Telecommunications Industry: Evolution Timeline
Marquita Sparks
NTC362 – Week 1 – A. Carpenter
August 27, 2015

When speaking about the evolution of telecommunications, this spans across approximately 200 years and has gone through leap years of innovations. The pre-historic age brought about using the smoke from fire to send signals to others from miles away. In the Ancient Greek book, The Iliad by Homer, smoke fires were mentioned in those pages which were dated to have been written about the early 1200s B.C. Later, approximately 700 B.C., carrier pigeons were trained to take a message from one person to another by memorized route. This was a tactic that became popularized especially during the Olympic Games of Athens, Greece, and later in wars with the Persians and the Mongolians. In the late 1700s, the French-born Chappe brothers invented the Semaphore system, which consisted of movable arms on a pole that denoted letters; the first commercial semaphore was invented about 1794 and spread from Paris to Russian, Italy, and Germany; these towers only lasted until about 1860. In 1843, Alexander Bain invented the first FAX, which was followed closely by the electric Telegraph which was invented by Samuel Morse in 1844. The “Morse Code” was widely used to send distress signals especially during times of war or maritime disaster. It wasn’t until 1876 that Alexander Graham Bell invented the first Telephone and applies for a patent. However, Elisha Gray, founder of Western Electric Manufacturing, applies for the same patent a mere 3 hours after Bell does. Bell offers his patent for $100,000, and Gray refuses. 1877 sees the first telephone line in operation through Somerville, Mass. and Boston. Bell then founds American Bell in 1880 and had over 30,000 phones in use, takes controlling interest of Western Union and Western Electric by 1882. In 1884, a Russian named Paul Nipkow gained a patent in Germany for a television that used a selenium cell and a mechanical scanning disk. He would have to wait several years to see anything come of this. In the 1890s, Heinrich Heinz made a theory that sound waves can be transmitted by means of electromagnetic radiation. However, Guglielmo Marconi takes those theories and capitalizes on them in 1895 by inventing the first working radio. Scotland’s John Baird’s innovation of Nipkow’s initial idea in 1926 of using neon bulbs instead of selenium cells that demonstrates the first known television.
The Cold War brings about the great Space Race, and the Soviet’s win it first by launching the first satellite into orbit around the Earth. Sputnik I was launched in 1957 and orbited Earth for 92 days to complete 1440 revolutions around the planet. 1962 brings about the minicomputer from IBM, but the Apple I home computer does not hit shelves until 1976. Of course there are several instances of the mobile phone that was seen prior to its actual invention, especially used by military, but Martin Cooper invents what we know as the archetypical mobile phone in 1973. With computers in homes across the globe, the success of widespread communication is evident. Tim Berners Lee introduces the World Wide Web to the masses in 1989. Microsoft is founded by Bill Gates, and the company releases several operating system advances for the home computer throughout the next several years, becoming a juggernaut in the computer industry. In 2005, the first instance of Broadband internet through cable Ethernet wiring and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) (Vonage, for example) is introduced to users, who require more bandwidth than its predecessor analog connections would offer.

References
Bernard, K. E. (1986). Regulatory Development in the U.S. Journal Of The American Society For Information Science, 37(6), 409-413.

King, W. E. (2003). Telecommunications. In S. I. Kutler (Ed.), Dictionary of American History (3rd ed., Vol. 8, pp. 65-67). New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Retrieved from http://go.galegroup.com.ezproxy.apollolibrary.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CCX3401804148&v=2.1&u=uphoenix&it=r&p=GVRL&sw=w&asid=edf4f67ce97e81cca97671fdaf4e2800