Timeline of communication technology
Timeline of communication technology
- 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 became 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 and 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 - Twitter, microblogging