1902: The billionth minute of the modern era (according to the ISO 8601 standard) is reached on 1 January at 10:40 am. That same year, American inventor Nathan Stubblefield conducts the first public demonstration of a wireless telephone, laying the foundations for voice transmission via radio waves.

1892: Adoption of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) as the legal standard in Belgium. This shift to a single temporal reference resolved critical railway synchronisation issues and optimised astronomical observations at the Royal Observatory. Today, this unified time base allows for the precise correlation of geophysical data, such as for the Jalhay earthquake in 2026, and ensures the interoperability of navigation and space exploration systems.