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Telecommunications Advances
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Morse's Telegraph
In Morse code each letter (and number) is represented by a series of dots and dashes. On January 24, Morse demonstrates the telegraph to his friends in his university studio. On February 8, Morse demonstrates the telegraph before a scientific committee at Philadelphia's Franklin Institute. -
Telephone
In 1876, at the age of 29, Alexander Graham Bell invented his telephone. In 1877, he formed the Bell Telephone Company. -
Radio (Speech and Music)
Reginald Fessenden makes the first radio broadcast: a poetry reading, a violin solo, and a speech. Later in 1906, the second International Radiotelegraphic Convention is held in Berlin. -
Television
John Logie Baird demonstrates the world's first television system to transmit live, moving images in black and white to 40 members of the Royal Institution. The 30-line images are scanned mechanically by a disk with a spiral of lenses at 12.5 images per second. -
Satellite Transmission
The launching of Sputnik I by the Soviet Union began the space race with the United States. It was the first artifial satellite to be put in to the Earth's orbit. It helped with research of the atmosphere and travels at 18,000 m.p.h. and completing an orbit in 96.2 minutes. -
Email
Raymond Samuel Tomlinson (born 1941) is a US programmer who implemented an email system in 1971 on the ARPANET. It was the first system able to send mail between users on different hosts connected to the ARPAnet. (Previously, mail could be sent only to others who used the same computer.) To achieve this, he used the @ sign to separate the user from their machine, which has been used in email addresses ever since. -
Hand Held Mobile Phone
Prior to 1973, mobile telephony was limited to phones installed in cars and other vehicles. Motorola and Bell Labs raced to be the first to produce a handheld mobile phone. That race ended on April 3, 1973 when Martin Cooper, a Motorola researcher and executive, made the first mobile telephone call from handheld subscriber equipment, placing a call to Dr. Joel S. Engel of Bell Labs. -
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web was developed in 1989 by English computer scientist Timothy Berners-Lee to enable information to be shared among internationally dispersed teams of researchers at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. It subsequently became a platform for related software development, and the numbers of linked computers and users grew rapidly. -
SMS
Engineer Neil Papworth sent the first SMS message on 3 December 1992 - it read "Happy Christmas". -
WiFi
WiFi is a popular term that is used referring to wireless communications between computers and other computer related devices. Regular radio waves are use to broadcast and receive just like a pair of walkie talkies, but on a much higher frequency. These days you will find many areas around town that offer free WiFi internet access, but the most common use for WiFi is in the home. -
Skype
Skype was founded in 2003 by Janus Friis from Denmark and Niklas Zennström from Sweden. Skype allows registered users to communicate through both instant messaging and voice chat. Voice chat allows telephone calls between pairs of users and conference calling -
Facebook
Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. The website's membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It gradually added support for students at various other universities before opening to high school students, and eventually to anyone aged 13 and over. -
Twitter
Twitter is an online social networking service and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, known as "tweets". It was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July. The service rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with over 140 million active users as of 2012, generating over 340 million tweets daily and handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day. It has been described as "the SMS of the Internet."
