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500
The Persian Royal Mail
In 500 BC, the Persian Empire was the greatest empire the world had ever seen. The empire contained dozens of formerly independent states and dozens of languages. To manage the empire, Cyrus the Great created and Darius I split the empire into 23 satrapies. Cyrus the Great created a road system called the Royal Road which all letter carriers used to get letters from state to state. Only ryoalty could send and recieve letters. -
First Newspaper publication
One of the world's first newspapers, Avisa Relation oder Zeitung, begins publication in Wolfenbüttel (Holy Roman Empire). -
Poor Richard's Almanack
The Almanack contained the calendar, weather, poems, sayings and astronomical and astrological information that a typical almanac of the period would contain. -
First Colonial newspaper
Ben Harris prints first Colonial newspaper [Publick Occurrences, Both Foreign and Domestic] in Boston -
First Public Library
In 1778, the town of Exeter Mass. was changed to Franklin. In return Franklin was asked to donate a bell for the town's church steeple. Dr. Franklin responded with an offer of books for the use of the town's residents saying that 'sense' was better than 'sound'. The town decided to lend all the books to the people of Franklin free of charge. -
Telegraph and Morse Code
In 1844, Morse and others invented the telegraph. It worked by transmitting electrical signals over a wire laid between stations. In addition to helping invent the telegraph, Samuel Morse developed a code (bearing his name) that assigned a set of dots and dashes to each letter of the English alphabet and allowed for the simple transmission of complex messages across telegraph lines. -
The Telephone
Similiar to the telegraph, Alexander Graham Bell created the "harmonic telegraph" which was based on the principle that several notes could be sent simultaneously along the same wire if the notes or signals differed in pitch. It wasn't until many years later that the telephone became available to consumers. -
First Radio Broadcast
On January 13, 1910, the first public radio broadcast was an experimental transmission of a live Metropolitan Opera House performance of several famous opera singers. The few radio receivers able to pick up this first-ever "outside broadcast" were those at the De Forest Radio Laboratory, on board ships in New York Harbor, in large hotels on Times Square and at New York city locations where members of the press were stationed at receiving sets -
BBC Broadcasts first tv transmissions
The BBC begins regular TV transmissions. -
Internet
In 1982, the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) was standardized, and consequently, the concept of a world-wide network of interconnected TCP/IP networks, called the Internet, was introduced.
