boil easiest come off first and condense back to a purer liquid. Separation by temperature — it makes nothing new, it only sorts.
  4. 有赖于它的是—— 使之可能 ↑

    Clear glass lets the distiller watch the boil and condensation and resists the acids and hot vapors that corrode metal and clay.

    Glass~1,500 BC (vessels) · 1,500 BCSand melted with a flux of soda or plant ash until it fuses into a transparent solid — shapeable while hot, rigid and chemically inert forever after.
  5. 使之可能 ↓
    Lenses~1286 AD (spectacles) · 1286 ADGlass ground into curved surfaces that bend light to a focus — correcting aging eyes, and, stacked in tubes, revealing worlds too far or too small to see at all.
  6. 使之可造 ↓
    Photolithography1957 AD · 1957 ADPrinting with light: project a circuit pattern onto a light-sensitive coating on a silicon wafer, so billions of microscopic transistors can be made in a single exposure.
  7. 使之可造 ↓
    Integrated Circuit1959 AD · 1959 ADAn entire circuit — transistors, resistors, wiring — manufactured as one piece on a single sliver of silicon.
  8. 使之可能 ↓
    The Internet1969–1983 AD · 1983 ADA network of networks with no center: any computer can reach any other by passing packets through whoever is in between.
  9. 使之可能 ↓

    The web is one application among many running over the internet's packet-carrying network; it borrows the internet's global reach and adds a layer of linked documents on top.

    The World Wide Web1989 AD (Berners-Lee's proposal) · 1989 ADA system of documents that live anywhere on the internet, each reachable by a universal address and able to link directly to any other. It is not the internet itself but an application running on top of it — hypertext, made global by three simple conventions: addresses (URLs), a transfer protocol (HTTP), and a markup language (HTML).
see it on the maptrace your own connection

Every link in this chain is a verified dependency — not a trivia association. Explore either end: Water Purification or The World Wide Web.