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200,000 BCE
Rock Carvings
Such artworks are often divided into three forms: petroglyphs, which are carved into the rock surface, pictographs, which are painted onto the surface, and earth figures, formed on the ground. The oldest known rock art dates from the Upper Palaeolithic period, having been found in Europe, Australia, Asia and Africa. -
100,000 BCE
Cave Paintings
Cave paintings are also known as "parietal art".They are painted drawings on cave walls or ceilings, mainly of prehistoric origin, dated to some 40,000 years ago in Eurasia. -
100,000 BCE
Sculpture
The first distinctive style of ancient Greek sculpture developed in the Early Bronze Age Cycladic period where marble figures, usually female and small, are represented in an elegantly simplified geometrical style. -
30,000 BCE
Pigeon Post
Pigeon post is the use of homing pigeons to carry messages. Pigeons were effective as messengers due to their natural homing abilities. The pigeons were transported to a destination in cages, where they would be attached with messages, then naturally the pigeon would fly back to its home where the owner could read their mail. -
1800 BCE
Smoke Signals
Smoke signals are the oldest form of visual communication. Simplistic in design and execution, they were used first used to send messages along the Great Wall of China. -
First Telegraph
Baron Schilling von Canstatt successfully demonstrates the first telegraph in history in his room. -
The First Typewriter
The first typewriter to be commercially successful was invented in 1868 by Americans Christopher Latham Sholes, Frank Haven Hall, Carlos Glidden and Samuel W. Soule in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. -
Demonstration of Telephone
On 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, Massachusetts on November 26, 1876. -
First Radio Audio Broadcast
Reginald Fessenden used an Alexanderson alternator and rotary spark-gap transmitter to make the first radio audio broadcast, from Brant Rock, Massachusetts. Ships at sea heard a broadcast that included Fessenden playing O Holy Night on the violin and reading a passage from the Bible. -
SOS
SOS is the commonly used description for the international Morse code distress signal (· · · — — — · · ·). This distress signal was first adopted by the German government in radio regulations effective April 1, 1905, and became the worldwide standard under the second International Radiotelegraphic Convention, which was signed on November 3, 1906 and became effective on July 1, 1908. -
First Television Commercial
The world's first legal TV commercial, for Bulova watches, occurs at 2:29 PM over WNBT (now WNBC) New York before a baseball game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and Philadelphia Phillies. The 10-second spot displayed a picture of a clock superimposed on a map of the United States, accompanied by the voice-over "America runs on Bulova time." -
First Email
The first email is created and sent by Ray Thomlinson, a computer engineer working under ARPAnet. -
The World Wide Web goes Public
Berners-Lee posted a short summary of the World Wide Web project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup. This date also marked the debut of the Web as a publicly available service on the Internet. -
First Text Message
The first SMS ever sent was by Brit Neil Papworth who texted ‘Happy Christmas’ to Vodafone director Richard Jarvis at a staff Christmas party. Papworth sent the Short Messaging Service from his work computer to an Orbitel 901 handset. -
The Beginning of Yahoo!
Yahoo! Inc. was founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo in January 1994 and was incorporated on March 1, 1995. -
Launching of Wikipedia
Ward Cunningham may have created the first wiki on the Internet domain c2.com on 25 March1995, but the most popular Wiki, Wikipedia, was launched on January 15, 2001 by Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales. -
Mark Zuckerberg launches Facebook
What initially begins as a drunken hacking attack on the Harvard network results in the creation of a popular social networking site. As of February 2012, Facebook has more than 845 million active users. -
Google Goes Public
Google was first incorporated as a privately held company on September 4, 1998, and its initial public offering followed on August 19, 2004. -
YouTube Created
Three paypal employees start Youtube on the grounds that they have difficulty sharing videos. The domain name www.youtube.com was activated on February 14, 2005, and the website was developed over the subsequent months.