Finishing the Grid

With a flurry of activity over the last week, I was able to finish up The Grid - which is to say, a system of dates and memorable events that enable context for most of the last 500 years of history. An additional advantage is being able to recreate it easily once the rules are known: Start from a known 4T/Crisis date, move along at about 100-year intervals to find previous and following crises; halfway between those dates you'll find 2T/Awakening events; and then split the remaining intervals to get 1T/High and 3T/Unraveling events.

This last burst was to finish up the Third Turning, which ended up mostly about technological advancement. Not too surprising, since its a way that individuals can distinguish themselves enough to be personally known. 

(It might be the case that Third Turning politicians also are well-known enough - we know Clinton and Bush; Coolidge and Hoover...the notion falls down before the Civil War, though.)

In any case, the final entries were

1752 - Benjamin Franklin experiments with electricity

1852 - Harriet Beecher Stowe publishes Uncle Tom's Cabin

1927 - Lindbergh flies solo from New York to Paris

1990 - Tim Berners-Lee invents the World Wide Web

The largest gaps left now are about - well, the largest one is between 1629 and 1666, 37 years. The 3T items ended up being close to the 4T events, making them often distant from the 2T ones. Still, the distance between any potential event in these last 522 years is roughly 20 years. Which makes it possible to identify other events by their distance from one of these, and be generally within a couple of decades of a known item in the Grid.

Which is, hopefully useful, if only by allowing one to be aware of the larger flow of history while looking at specific happenings.