Swiss Confederation

State · 1294–2026 CE · at its largest around 1552 CE

An alliance of Alpine cantons traditionally dated to the 1291 pact of Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden, which grew by accession of new members and gradually won de facto independence from the Holy Roman Empire.

On its lands while it lasted

John Calvin (1509 CE – 1564 CE): French theologian and reformer who led the Reformation in Geneva. His Institutes of the Christian Religion shaped Reformed and Presbyterian Protestantism.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 CE – 1778 CE): Genevan philosopher and writer whose The Social Contract (1762) and Emile influenced the French Revolution, modern political thought and education.
Lucerne (c. 1799 CE): Capital of Helvetic Republic (1799–1799).
Frankenstein (1818 CE): Mary Shelley conceived this novel at Lake Geneva in 1816; it was published in London in 1818 and is often considered the first science fiction novel.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 CE – 1900 CE): German philosopher and classical philologist whose works, including Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil, attacked traditional morality and religion and introduced ideas such as the will to power.
Founding of the Red Cross (1863 CE): Henry Dunant and four other Genevans founded the committee that became the International Committee of the Red Cross in 1863. The first Geneva Convention followed in 1864.
Einstein's special relativity (1905 CE): In 1905, while working at the patent office in Bern, Albert Einstein published his theory of special relativity and, in a follow-up paper, E = mc². It transformed ideas of space and time.
World Health Organization (1948 CE): The United Nations agency for international public health, founded when its constitution came into force on 7 April 1948. Based in Geneva, it led the campaign that eradicated smallpox.
Tim Berners-Lee (born 1955 CE): English computer scientist who invented the World Wide Web at CERN near Geneva in 1989 and in 1994 founded the World Wide Web Consortium at MIT.
World Wide Web (1989 CE): Tim Berners-Lee proposed the World Wide Web at CERN near Geneva in 1989 and built the first web server and browser in 1990.
World Wide Web opens to the public (1991 CE): Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web, developed at CERN, was made publicly available on the internet in 1991; CERN placed the software in the public domain in 1993, and the web spread rapidly worldwide.
Higgs boson (2012 CE): In July 2012 the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider announced the discovery of the Higgs boson, predicted almost 50 years earlier.