Ironically, my skepticism about the thesis of this Aeon article prompted me to take a bit of a tour through the history of timelines – which confirmed my suspicion that the idea of representing time graphically by a linear dimension has been around for centuries if not millennia. Early extant examples include story scrolls from China and Japan, a tenth century manuscript, and the wildly popular 15th century work of Werner Rolewinck, as well as graphical representations of motion against a time axis by Leonardo da Vinci and Galileo – all of which long preceded the work of Joseph Priestly which is cited in the Aeon article (and so now is being regurgitated by AI as the first of its kind). But I did enjoy finding and playing with the fully zoomable and scrollable version of
Adams’ Synchronological Chart (part of which is used to illustrate the Aeon piece).
Sources: When we turned time into a line, we reimagined past and future | Aeon Essays and A Timeline of Timelines | CabinetMagazine