Some Events in the History of Communications
1. 1200 B.C. - News of the fall of Troy relayed with a system of fire beacons that
carried a prearranged signal nearly 400 miles from island to island. The news of
the victory reached Mycenae in Southern Greece within hours. Lord of the Rings
anyone? ( from
2. 490 B.C. - Phidippides runs from Marathon to Athens, a distance of 26.2 miles,
and shoutes "NENIKIKAMEN" (we were victorious) and dies.
3. 1790's - Claude Chappe builds a series of giant communication towers
that some have called the Napoleonic Internet. With funding from the French
government, Chappe constructed hundreds of towers, each adorned with giant
arms that could be clearly seen with a telescope, from adjacent towers. Because
each letter of the alphabet could be represented with different arm positions,
specific messages could be sent from tower to tower, and relayed clear across
France (from
4. 1815 - British and American forces met in a bloody battle in New Orleans. The
fighting lasted for days, and left thousands dead. But tragically, the war had
ended several weeks earlier (from Light Speed).
5. 1860 - The Pony Express delivers mail from St. JosephMissouri to
SacramentoCalifornia (1966 miles) in an average time of 10 days.
( In 1961, Western
Union completes a telephone line from St. Joseph to Sacramento and puts
the pony express out of business.
6. 1837 - Samuel F. B. Morse in the United States and Sir William Cook
and Sir Charles Wheatstone in England independently invent the telegraph.
In 1844, Morse sends his famous message "What hath god wrought" on a
37 mile link between WashingtonD.C. and Baltimore.
7. 1858 - Cyrus Field completes the first translantic cable between Newfoundland
and Ireland (sixteen hundred miles). On August 14, Queen Victoria and President
Buchanan exchange telegraph messages over the telegraph cable, which fails
several weeks later. A new transatlantic cable was laid in 1966 between
Heart's Content, Newfoundland, and Valentia, Ireland.
8. 1877 - Alexander Grahm Bell invents the first practical telephone.
On March 10, he sent the famous message "Mr. Watson. Come here. I need you"
to his assistant in the next room.
9. 1895 - Guglielmo Marconi invents radio (wireless communication).
Uses Morse code (dots and dashes) rather than voice. By 1901, Marconi
succeeded in transmitting the letter "S" in Morse code 3,500 kilometers
across the Atlantic Ocean.
10. 1914 - First transcontinental phone call.
11. 1918 - First regular airmail service (between Washington, D.C. and
New York).
12. 1920 - Radio station KDKA in PittsburghPennsylvania broadcasts
the first scheduled radio programs.
13. 1927 - AT&T telecasts a speech by Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover
from Washington to New York City.
14. 1941 - CBS and NBC begin commercial television broadcasts, but World
War II intervenes. Network television braodcasting begins in 1949.
15. 1956 - Lawrence Curtiss, a college freshman at the University of Michigan, creates
the fiber gastroscopes as a physics project. In the process, he invents the
modern glass fiber with an optically "heavier" glass core surrounded by an
optically lighter glass cladding to achieve total internal reflection.
16. October 4, 1957 - Soviet Union launches Sputnik I, The world's first artificial
satellite. It was about the size of a basketball, weighed only 183 pounds, and
took about 98 minutes to orbit the Earth on its elliptical path.
17. 1965 - Geosynchounous communications satellite "Early Bird (Intelsat I)
begins operation above the Atlantic Ocean.
18. 1970 - Peter Schultz, Don Keck and Bob Maurer at Corning Glass develop
glass fibers of fused-silica (made of pure sand) that can carry laser light
one kilometer. By 1975 even purer fibers carried light ten kilometers.
19. 1977 - AT&T begins fiber optic transmissions of telephone signals in
downtown Chicago. The first intercity fiber loop (between New York
and Washington) begins in 1983. The first transatlantic fiber cable
begins operating on December 8, 1988.
20. 2004 - "To date, such ships have laid an estimated 4 million miles of glass
fiber under the world's oceans--enough to cross the Atlantic a thousand times.
And another 300 million miles crisscross the continents, forming what has been
called a glass necklace of communications."
( from ).