Communication History & Information Technology

Communication used to be written down by the sender (or dictated to a messenger) and sent by human or animal all the way to the recipient. Developments in information technology have improved the way messages can be recorded and transmitted.

Handwriting

Messages were once written by hand and physically conveyed to another party. The printing press allowed multiple copies of texts to be made quickly and cheaply. This was an obvious advantage over hand-written communication, and led to greater dissemination of books and other information.

Line of Sight Signaling Devices

Signaling devices that required line of sight, like signal fires or semaphore-like optical telegraphs, required a direct line of sight between sender and receiver. This often meant multiple signaling towers were needed to transfer messages over long distances, but since the message didn't travel in physical form, the medium was an advancement.

Electrical Signaling Systems (Telegraph)

After some trial and error using synchronized clocks, Samuel Morse developed the first practical, functioning electrical telegraph in 1837. By 1858, entrepreneurs successfully laid a trans-Atlantic cable.

Telephone

At first seen as merely an improvement on the telegraph, the telephone revolutionized person-to-person communication. For the first time, people could communicate remotely, person to person, without any mediating individual or obvious network. It was patented in 1876 by Alexander Graham Bell.

Internet

The modern Internet developed from a US military project called ARPANET, created to transfer files between the computers at several US universities. They developed email in the 1960s. The World Wide Web was developed in 1990 by a European laboratory called CERN.

References

• "The Victorian Internet." Tom Standage. 1998.
• "Where Wizards Stay Up Late." Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon. 1998.
• "In the Beginning...Was the Command Line." Neal Stephenson. 1999.