HISTORY OF COMMUNICATIONSBy: Brandon Murphy

The Dark Ages (500 000 BC – 900 AD)….The Discovery of Fire

Truthfully no one knows when fire was first discovered. Some speculate that a lightning strike near a caveman was what brought it to humans. Others believe a caveman threw rocks and sticks together at things, and somehow managed to spark a fire. 

An important change in the behavior of humans was brought about by the control of fire and its accompanying light. Activity was no longer restricted to the daylight hours.

Fire's purposes are multiple, some of which are to add light and heat, to cook plants and animals, to clear forests for planting, to heat-treat stone for making stone tools, to burn clay for ceramic objects.The discovery of fire led the way to the survival of mankind.

The Middle Ages…The Invention of the Steam Engine

Thomas Savery was an English military engineer and inventor who in 1698, patented the first crude steam engine based on Denis Papin's Digester or pressure cooker of 1679.

This machine was so simple that it had no moving parts. It also used up lots and lots of coal just to pump a small quantity of water.

Using two steam boilers, Savery devised a nearly continuous system for pumping water from mines. But despite the early success of Savery's system, it was soon

discovered that his engine was only capable of drawing water from shallow depths.

The Industrial Age….1800s

The Invention of the Telephone Alexander Graham Bell

was born in 1847 in Edinburgh, Scotland. In 1876, at the age of 29, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone.

Speech over the phone lines…. The telegraph and telephone are both wire-

based electrical systems, and Alexander Graham Bell's success with the telephone came as a direct result of his attempts to improve the telegraph. When Bell began experimenting with electrical signals, the telegraph had been an established means of communication for some 30 years. Although a highly successful system, the telegraph, with its dot-and-dash Morse code, was basically limited to receiving and sending one message at a time. Bell's extensive knowledge of the nature of sound and his understanding of music enabled him to think that other sounds such as speech could be transmitted. 

Alexander Graham Bell could have been content with the success of his telephone invention. However, his many laboratory notebooks demonstrate that he was driven by a curiosity that kept him always searching, striving, and wanting to learn and to create. He would continue to test out new ideas through a long and productive life. He died August 2, 1922.

The Modern Age…1900-1960

The Invention of the

Television

John Logie Baird

John Logie Baird was a Scottish engineer, innovator and inventor of the world's first television, the first publicly demonstrated colour television system; and the first purely electronic picture tube. Baird's early technological successes and his role in the introduction of broadcast television for home entertainment have earned him a special place in television's history.

The development of television was the result of work by many inventors. Among them, Baird was a prominent pioneer and made major advances in the field. Many historians credit Baird with being the first to produce a live, moving, greyscale television image from reflected light. Baird achieved this, where other inventors had failed, by obtaining a better photoelectric cell and improving the signal conditioning from the photocell and the video amplifier.

The First Colour Transmission On 26 January 1926, Baird repeated the

transmission for members of the Royal Institution and a reporter from The Times in his laboratory at 22 Frith Street in the Soho district of London. By this time, he had improved the scan rate to 12.5 pictures per second. It was the first demonstration of a television system that could broadcast live moving images with tone graduation.

He demonstrated the world's first colour transmission on 3 July 1928, using scanning discs at the transmitting and receiving ends with three spirals of apertures, each spiral with a filter of a different primary colour; and three light sources at the receiving end, with a commutator to alternate their illumination.

That same year he also demonstrated stereoscopic television.

The Information Age

The Development of the Internet

What is the definition of the internet? The simple description is, a "worldwide system of interconnected networks and computers“.

The Internet was the result of some visionary thinking by people in the early 1960s who saw great potential value in allowing computers to share information on research and developmentin scientific and military fields. J.C.R. Licklider of MIT first proposed a global network of computersin 1962, and moved over to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in late 1962 to head the work to develop it. Leonard Kleinrock of MIT and later UCLA developed the theory of packet switching, which was to form the basis of Internet connections. Lawrence Roberts of MIT connected a Massachusetts computer with a California computer in 1965 over dial-up telephone lines. It showed the feasibility of wide area networking, but also showed that the telephone line's circuit switching was inadequate. Kleinrock's packet switching theory was confirmed. Roberts moved over to DARPA in 1966 and developed his plan for ARPANET.

The Internet was designed to provide a communications network that would work even if some of the major sites were down. If the most direct route was not available, routers would direct trafficaround the network via alternate routes. The early Internet was used by computer experts, engineers, scientists, and librarians. There was nothing friendly about it. There were no home or office personal computers in those days, and anyone who used it, whether a computer professional or an engineer or scientist or librarian, had to learn to use a very complex system.

Modern Day Internet It is now 30 years since the transition,

completed on January 1 1983,  from the use of disparate packet-switched networks to the unified computer communication protocol TCP/IP pioneered by Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn.

The great achievement of the modern internet it is that it enables data to be freely exchanged among all the networks that make up the world wide web. It does this with a combination of two communications protocols - TCP/IP (Transport Communications Protocol over Internet Protocol).

Today we use Google to search for anything we need to know…we can speak to family all over the world using Skype and we have email and messenger…we have internet on the TV and on our phones. We literally have the world at our fingertips.