700th anniversary : for the year 1311

■ portolan chart (compass chart, or rhumb chart); creat- ed by Petrus Vesconte at Genoa to help navigators to find safe harbors and by some accounts marks the beginning of professional cartography. Drawn on vellum and embellished with decorations, the chart has rhumb lines that radiate from the center in the direction of wind or compass points.

■ Notre-Dame Cathedral at Reims is completed after 99 years of construction on the site where Clovis was reput- edly baptized in 496. The cathedral is a masterpiece of Gothic architecture.

500th anniversary : for the year 1511

■ watches, mentioned for the first time in print in the Nuremberg Chronicles, had hour hands but no minute.

■ the first description of corn (maize) by Peter Martyr, which he has heard about from the late Christopher Columbus.

400th anniversary : for the year 1611

■ patent for coke: the first British patent in which coal is used instead of charcoal for smelting iron, obtained by Simon Sturtevant, ironmaker from Lincolnshire. However, the process did not become commercially successful for another hundred years.

■ astronomical telescope with an inverting refractor, described in Dioptrice by Johann Kepler, Imperial Mathema- tician, Prague, Bohemia.

■ the authorized (King James) version of the Bible is published for the Church of England after 7 years of effort by a committee of some 50 men; a masterpiece of the English language that will appear in countless editions over the next 4 centuries, with more than 7 billion copies sold.

350th anniversary : for the year 1661

■ manometer invented by Christiaan Huygens, Nether- lands, "for measuring the elasticity of gases".

■ bank notes issued by the Bank of Stockholm, Sweden.

300th anniversary : for the year 1711

■ tuning fork, by John Shore, Sergent Trumpeter to the Court of Queen Anne of England and lutenist at the Chapel Royal.

250th anniversary : for the year 1761

■ marine chronometer (pocket watch size) by John Harrison Yorkshire carpenter, undergoes its first real sea trial during a voyage to Jamaica to test whether Harrison's method can be used to find the longitude at sea; it lost 5 seconds during 81 days at sea.

■ scissors and shears, mass-produced in cast steel, by Robert Hinchliffe of Sheffield, England.

■ pencils, mass-produced by German carpenter Kaspar Faber at Stein, near Nuremberg, to launch a family compa- ny that will continue into the 21st century.

■ synthetic dyes, manufacturing of which was initiated in England by A.W. Hofman and W.H. Perkin, were greatly enriched when Hofmann showed that magenta could be the parent of a whole series of violet dyes.

200th anniversary : for the year 1811

■ paper money as currency adopted in Britain May 10 to ease an economic A bullion report issued by government economists establishes the intrinsic-value theory of money: bank notes may be a useful medium of exchange, but the notes must bear a definite ratio to the amount of coin and bullion in the vaults.

■ New York adopts a Commissioners' Plan marking off future Manhattan streets and avenues in a grid pattern. The plan provides for 12 numbered avenues, exten- ding to the north. The 155 numbered cross streets, exten- ding from the North (Hudson) River to the East River, are to be 60 feet wide, except for 14th, 23rd, 34th, 42nd, 57th, 72nd, and 86th, which are to be 100 feet wide.

■ The Russian ambassador to Paris Prince Aleksandr Borosovich Kurakin, 35, introduces the practice of serving meals in courses (à la Russe) instead of placing many dishes on the table at once.

150th anniversary : for the year 1761

■ bicycle propelled by pedals attached to the front wheel and used as cranks, introduced in France by Pierre Michaux. This version of the bicycle was often called the boneshaker in English since it had no springs and, at first, used steel tires.

■ James Clerk Maxwell, assisted by photographer Thomas Sutton, demonstrates in London the first color reproduc- tion using a photographic process, projecting three separate images of the Scottish flag taken through red, green, and violet filters and matching them to form a single picture, using light of the same three colors to produce the color image.

■ roller mills come into use in Britain; refined wheat flour without wheat germ will become the dietary staple by the 1870s, and not just among the rich.

■ pneumatic drill, by Germain Sommelier, chief engineer on the Mont Cenis railway tunnel project, a rail tunnel of 13.7 km length in the European Alps, connecting Modane, France and Bardonecchia, Italy.

■ postcard by John P. Charlton, Philadelphia, USA.

SOURCE: A short history of technology by T.K. Derry & T.I. Williams, Dover Publ., New York, 1960; Fig. 273.

100th anniversary : for the year 1911

■ electric self-starter invented by C. F. Kettering impro- ves automobile safety. Cadillac boss Henry M. Leland gives Kettering's Dayton Engineering Laboratories (Delco) a contract to supply 4,000 self-starters after losing a good friend who died after his jaw was broken by a crank handle while trying to start the balky engine of a woman's Cadillac.

■ the last horse-drawn bus of the London General Omnibus Company goes out of service. The city had 1,142 licensed horse-drawn buses at the end of October 1910 and the same number of motor buses, but while at least one horse-drawn bus will continue running (over Waterloo Bridge) until 1916, the horse is now rapidly being replaced by motorbuses and motorcars and trucks.

■ Nivea creme has its beginnings at Hamburg, where the 29-year-old German cosmetics firm Beiersdorf AG creates a skin moisturizer employing the first water-soluble emulsifier. Owner Oskar Troplowitz has seen an opportunity to make Eucerit into consumer products that will eventually be sold in some 150 countries worldwide.

■ the white line marking the center of a highway is first used in the United States in Indio, California. It is suggested by resident Dr. June MacCarroll after a near accident with an oncoming truck.

■ motion-picture camera, electric drive, by E.F. Moy of London; with a gyroscope to stabilize it and a displacement film-magazine, it replaced hand-cranked machines.

■ the six-passenger Blériot Berline biplane built for Parisian Henri Deutsch de la Neurthe is the first airplane with an enclosed passenger cabin.

■ oil underwater drilling, by Gulf Refining Co., in Caddo Lake on the Lousiana-Texas border.

■ German scientist P. Monnartz becomes the first to realize that stainless steels resist corrosion.

■ US Patent No. 1,000,000  by Francis H. Holton, Akron, Ohio: vehicle tire improvements.

50th anniversary : for the year 1961

■ the Helvetica typeface introduced by Swiss designers Edouard Hoffman and Max Meidinger is a deliberately anonymous font that will be widely used by European modernists.

■ IBM introduces the Selectric typewriter, designed by architect Eliot F. Noyes, in which characters are printed on paper by a rotating ball while the carriage remains fixed. A moving "golf ball" cluster of interchangeable type will be linked in 1964 to a magnetic tape recorder that permits automated, individually addressed original copies of any letter, and by 1975 will account for an estimated 70 to 80 percent of the electric typewriter market.

■ broadcast in stereophonic sound begins by the FM radio stations in USA.

■ Kodachrome II color film is introduced by Eastman Kodak; it is 2½ times faster than the Kodachrome introdu- ced in 1936.

■ electric toothbrush by Squibb & Co., New York

■ electronic calculator, commercial model, by Sunlock Comptometer Ltd, UK, called Anita.

■ hatchback estate car (upward-opening rear door): Renault 4, France.

■ man-carrying spacecraft, USSR. Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin becomes the first human being to orbit Earth, on April 12, in his 1.8-hour mission in Vostok 1. Soviet cosmonaut Gherman S. Titov completes the first multi-orbit spaceflight, of 17 orbits and 25.6 hours duration, the Vostok 2 mission, on August 6.

■ US Patent No. 3,000,000 by Kenneth R. Eldredge for General Electric Co., New York: automatic reading system.