The History of Communications Developmental Time Line

Communication wall drawings

Communication - Storytelling

 

 

Modern day Communication

 

 

Communication is the ability to share information.

We need communication.  Communication keeps businesses and factories running.
It helps people in trouble to contact police, fire departments, ambulances and doctors.
Our military forces would be useless, and our government would not work without it.
Transportation and food supplies would not meet the needs of the people.
We would loose contact with our families and friends that live far away.
There would be no radio or television stations to entertain us, or movies to see.
Society would surely not be the same as it is now.

Prior to 3500BC - Communication was carried out through paintings of indigenous tribes.

3500s BC - The Sumerians develop cuneiform writing and the Egyptians develop hieroglyphic writing.

16th century BC - The Phoenicians develop an alphabet.

AD 26-37 - Roman Emperor Tiberius rules the empire from island of Capri by signaling messages with metal mirrors to reflect the sun.

105 - Tsai Lun invents paper.

7th century - Hindu-Malayan empires write legal documents on copper plate scrolls, and write other documents on more perishable media.

751 - Paper is introduced to the Muslim world after the Battle of Talas.

1305 - The Chinese develop wooden block movable type printing.

1450 - Johannes Gutenberg finishes a printing press with metal movable type.

1520 - Ships on Ferdinand Magellan's voyage signal to each other by firing cannon and raising flags.

1792 - Claude Chappe establishes the first long-distance semaphore telegraph line.

1831 - Joseph Henry proposes and builds an electric telegraph.

1835 - Samuel Morse develops the Morse code.

1843 - Samuel Morse builds the first long distance electric telegraph line.

1844 - Charles Fenerty produces paper from a wood pulp, eliminating rag paper which was in limited supply.

1849 - Associated Press organizes Nova Scotia pony express to carry latest European news for New York newspapers.

1876 - Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas A. Watson exhibit an electric telephone in Boston.

1877 - Thomas Edison patents the phonograph.

1889 - Almon Strowger patents the direct dial telephone.

1901 - Guglielmo Marconi transmits radio signals from Cornwall to Newfoundland.

1920 - Radio station KDKA based in Pittsburgh began the first broadcast.

1925 - John Logie Baird transmits the first television signal.

1942 - Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil invent frequency hopping spread spectrum communication technique.

1947 - Douglas H. Ring and W. Rae Young of Bell Labs propose a cell-based approach which led to "cellular phones."

1947 - Full-scale commercial television is first broadcast.

1949 - Claude Elwood Shannon, the "father of information theory", mathematically proves the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem.

1958 - Chester Carlson presents the first photocopier suitable for office use.

1963 - First geosynchronous communications satellite is launched, 17 years after Arthur C. Clarke's article.

1966 - Charles Kao realizes that silica-based optical waveguides offer a practical way to transmit light via total internal reflection.

1969 - The first hosts of ARPANET, Internet's ancestor, are connected.

1971 - Erna Schneider Hoover invent a computerized switching system for telephone traffic.

1976 - The personal computer (PC) market is born.

1977 - Donald Knuth begins work on TeX.

1989 - Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau build the prototype system which becames the World Wide Web at CERN.

1991 - Anders Olsson transmits solitary waves through an optical fiber with a data rate of 32 billion bits per second.

1992 - Neil Papworth sends the first SMS (or text message).

1992 - Internet2 organization is created.

1994 - Internet radio broadcasting is born.

1999 - 45% of Australians have a mobile phone.

1999 - Sirius satellite radio is introduced.

2001 - First digital cinema transmission by satellite in Europe of a feature film by Bernard Pauchon, Alain Lorentz, Raymond Melwig, Philippe Binant.

2003 - Apple launches the iTunes Music Store and sells one million songs in its first week.^[1]

2003 - MySpace is launched.

2004 - What would become the largest social networking site in the world, Facebook is launched.

2005 - YouTube, the video sharing site is launched.

2006 - Messages are sent faster than ever via the microblogging site, Twitter.

Reference www.wikipedia.com

 

Early Communications

 

Cave drawings were murals that people painted onto the walls of caves and canyons to tell the story of their culture.  They would tell stories of battles, hunts and culture.   Storytelling was used to tell stories, both fiction and nonfiction, before there were books.  It was a way for families and communities to pass on information about their past. 

Printing press - The oldest printed book known is a Chinese religious book, The Diamond Sutra.  Other books like this were printed with wood blocks, usually made from Mulberry wood. Johann Gutenburg invented an actual printing press in 1450, it was a screw press that worked very much like a wine press.  He discovered how to make a good ink that would print with metal type.  Gutenburg was the first to use a press to print the Bible, it is the oldest full length volume printed.  From Gutenburg's press in Mainz, Germany, printing spread all over Europe. The mechanics of printing changed little between 1450 and the 1800s, when the power press was introduced.  By the 1600's the art of printing was used in business.  Printed news sheets, called corantos, which were somewhat like newspapers of today.   Today we use modern versions of these printing presses to print books, magazines, and newspapers.

Telegraph -  The idea for the electric telegraph was not thought up in a scientific laboratory, but on the deck of a sailing ship called the Scully, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.  The inventor was Samuel Finley Breese Morse, and in 1832, he was on of the most famous artists in the United States.  Morse and ship passengers were talking about the invention of the electromagnet, which looked like a horseshoe with wire wrapped around it.  They talked about how electricity traveled through the wire.  Morse thought if electricity would travel a short distance through wire, it could travel long distances through wire also. In 1837, he developed his telegraph idea enough to test it.  Morse strung seventeen hundred feet of wire around his room at New York University, where he taught.  It worked; his signals traveled from one end of the wire to the other.  On May 24, 1844, Morse stretched wires from Washington D.C. to Baltimore, New York and sent the message, "What hath God wrought!" through the telegraph machine.  The telegraph was a success. 

