Something for the History Buffs

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Ever wonder about how two overlapping things fit in to one another?

For example, Railroads in the US in 19th Century, the Steam Engine in the same period, and the US Civil War.

I’ve had it in the back of my mind to build a tool to visualize those kind of relationships. I’ve been frustrated though with the seeming lack of a public database of historical dates in a machine readable form.

Creating my own would be a daunting task.

Then I realized all the dates I’d ever want are already in Wikipedia. I fed Google Gemini AI a URL a Wikipedia page and asked it to give me a list of dates it found in that article. It worked!

So I kept dinking around, and had a graphical timeline generated from a URL. Then Gemini suggested instead of giving a URL, I just give it a topic, and it would find the pertinent articles.

You can try that tool yourself.



<cross posted from my Substack Newsletter>

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