By Julie Shapiro
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
LOWER MANHATTAN — At 8:59 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001, Brian Sweeney left a message on his wife's answering machine.
"Hi Jules, it's Brian," he said. "Listen, I'm on an airplane that's been hijacked...I just want you to know I absolutely love you."
Sweeney was a passenger on Flight 175, which slammed into the South Tower just four minutes later, killing everyone on board.
The phone message that captured Sweeney's last words is part of a new 9/11 Interactive Timeline, launched online Wednesday by the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. The timeline traces the events of 9/11 down to the minute, illustrating them with firsthand accounts and photos, audio and video.
"We're trying to organize the chaos of the day," said Joe Daniels, president of the 9/11 Memorial Foundation. "There's a basic yearning [to know] what happened when."
The online timeline begins at 5:45 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001, with a surveillance shot of two of the hijackers passing through security screening at an airport in Portland, Maine. It ends at 8:30 p.m., with President George W. Bush's televised address to the shocked, grieving country.
In between, the timeline marks everything from the collapse of the South Tower at 9:59 a.m., which killed about 600 people in 10 seconds, to the evacuation of lower Manhattan at 1:02 p.m.
Viewers can scroll through quickly or click on one moment to learn more from the people who experienced it.
Archetype International, a California-based design and engineering company, built the timeline over the past six months.
"It was such a profound moment in our history that it really needs to be remembered and revisited," said Mike Lucaccini, president of Archetype.
Lucaccini added a feature that allows people to share an individual piece of the timeline by e-mail, Facebook and Twitter, so they can discuss their own 9/11 experiences with others.
The timeline includes the familiar but still emotionally devastating footage of the towers' collapse, along with lesser-known images, like flyers for September 2001 events at the World Trade Center, which were canceled by the attacks. The memorial foundation chose not to include footage of people jumping from the towers.
"Our goal is to be true to the facts of what happened as much as possible, without crossing the line to be sensational," Daniels said.
The timeline includes a warning about the graphic and sensitive content.
Daniels sees the timeline as a preview of the 9/11 museum, which is scheduled to open in September 2012. In the future, he hopes to add a separate interactive timeline for the nine-month recovery effort at Ground Zero and for the first 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