The Telephone  A telephone is an instrument that sends and receives information, usually by means of electricity.  The word telephone comes from Greek words meaning far and sound.  The telephone is one of our best ways to communicate.  In an emergency a telephone can save your life.  You can save time with a telephone.  You can make a telephone call almost anywhere in the world.  Telephones are even used in cars, planes, ships, and on lots of different mechanical machines. 

Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in Boston in 1876, 120 years later there are over 360 million telephone numbers, and that figure grows each year.
Raidio -
Computers - Konrad Zuse is popularly recognized in Germany as the "father of computer" and his ZI, a programmable automation system build between 1936 and 1938, has been called the first computer in the world. Konrad Zuse realized that he could construct a system capable of doing sequences of mathematic operations, like those needed to construct mathematical tables. He had no formal training in electronics and was not familiar basic technological ideas, which allowed him to solve problems he came across, with new, creative and original solutions.  Herman Hollerith was the first American to help in the invention of the computer in 1890.  He invented the Tabulating Machine which was used by the U.S. Government.  His company was called the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company. Later the company changed its name to International Business Machines, we know the today as IBM, one of the worlds largest computer companies.  In the 1940-1950's one single computer filled an entire room and weighed about 30 tons. In the 50's and 60's the computers were smaller and faster, but still too big and expensive for home use. In the 1970's smaller computers were designed for smaller businesses and the microprocessors were introduced. They were now small enough for use in homes and schools.

Prominent Moments in Communications

1877  - Thomas Edison invents the phonograph , a device to record sound on a wax cylinder.

1884 - First long distance phone calls are made

1901 - Gugliermo Marconi sends the first radio signal across the Atlantic Ocean

1924 - Pictures are first transmitted over telephone lines

1928 -  Very first few homes get their first television sets

1963 - first communications satellite is launched allowing world wide broadcast of the 1964 Olympics

1970 - The internet is invented by the US government , as means of communication for the military

1972 - the first emails are sent

1975 - the first home computer, small ,powerful and personal is invented

1979 - the first emotion con is sent with an email

1982 - the first cell phones are available for sale

1990 - Tim Bernard's Lee invents the World Wide Web

1993 - Marc Andreeson creates the first browser program allowing people to browse the web

1994- Laurence Canter sent the first spam e-mail — “Green Card Lottery 1994 May be the Last One!! Sign up now!!” — creating a huge uproar in the internet community. As a result, Canter lost his job, and his Internet service provider cancelled his subscription.
Laurence Canter sent the first spam e-mail — “Green Card Lottery 1994 May be the Last One!! Sign up now!!” — creating a huge uproar in the internet community. As a result, Canter lost his job, and his Internet service provider cancelled his subscription.
1995 - The number of U.S. homes with one or more personal computers increased by 16% in 1995 to about 38 million households, up from 33 million in 1994 and 25 million in 1993.

2000 - Sixty percent of U.S. households own at least one computer.
The LoveBug worm/virus infects 2.5 million PCs and causes an estimated $8.7 billion in damage.
Application service providers (ASPs) explode onto the meeting planning scene, fuelled by enthusiastic venture capitalist funding. Several of these companies do not last past the bust in 2001. computers increased by 16% in 1995 to about 38 million households, up from 33 million in 1994 and 25 million in 1993.
2001 - Apple released the iPod, which became the most popular MP3 player in history. This plus opening the iTunes Store to distribute music content lead to a disruptive and sweeping change in the music industry.   Wikipedia the largest and most popular information /reference site was launched in 2001.  It now has more than 17 million articles collaboratively by volunteers around the world. 
 
2003 - Intel incorporated Wi-Fi (wireless internet receiving capability) in their Centrino chip opening a floodgate of wireless internet adoption in the next few years.
2004 - Google indexed more than 8 billion pages on the web.Facebook (limited to Harvard students only) started this year.
 

2005 - YouTube, the first video sharing site came online in 2005 and has grown to one of the most popular sites on the web. YouTube used more bandwidth in 2010 than the entire internet did in 2000. 

2006 - Twitter, the micro blogging site opened with 140 characters maximum per message.

iTunes downloaded its billionth file in May of 2006

Apple introduces the iPhone in June revolutionizing the mobile phone industry. More than 74 million iPhone were sold in the next 4.5 years.

Google releases GoogleDocs providing free web-based spreadsheets and word processing tools.

 

2009 -

Digital television became the broadcast standard in the U.S. and other parts of the world, opening the door to web-based TV services.

 

2010 -  Apple introduced the iPad, another revolution in portable “tablet” computing.

There are 4.7 billion mobile phone subscriptions (2 out of every 3 people on the planet). There are more people with mobile phones that have running water or toothbrushes.

Skype provided high-definition video conferencing. This gave planners the ability to stream good quality video signal for free at events.

 

2011
Amazon releases the Kindle Fire tablet computer/eReader in October and sells more the 25 million by the end of the year.

There are more than 600,000 iPhone/iPad apps and 400,000 Android apps.

More than 5.6 million iPhone apps are downloaded daily.

There are more than 800 million Facebook users (more than 1 in 10 on the planet).

Major revolution occurs in the Middle East kindled by mobile phones and social media.

1.2 billion mobile apps were downloaded over the Christmas 2011 holidays.