-
Telecommunications before the 1800s
Telecommunications is simply the process of communicating over a distance. Ancient telecommunications used both audio (like signal drums) and visual (like smoke signals) methods. Even packetized data (a note) on a transport media (a carrier pigeon) dates back more than 2,500 years. -
Chappe Brothers Semaphore
The Chappe brothers, in France, were in their teens and were attending schools some distance apart but visible to each other. They obtained permission to set up a signaling system so they could send messages to each other. Their semaphore system consisted of movable arms on a pole whose positions denoted letters of the alphabet. -
Period: to
Commercial Semaphore Systems
Commercial semaphore systems were in use from the time the Chappe brothers established their first system in France in 1791 until the last system shut down in Algeria in 1860.
As late as 1840, appropriations requests were made to the US Congress for the establishment of semaphore systems.
Flag semaphore systems are still used today in some maritime and other settings. -
Period: to
Samuel Finley Breese Morse
Samuel Finley Breese Morse was born 27 April 1791 to Jedidiah Morse and Elizabeth Ann Finley Breese in Charlestown, Massachusetts. Morse attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts and Yale College. While at Yale, he supported himself by painting and graduated in 1810.
Morse continued to work as a painter until in 1837 he introduced the first single wire telegraph. -
Multiple-Wire Signaling Telegraph
William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone patent a multiple-wire signaling telegraph. -
Single Wire Telegraph
Several versions of electric telegraph machines were invented in the early to mid 1830s. However, most of them depended on separate wires to represent each letter. Samuel Morse introduced the first single wire telegraph in 1837. -
Congress Appropriates Funds for First Telegraph Line
In 1843 congress appropriated $30,000 for the construction of an experimental 38 mile telegraph line between Washington, DC and Baltimore along the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad; thus beginning the state sponsored monopoly of telecommunications that would more or less reign in the US until public sector entities began breaking the mold with public-private partnership open access networks. -
Bain Fax Machine
Clear back in 1843 Alexander Bain connected two pens to pendulums which in turn were joined to a wire that was able to reproduce writing on an electrically conductive surface and ta da! the fax was born. -
What Hath God Wrought
The first telegraph line (from Washington, DC to Baltimore) was inaugurated with the words from Numbers 23:32, "What hath God wrought." -
Period: to
Theodore Newton Vail
Theodore Vail was one of AT&T's most far-sighted presidents. He oversaw the building of the first American coast to coast telephone system, and it was his dedication to basic science that initiated a new research arm for AT Bell Labs. Vail was responsible for helping to set up the Western Electric Company, a division of the company which built telephone equipment.
It is said that Bell invented the telephone but Vail invented the telephone business. -
Period: to
Alexander Graham Bell
Alexander Graham Bell was born on March 3, 1847, in Edinburgh, Scotland. His education was largely received through numerous experiments in sound and the furthering of his father’s work on Visible Speech for the deaf. Bell worked with Thomas Watson on the design and patent of the first practical telephone. In all, Bell held 18 patents in his name alone and 12 that he shared with collaborators. He died on August 2, 1922, in Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Canada. -
New York and Mississippi Valley Printing and Telegraph Company
The New York and Mississippi Valley Printing and Telegraph Company, formed in 1851, would later become Western Union. -
Period: to
Thomas Watson
Thomas Watson dropped out of school at 14, and worked as a bookkeeper and carpenter before being hired in a Boston machine shop. There he helped build some rudimentary machines per the design of Alexander Graham Bell. Bell hired Watson, and the two men jointly discovered that tones from a vibrating transmitter reed could be carried electrically by wire and audibly recreated. From there the two men pressed forward to the invention of the telephone. -
Western Union
The New York and Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Company becomes Western Union in 1856. -
First Transcontinental Telegraph System
The first transcontinental telegraph was a line that connected an existing network in the eastern United States to a small network in California by a link between Omaha and Carson City via Salt Lake City -
First Trans-Atlantic Cables
Five attempts to lay the cable were made over a nine year period - in 1857, two in 1858, in 1859, and in 1865. The 1857 attempt was unsuccessful. The 1858 attempt was completed on August 5th. In September of 1858, attempts to achieve faster telegraph operation resulted in destructive voltage being applied to the cable. The effort was not tried again until 1865 and was completed on July 28, 1865. This cable remained in use for the next 100 years. -
Telegraph Act of 1866
From the time congress appropriated funds to help Morse build the first telegraph line, the federal government established a precedent of state sponsored private monopolies in US telecommunications. Throughout the history of telecommunications in the US, that relationship has been tested and regulated and has waxed and waned.
The Telegraph Act of 1866 was one of the federal governments first telecommunications anti-monopoly regulatory efforts. -
Alexander Graham Bell Invents the Telephone
On March 10, 1876, the telephone was born when Alexander Graham Bell called to his assistant, "Mr. Watson! Come here! I want you!"
He was not simply making the first phone call. He was beginning a revolution in communications and commerce. It spread a web of instantaneous information across towns, then a continent, then the world, and has greatly accelerated economic development. -
Peace Semaphore
Even though Semaphores went out of commercial use in 1860, they still secured a place in popular culture.
The peace symbol contains a representation of the semaphores for N and D (Nuclear Disarmament) in a circle of the world.
The symbol was first widely used at an anti-nuclear weapons development rally in London in 1958.
