--Not perfect, edited mainly from Wikipedia--
450 BC - Archytas of Tarentum used a jet of steam to propel a toy wooden bird suspended on wire.
50 AD - Hero of Alexandria's Engine, also known as Aeolipile.
10th century - China develops the earliest fire lances which were spear-like weapons combining a bamboo tube containing gunpowder and shrapnel like projectiles tied to a spear.
12th century - China, the earliest depiction of a gun showing a metal body and a tight-fitting projectile which maximises the conversion of the hot gases to forward motion.
1125 - Gerbert, a professor in the schools at Rheims designed and built an organ blown by air escaping from a vessel in which it was compressed by heated water.
1232 - First recorded use of a rocket. In a battle between the Chinese and the Mongols.
1500 - Leonardo da Vinci builds the Architonnerre, a steam-powered cannon.
1543 - Blasco de Garay, a Spanish naval officer demonstrates a boat propelled without oars or sail that utilised the reaction from a jet issued from a large boiling kettle of water.
1551 - Taqi al-Din demonstrates a steam turbine
1629 - Giovanni Branca demonstrates a steam turbine.
1665 - Edward Somerset, the Second Marquess of Worcester builds a working steam fountain.
1680 - Christiaan Huygens publishes a design for a piston engine powered by gunpowder
1690 - Denis Papin - produces design for the first piston steam engine.
1698 - Thomas Savery builds a pistonless steam-powered water pump
1707 - Denis Papin - produces design for his second piston steam engine
1712 - Thomas Newcomen piston-and-cylinder steam-powered water pump for pumping water out of mines.
1748 - William Cullen first artificial refrigeration in a public lecture at the University of Glasgow
1769 - James Watt patents his first improved atmospheric steam engine
1791 - John Barber patents the idea of a gas turbine.
1799 - Richard Trevithick the first high pressure steam engine..
1807 - Nicéphore Niépce installed his 'moss, coal-dust and resin' fuelled Pyréolophore internal combustion engine in a boat and powered up the river Saone in France.
1807 - Franco/Swiss engineer François Isaac de Rivaz built the De Rivaz engine.
1816 - Robert Stirling, Stirling engine.
1834 - Jacob Perkins, patent for a vapor-compression refrigeration system.
1859 - Etienne Lenoir. first commercially successful internal combustion engine.
1861 - Alphonse Beau de Rochas four-stroke internal-combustion engine .
1861 - Nikolaus Otto patents a two-stroke internal combustion engine building on Lenoir's.
1872 - Pulsometer steam pump, a pistonless pump, patented by Charles Henry Hall.
1873 - Sir William Crookes invents the light mill
1877 - Nikolaus Otto patents a practical four-stroke internal combustion engine (U.S. Patent 194,047)
1883 - Samuel Griffin of Bath UK patents a six-stroke internal combustion engine.
1884 - Charles A. Parsons builds the first modern Steam turbine.
1886 - Herbert Akroyd Stuart builds the prototype Hot bulb engine
1892 - Rudolf Diesel patents the Diesel engine (U.S. Patent 608,845)
1913 - Nikola Tesla patents the Tesla turbine based on the Boundary layer effect.
191x -Steam-Diesel hybrid (link)
1926 - Robert Goddard of the USA launches the first liquid fuel rocket.
1929 - Felix Wankel patents the Wankel rotary engine (U.S. Patent 2,988,008)
1930 - Sir Frank Whittle gas turbine for jet propulsion.
1933 - French physicist Georges J. Ranque invents the Vortex tube
1937 - Hans von Ohain builds a gas turbine
1940 - Hungarian Bela Karlovitz magnetohydrodynamic generator.
1942 - R.S. Gaugler, Heat pipe,
1950 - The Philips company develop the Stirling-cycle generator.
1959 - Geusic, Schultz-DuBois and Scoville quantum heat engine
1962 - William J. Buehler and Frederick Wang Nitinol engine
1992 - The first practical magnetohydrodynamic generators are built in Serbia and the USA.
1996 - Quasiturbine engine patented
2011 - Michigan State University, wave disk engine.
