History of telecommunication

Early telecommunications included

In Rabbinical Judaism a signal was given by means of kerchiefs or flags at intervals along the way back to the high priest to indicate the goat "for Azazel" had been pushed from the cliff.

During the Middle Ages, chains of beacons were commonly used on hilltops as a means of relaying a signal. Beacon chains suffered the drawback that they could only pass a single bit of information, so the meaning of the message such as "the enemy has been sighted" had to be agreed upon in advance. One notable instance of their use was during the Spanish Armada, when a beacon chain relayed a signal from Plymouth to London that signaled the arrival of the Spanish warships.^[5]

In 1774, the Swiss physicist Georges Lesage built an electrostatic telegraph consisting of a set of 24 conductive wires a few meters long connected to 24 elder balls suspended from a silk thread (each wire corresponds to a letter). The electrification of a wire by means of an electrostatic generator causes the corresponding elder ball to deflect and designate a letter to the operator located at the end of the line. The sequence of selected letters leads to the writing and transmission of a message.^[6]

French engineer

However, semaphore as a communication system suffered from the need for skilled operators and expensive towers often at intervals of only ten to thirty kilometers (six to nineteen miles). As a result, the last commercial line was abandoned in 1880.[9]

Electrical telegraph

Experiments on

An early experiment in electrical telegraphy was an 'electrochemical' telegraph created by the German physician, anatomist and inventor Samuel Thomas von Sömmerring in 1809, based on an earlier, less robust design of 1804 by Spanish polymath and scientist Francisco Salva Campillo.^[10] Both their designs employed multiple wires (up to 35) in order to visually represent almost all Latin letters and numerals. Thus, messages could be conveyed electrically up to a few kilometers (in von Sömmerring's design), with each of the telegraph receiver's wires immersed in a separate glass tube of acid. An electric current was sequentially applied by the sender through the various wires representing each digit of a message; at the recipient's end the currents electrolysed the acid in the tubes in sequence, releasing streams of hydrogen bubbles next to each associated letter or numeral. The telegraph receiver's operator would visually observe the bubbles and could then record the transmitted message, albeit at a very low baud rate.^[10] The principal disadvantage to the system was its prohibitive cost, due to having to manufacture and string-up the multiple wire circuits it employed, as opposed to the single wire (with ground return) used by later telegraphs.

The first working telegraph was built by Francis Ronalds in 1816 and used static electricity.^[11]

Charles Wheatstone and William Fothergill Cooke patented a five-needle, six-wire system, which entered commercial use in 1838.^[12] It used the deflection of needles to represent messages and started operating over twenty-one kilometres (thirteen miles) of the Great Western Railway on 9 April 1839. Both Wheatstone and Cooke viewed their device as "an improvement to the [existing] electromagnetic telegraph" not as a new device.

On the other side of the

The

The electric telephone was invented in the 1870s, based on earlier work with

Telephone technology grew quickly after the first commercial services emerged, with inter-city lines being built and telephone exchanges in every major city of the United States by the mid-1880s.^[17][18][19] The first transcontinental telephone call occurred on January 25, 1915. Despite this, transatlantic voice communication remained impossible for customers until January 7, 1927, when a connection was established using radio.^[20] However no cable connection existed until TAT-1 was inaugurated on September 25, 1956, providing 36 telephone circuits.^[21]

In 1880, Bell and co-inventor Charles Sumner Tainter conducted the world's first wireless telephone call via modulated lightbeams projected by photophones. The scientific principles of their invention would not be utilized for several decades, when they were first deployed in military and fiber-optic communications.

The first transatlantic telephone cable (which incorporated hundreds of

Over several years starting in 1894, the Italian inventor

The development of

The first U.S. satellite to relay communications was

After commercial long-distance telephone service was established via communication satellites, a host of other commercial telecommunications were also adapted to similar satellites starting in 1979, including mobile satellite phones, satellite radio, satellite television and satellite Internet access. The earliest adaption for most such services occurred in the 1990s as the pricing for commercial satellite transponder channels continued to drop significantly.

Realization and demonstration, on October 29, 2001, of the first digital cinema transmission by satellite in Europe^[42][43][44] of a feature film by Bernard Pauchon,^[45] Alain Lorentz, Raymond Melwig^[46] and Philippe Binant.^[47]

Computer networks and the Internet

On September 11, 1940,

Internet access became widespread late in the century, using the old telephone and television networks.

Digital telephone technology

MOS technology was initially overlooked by Bell because they did not find it practical for analog telephone applications.

• Prehistoric:
  communication drums, horns
• 6th century BCE: Mail
• 5th century BCE: Pigeon post
• 4th century BCE: Hydraulic semaphores
• 15th century CE: Maritime flag semaphores
• 1672: First experimental acoustic (mechanical) telephone
• 1790:
  Semaphore lines
  (optical telegraphs)
• 1867: Signal lamps
• 1877: Acoustic phonograph
• 1900: optical picture

Basic electrical signals

• 1838: Electrical telegraph. See: Telegraph history
• 1830s: Beginning of attempts to develop "wireless telegraphy", systems using some form of ground, water, air or other media for conduction to eliminate the need for conducting wires.
• 1858: First trans-Atlantic telegraph cable
• 1876: Telephone. See: Invention of the telephone, History of the telephone, Timeline of the telephone
• 1880: Telephony via lightbeam photophones

Advanced electrical and electronic signals

• 1896: First practical wireless telegraphy systems based on Radio. See: History of radio.
• 1900: first television displayed only black and white images. Over the next decades, colour television were invented, showing images that were clearer and in full colour.
• 1914: First North American transcontinental telephone calling
• 1927: Television. See: History of television
• 1927: First commercial radio-telephone service, U.K.–U.S.
• 1930:
  First experimental videophones
• 1934: First commercial radio-telephone service, U.S.–Japan
• 1936:
  World's first public videophone network
• 1946: Limited capacity Mobile Telephone Service for automobiles
• 1947: First working transistor (see History of the transistor)
• 1950: Semiconductor era begins
• 1956: Transatlantic telephone cable
• 1962: Commercial telecommunications satellite
• 1964: Fiber optical telecommunications
• 1965:
  First North American public videophone network
• 1969:
  Computer networking
• 1973: First modern-era mobile (cellular) phone
• 1974:
  History of Internet
  )
• 1979: INMARSAT ship-to-shore satellite communications
• 1981:
  First mobile (cellular) phone network
• 1982: SMTP email
• 1998: Mobile satellite hand-held phones
• 2003:
  VoIP Internet Telephony

Wikimedia Commons has media related to History of telecommunications.

• History of the Internet
• History of podcasting
• History of radio
• History of television
• History of the telephone
• History of videotelephony
• Information Age
• Information revolution
• Optical communication
• Outline of telecommunication

References