-
38,000 BCE
Signal Instruments
-
38,000 BCE
Smoke Signals
It is a form of visual communication used over a long distance, the use of smoke signals began around the same time in America by Native Americans and in China. There is no standardized code for smoke signals; the signals are often of a predetermined pattern discerned by sender and receiver. Because of this, smoke signals tend to only convey simple messages, and are a limited form of communication. This advancement helped further the drive for instant long distance communication. -
38,000 BCE
Cave paintings
Cave paintings are painted drawings on cave walls or ceilings. They have been found in Europe, Africa, Australia and Southeast Asia. It is widely believed that the paintings are the work of respected elders or shamans. The most common themes in European cave paintings are large wild animals, such as bison, horses, aurochs, and deer, and tracings of human hands [which was said to be the signature of the artist who painted it] as well as abstract patterns. -
3000 BCE
Papyrus in Egypt
When the Egyptians began to write, about 3000 BC, they wrote from the beginning in ink, on papyrus. Papyrus is a plant that grows wild all over the Nile river valley, so it is very common in Egypt. -
2400 BCE
Clay tablets in Mesopotamia
Evidence of the first writing on clay tablets has been found in southern Mesopotamia. Because of their durability, clay tablets were also used in other areas including Persia, Asia Minor, and Syria. The use of clay tablets continued for a couple thousand years. The Sumerians use a wooden stylus to place simple shapes and lines into moist clay. This form of writing became known as cuneiform because of the wedge-shaped markings made in the clay. -
220
Printing press using wood blocks (220 AD)
The oldest form of printing known as woodblock printing was used extensively throughout East Asia and is said to have been a Chinese invention. This was a method where the wood blocks were used for printing on textiles and then later on paper. It also has been uncovered that the wood blocks apart from being made from wood were also created from other materials such as tin, lead, cast iron, even in stone and clay. -
Megaphone
The megaphone (or otherwise known as a bullhorn, blowhorn, speaking-trumpet, or loud hailer) is a cone-shaped, portable voice amplifier that people use to make sounds or give directions. The sound comes out by holding it up to the mouth and speaking through the narrow end of the megaphone. Its unique cone shape directs sound waves in the direction the megaphone is pointing and creates a loud projection of the voice. -
Semaphore
Semaphore with flags Semaphore is how people communicated before the electric age of communication. It derives from ancient times when civilizations would use smoke signals. Semaphore consists of a series of hilltop stations that each had large arms to signal letters and numbers, and on the hill tops there were two telescopes with which to see the other stations. An example of semaphore used today is flags during airplane landings. -
Braille
Louis Braille, who was blind by the age of three, invented braille. Braille is a universally accepted system of writing used by and for blind people and consisting of 63 characters. A Frenchman named Valentin Haüy was the first person to emboss paper as means of reading for the blind. When Louis Braille entered the school for the blind in Paris, in 1819, he learned a system of tangible writing using dots, it was called night writing. He adapted it into the 6 dot system, brialle, when he was 15. -
The Telegraph
The electric telegraph was invented by Samuel F.B. Morse. It worked by transmitting electrical signals over a wire laid between two stations. Morse invented the Morse Code which is an assortment of dots and dashes, and this invention lead as the first device that was able to send messages electronically. This code played an important role in the military; at one point it was the main form of communication. -
Fax Machine
The fax machine was invented by Alexander Bain. This machine is also known by its full name facsimile. The use of the fax machine is to transmit images via telephone lines, and it is comprised of two pens connected to pendulums; they were then joined to a wire, that was able to reproduce writing on an electrically conductive surface. -
Typewriter
Christopher Latham Sholes of Milwaukee invented the first typewriter. He gets the credit even though a variety of prototypes had been created previously. The Sholes & Glidden typed only in capital letters, and it introduced the QWERTY keyboard, which is still used today. At first buying a type writer seemed impractical, until technical modifications took place, and the first successful commercial product was created. -
Telephone
Alexander Graham Bell invented and patented the first telephone that did work reliably. The first successful telephone call happened on March 10, 1876 wherein Alexander told his assistant, Thomas Watson: "Mr. Watson--come here--I want to see you." -
Phonograph
The phonograph was invented by Thomas Edison. While working on improvements to the telegraph and the telephone, Edison figured out a way to record sound on tinfoil-coated cylinders. When Edison spoke into the mouthpiece, the sound vibrations of his voice would be indented onto the cylinder by the recording needle. -
Radio "The Wireless Telegraph"
The radio was invented by an Italian named Gugliemo Marconi. Radios work by changing sounds into waves, which then travel through air, space, and solid objects, and then a radio receiver changes them back into the sounds, words, and music we hear. In 1901, Marconi recieved morse code dots making the letter S-- that had traveled across the Atlantic ocean. The United States took away Marconi's patents claiming a man named Nikola Telsa was the true inventor. -
Television
Electronic television was first successfully demonstrated in San Francisco on Sept. 7, 1927. The system was designed by Philo Taylor Farnsworth, a 21-year-old inventor who had lived in a house without electricity until he was 14. Starting in high school, he began to think of a system that could capture moving images, transform those images into code, then move those images along radio waves to different devices.The first image ever transmitted by television was a simple line. -
Walkie Talkie
The walkie talkie was invented by Donald Hings. He created the devices so that they could be used in the canadian military. Hing has 23 other patents relating to the field of electronics; one of those patents is for the electric piano. Unlike a normal radio, a walkie-talkie is two-way: you can both talk and listen (send and receive). Donald Hing called them a "packset" before they were nicknamed walkie talkier. -
Computer
In 1946 the first computer was announced. It was called ENIAC, which stood for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer. ENIAC took up a large room and required several people to operate. -
Pager
The pager was made to alert the person. This help create a system of alerts to help us be more aware and communicate more effectively. It was a wireless telecommunications device that receives and displays numeric and/or receives and announces voice messages. One-way pagers would only receive messages, while response pagers and two-way pagers would also acknowledge, reply to, and originate messages using an internal transmitter. -
Email
Email was invented by Ray Tomlinson; there are many debates as to who was the original creater becasue many say it was created by a fourteen year old Indie born scientist. Email is an important program that people use to communicate through computers. Email works by the sender composing a message using the email client. When the user sends the message, the email text and attachments are uploaded to the SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) server as outgoing mail. -
Mobile phone
The world’s first mobile phone call was made on April 3, 1973, when Martin Cooper, a senior engineer at Motorola, called a rival telecommunications company and informed them he was speaking via a mobile phone. The phone Cooper used, if you could call it that, weighed a staggering 1.1kg and measured in at 228.6x127x44.4mm. With this prototype device, you got 30 minutes of talk-time and it took around 10 hours to charge. -
PC
The first personal computers, introduced in 1975, came as kits: The MITS Altair 8800, followed by the IMSAI 8080, an Altair clone. Both used the Intel 8080CPU. That was also the year Zilog created the Z-80 processor and MOS Technology produced the 6502. Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote a BASIC compiler for the Altair and formed Micro-soft. -
Webcam
The first webcam ever was actually invented by lazy students at Cambridge University who didn’t want to waste a trip to the nearby coffee pot if it was going to be empty when they got there.
This coffee machine that was the inspiration for the world’s first webcam was located in a corridor just outside The Trojan Room in the old computer lab at Cambridge University. -
Smartphone
The first smart phone was made 1993 and distributed/sold in 1994. It was made by IBM and BellSouth. It was named “Simon”. It had a touch screen that was capable of accessing email and sending faxes. The phone made daily activities easier and had society working for more advanced technology.
