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- 1929 - Atkinson and Huetermans used the measured masses of light elements and applied Einstein's discovery that E=mc2 to predict that large amounts of energy could be released by fusing small nuclei together.
- 1939 - Hans Bethe won the Nobel Prize in physics (awarded 1968) for quantitative theory explaining fusion
- shortly after World War II and the success of the Manhattan Project the hydrogen bomb was built, which released large amounts of fusion energy from a reaction ignited by a fission trigger
- 1951 - Argentina publicly claimed that they had harnessed controlled nuclear fusion (these claims were false), sparking a responsive research effort in the U.S.
- 1952 - Cousins and Ware build a small toroidal pinch device in England, and demonstrate that instabilities in the plasma make pinch devices inherently unstable.
- 1953 - pinch devices in the US and USSR attempt to take the reactions to fusion levels without worrying about stability. Both report detections of neutrons, which are later explained as non-fusion in nature.
- 1954 - ZETA stabilized toroidal pinch device starts operation in England.
- 1958 - American, English and Soviet scientists began to share previously classified fusion research, as their countries declassified controlled fusion work as part of the Atoms for Peace conference in Geneva (an amazing development considering the Cold War political climate of the time)
- 1958 - ZETA experiments end. Several firings produce neutron spikes that the researchers initially attribute to fusion, but later realize are due to other effects. Last few firings show an odd "quiet period" of long stability in a system that otherwise appeared to prove itself unstable. Research on pinch machines generally dies off as ZETA appears to be the best that can be done.
- 1967 - Demonstration of Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusor appears to generate neutrons in a nuclear reaction.
- 1968 - Results from the T-3 Soviet magnetic confinment device, called a tokamak, which Igor Yevgenyevich Tamm and Andrei Sakharov had been working on - showed the temperatures in their machine to be over an order of magnitude higher than what was expected by the rest of the community. The western scientists visited the experiment and varified the high temperatures and confinement, sparking a wave of optimism for the prospects of the tokamak as well as construction of new experiments. which is still the dominant magnetic confinement device today.
- 1974 - Taylor re-visits ZETA results of 1958 and explains that the quiet-period is in fact very interesting. This leads to the development of "reversed field pinch", now generalized as "self-organizing plasmas", an ongoing line of research.
- 1978 - The European Community (with Sweden and Switzerland) launched the JET (tokamak) project in the UK
- 1988 - The Japanese tokamak, JT-60 came online
- March 1989 - some scientists announced that they achieved cold fusion - causing fusion to occur at room temperatures. However, they made their announcements before any peer review of their work was performed, and no subsequent experiments by other researchers revealed any evidence of fusion.
- 1993 - The TFTR tokamak at Princeton (PPPL) does experiments with 50% deuterium, 50% tritium, which eventually produces as much as 10 megawatts of power from a controlled fusion reaction.
- 1997 - The JET tokamak in the UK produces 16 MW of fusion power. This is roughly their break even point — producing as much fusion power as they were using to heat the plasma and sustain the reaction.
- 1997 - combining a field-reversed pinch with an imploding magnetic cylinder results in the new Magnetized Target Fusion concept. In this system a "normal" lower density plasma device is explosively squeezed using techniques developed for high-speed gun research.
- 2002 - Claims and counter-claims are published regarding bubble fusion, in which a table-top apparatus is reported as producing small-scale fusion in a liquid undergoing acoustic cavitation.