In 1957, in New Jersey, two inventors, Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes, sealed two plastic shower curtains together, trapping air bubbles between them. Their goal: a modern textured wallpaper. It flopped. They then tried selling it as greenhouse insulation, with no more luck. The winning idea, packaging, took off after they founded Sealed Air in 1960. By 1961, IBM was using it to ship its computers.
Around 2300 BCE, Enheduanna, daughter of King Sargon of Akkad, became high priestess of the Moon god at Ur. She composed hymns to the goddess Inanna and put her name to them. She is the oldest person identified as the author of a literary work, about 1,500 years before Homer.
Squeeze Earth's 4.5 billion years into a single 24-hour day. Homo sapiens shows up around 11:59:54 p.m., roughly six seconds before midnight. All of written history, from Sumerian tablets to today, fits into the final tenth of a second. A cosmic blink.