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35,000 BCE
Cave Paintings
In prehistoric art, the term “cave paintings” encompasses any parietal art which involves the application of colour pigments on the walls, floors or ceilings of ancient rock shelters. A monochrome cave paintings is a picture made with only one colour (usually black)-see, for instance, the monochrome images at Chauvet -
Period: 35,000 BCE to
Pre-industrial Age
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2500 BCE
Papyrus in Egypt
first papyrus was only used in Egypt, but by about 1000 BC people all over West Asia began buying papyrus from Egypt and using it, since it was much more convenient than clay tablets (less breakable, and not as heavy!). People made papyrus in small sheets and then glued the sheets together to make big pieces. -
2400 BCE
Clay Tablets in Mesopatamia
In the Ancient Near East, clay tablets (Akkadian ṭuppu) were used as a writing medium, especially for writing in cuneiform, throughout the Bronze Age and well into the Iron Age. Cuneiform characters were imprinted on a wet clay tablet with a stylus often made of reed (reed pen). -
220
Printing Press using woodblock
Woodblock printing is a technique for printing text, images or patterns used widely throughout East Asia and originating in China in antiquity as a method of printing on textiles and later paper. Prior to the invention of woodblock printing, seals and stamps were used for making impressions. -
500
Codex in the Mayan Region
Maya codices (singular codex) are folding books written by the pre-Columbian Maya civilization in Maya hieroglyphic script on Mesoamerican bark cloth. … The Maya developed their huun-paper around the 5th century, which is roughly the same time that the codex became predominant over the scroll in the Roman world. -
Period: to
Industrial Age
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Electric Telegraph
In 1774, Georges-Louis Le Sage realised an early electric telegraph. The telegraph had a separate wire for each of the 26 letters of the alphabet and its range was only between two rooms of his home. -
Newspapers
Advances in printing technology related to the Industrial Revolution enabled newspapers to become an even more widely circulated means of communication, as new printing technologies made printing less expensive and more efficient. In 1814, The Times (London) acquired a printing press capable of making 1,100 impressions per hour.[30] Soon, this press was adapted to print on both sides of a page at once. This innovation made newspapers cheaper and thus available to a larger part of the population. -
Typewriter
In 1829, American William Austin Burt patented a machine called the "Typographer" which, in common with many other early machines, is listed as the "first typewriter". -
Telegraph
Samuel Morse independently developed and patented a recording electric telegraph in 1837. Morse's assistant Alfred Vail developed an instrument that was called the register for recording the received messages. -
Mail
The Postage Act 1839(c.52) was an act of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland that came into effect on 17Aug.1839 to regulate the postage rates of Great Britain until 5Oct1840 and led to several postal reforms, including the introduction of the Uniform Penny Post and the world's first postage stamps.The use of the word or Letters in the Act shall include newspapers, any other packet, paper, article or thing transmitted by the post but not to deprive newspapers of any current privilege -
Period: to
Electronic Age
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Telephone
n March 7, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell, scientist, inventor and innovator, received the first patent for an “apparatus for transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically,” a device he called the telephone. ... This is one of two telephones used by Bell in a demonstration between Boston and Salem, Mass. -
Radio Broadcasting
Marchese Guglielmo Marconi builds his first radio equipment, a device that will ring a bell from 30 ft. away. -
Television
The first official, paid television advertisement was broadcast in the United States on 1 July 1941 over New York station WNBT (now WNBC) before a baseball game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and Philadelphia Phillies. -
Internet
Scientists and military experts were especially concerned about what might happen in the event of a Soviet attack on the nation’s telephone system. Just one missile, they feared, could destroy the whole network of lines and wires that made efficient long-distance communication possible. -
PC
Bill Gates and Paul Allen establish Microsoft on April 4, 1975, after creating Altair BASIC. The program is later developed into Microsoft BASIC. -
Tablet (e.g. iPad)
By late 2009, the iPad's release had been rumored for several years. Such speculation mostly talked about “Apple’s tablet”; specific names included iTablet and iSlate. The actual name is reportedly an homage to the Star Trek PADD, a fictional device very similar in appearance to the iPad. The iPad was announced on January 27, 2010, by Jobs at an Apple press conference at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. -
Virtual Reality (e.g. Oculus Rift)
In 2010, Palmer Luckey designed the first prototype of the Oculus Rift. This prototype, built on a shell of another virtual reality headset, was only capable of rotational tracking. However, it boasted a 90-degree field of vision that was previously unseen in the consumer market at the time. -
Period: to
Information Age
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Augmented Reality (e.g. Google Maps)
On April 19, 2011, Map Maker was added to the American version of Google Maps, allowing any viewer to edit and add changes to Google Maps. This provides Google with local map updates almost in real time instead of waiting for digital map data companies to release more infrequent updates. -
3D Holograms
3D Hologram -
5G
5G is the fifth generation cellular network technology. The industry association 3GPP defines any system using "5G NR" (5G New Radio) software as "5G", a definition that came into general use by late 2018.
