I was browsing the website on the history of the journal Nature and came across their timeline. Scanning through the decades from the 1860s to the present gives an impressive overview of the history of science. Read about the argument over who the first person was to think up using fingerprints to identify criminals in 1880, or the debunking of N-rays (N is for Nancy) in 1904. Some key papers have come from Nature, including the famous paper on the structure of DNA from Watson and Crick in 1953. Explore the timeline and learn more about those early reports of X-rays, nuclear fission, lasers, holography, and isotopes.

The Library has an electronic version of the book A century of nature twenty-one discoveries that changed science and the world that you may be interested in as well.