Technological Revolutions by Saira Beg timeline

In an attempt to improve the telegraph, where you could only send one message at a time, Alexander Grahm Bell wanted to create a harmonic or musical telegraph. Instead of simply hearing the dots and dashes from telegraphs, Bell thought it possible to transmit the human voice in a similar fashion.
"Bell's first intelligible voice transmission over an electric wire was named an IEEE Milestone."
Commercialized telephones allowed for far more rapid transmission of information between people.

This allowed for more accurate data retrieval, storage, sorting, and manipulation. "...the 1880 census, which had required 8 years to complete, the 1890 census was finished in only two years. Automating the census saved the Census Bureau 5 million dollars, about 1/3 of its annual budget" (Ethics, pg 9). Other machines were built off the punch cards that could sort, alphabetize and tabulate. This system was also expanded to Germany where it played a major and unfortunate roll in the Holocaust.

"In 1885, Hertz successfully generated electromagnetic waves,"(pg 25) and those waves were successfully transmitted in 1895. The radio was widely used to report the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 but was later used for entertainment purposes such as music and news. This connected people not only for important global news messages but for a sharing of more light-hearted purposes, such as dramas and comedies. Literacy is not a factor for consuming such media, making it more widely accessible.

Televisions were introduced to the public at the 1939 World Fair but remained rare until the 1950s due to the price being so high. The power of televised media/news was fully demonstrated by the momentous moon landing in 1969 (pg 26). Another huge impact of TV's ability to convey visual information was in the 1960 US presidential election, where the handsome appearance and confident demeanor of JFK as compared to Nixion had a big impact on the public's perception of the candidates.

The smartphones that are ubiquitous with almost all people, that are borderline essential to our professional survival, are near useless without wireless connectivity. Whether its for work or leisure, people gather to places of internet connectivity to utilize the connectivity of Wi-Fi. The ability to communicate and connect without being tethered down is an invaluable tool, but can also take us away from our present surroundings because we have the ability to "go" anywhere digitally.