Communication Over Time

The Kish tablet

3500 BCE

discovered in the ancient Sumerian city of Kish, has inscriptions considered by some experts to be the oldest form of known writing.

The phonetic system

1500 BCE

With the phonic system, symbols refer to spoken sounds. If this sounds familiar, it’s because the modern alphabets that many people in the world use today is a phonetic form of communication.

Greek oral language

800 BCE

the Phoenician symbols reached Greece, where it was altered and adapted to the Greek oral language. The biggest alterations were the addition of vowel sounds and having the letters read from left to right.

Messenger pigeon

776 BCE

Around that time, long-distance communication had its humble beginnings as the Greeks, for the first time in recorded history, had a messenger pigeon deliver results of the first Olympiad in the year 776 BC.

The Library

530 BCE

Another important communication milestone to come from the Greeks was the establishment of the first library in 530 BC.

The First Postal Service

14

In the year 14 AD, the Romans established the first postal service in the western world. While it’s considered to be the first well-documented mail delivery system, others in India, China had already long been in place.

Writing on Paper

105

With a well-developed writing system and messenger services, the Chinese would be the first to invent paper and papermaking when in 105 AD an official named Cai Lung submitted a proposal to the emperor in which he, according to a biographical account, suggested using “the bark of trees, remnants of hemp, rags of cloth, and fishing nets” instead of the heavier bamboo or costlier silk material.

The First Printer

1030

Han Chinese inventor Bi Sheng was credited with developing the porcelain device, which was described in statesman Shen Kuo’s book “Dream Pool Essays.” He wrote:
“…he took sticky clay and cut in it characters as thin as the edge of a coin. Each character formed, as it were, a single type. He baked them in the fire to make them hard. He had previously prepared an iron plate and he had covered his plate with a mixture of pine resin, wax, and paper ashes.

Printing Paper Books

1041

The Chinese followed that up sometime between 1041 and 1048 with the invention of the first moveable type for printing paper books.

Photographing

1822

People wanted photographs, except they didn’t know it yet. That was until French inventor Joseph Nicephore Niepce captured the world’s first photographic image in 1822. The early process he pioneered, called heliography, used a combination of various substances and their reactions to sunlight to copy the image from an engraving.