History Of Communication Technology

The history of communication technology has dawned on time. Humans have been able to interact with one another in some manner or another. As far as we can tell, the first written records of communication extend back to Mesopotamia. Since the dawn of time, people have always relied on communication as a means of exchanging information. 

Our loved ones, acquaintances, and business companions all receive crucial information from us via complicated technology nowadays. However, the modern technology that we take for granted didn’t always go hand in hand. Throughout history, humans have depended on a variety of means to communicate with one another. These approaches have relied on the advancements in science at the time.

What Are The Ways In Which People Communicate Verbally?

History Of Communication Technology: The Written Word

In China, written language is said to have developed around 1200 B.C., and in the Americas around 600 B.C. The parallels between the Mesopotamian language as well as the Egyptian language show that a writing system was created in the Middle East. Any relationship between Chinese characters but these early language schemes is less plausible, given the civilizations appear to have had no interaction at all.

The phonetic system is one of very few non-glyph written languages that does not utilize pictorial indicators. Phonetic systems use symbols to represent spoken sounds. As if that wasn’t obvious enough, the contemporary alphabets used by most people today are a phonetic manner of communication. A Canaanite population inside the 19th century B.C. or a Semitic group in central Egypt in the 15th century B.C. were the first to leave traces of these systems.

The Phoenician Way

The Phoenician method of written communication expanded and was adopted by the Mediterranean city-states over time in varied ways. Greek orators influenced the Phoenician method when it reached Greece in the 8th centuries Bc. The insertion of vowel sounds, as well as the reading of the letters from left to right, were the two most significant modifications.

A messenger pigeon delivered the results of the very first Olympiad around 776 B.C., marking the origins of long-distance communication in recorded history. In 530 B.C., the Greeks built the first library, which is the history of communication technology.

Communication Over Long Distances

Humans began to use long-distance communication devices as the B.C. era reached its conclusion. An item in the book “Globalization as well as Everyday Life” said that between 200 and 100 B.C.

“People in Egypt and China used messenger relay stations to send messages by foot or horseback. The use of fire communications as an alternative to human relays was not uncommon.”

The Masses Are Able To Communicate With One Another

The Romans founded the first mail service in Western Europe this year 14 BCE. While it’s often regarded as the earliest well-documented postal delivery system, someone else in China and India has been in existence for some time. 

Around 550 B.C., ancient Persia may have been the first country to have functional mail service. While it is true that it was used initially for information collection and subsequently to communicate with the monarch, historians believe that it was not a legitimate postal service.

Systematic Approach To Composing

Chinese communicative efforts were also gaining traction in the East Asian region. In 105, an official called Cai Lung proposed to the emperor that he use “the bark of trees, remains of hemp, rags of fabric, and fishing nets” rather than just the bulkier bamboo or more expensive silk material.

The First Commercially Available Electric Telegraph System

Samuel Morse, an American inventor, produced a version of said Cooke as well as the Wheatstone telegraph which might transmit messages from Washington, D.C., into Baltimore some few years after that the Cooke, as well as the Wheatstone telegraph, were invented. 

Later, with Alfred Vail’s assistance, he came up with both the Morse code, the method of signal-induced protrusions that corresponded to numerical values, special characters, and alphabetic letters.

The History Of Communication Technology: The Telephone

The very next step was to find a technique to send sound across long distances. In 1843, Italian scientist Innocenzo Manzetti started discussing the notion of a “speaking telegraph,” and it was a popular topic at the time. 

Alexander Graham Bell was issued a patent for “Improvements in Telegraphy” in 1876, which laid out the fundamental technology underlying electromagnetic telephones although he and others were exploring the idea of transferring sound over distances.

Invention Of The Answering Machine

But what would happen if someone attempted to contact you and you weren’t there? That’s exactly what happened with the creation of the telegraphone with Valdemar Poulsen, a Danish inventor who created the first gadget that could record and playback magnetic fields generated by sound. Massive data storage technologies like audio CDs and tape were built on top of the magnetic recordings.

Writing

Humans’ transition to agricultural societies ushered in the emergence of written language. Approximately 9,000 years ago, the transition from hunting-based communities to non-nomadic lives based on agriculture occurred. Humans began to value writing when they realized how crucial it was to document their possessions and transactions of the history of communication technology.

In the beginning, images were used to symbolize the things that were being discussed. Pictures began to symbolize sounds as cultures progressed. When it came to Western culture, the language of images eventually gave way to the alphabet. Words were formed by putting letters together.

Printing

Documents were traditionally written in pencil, which took a long time. Most of the people who could write were clerics, who belonged to an educated, aristocratic society. Block printing became widespread in Europe throughout the fourteenth century. Individual etched hardwood blocks were used to produce single words or characters in block printing. 

This was a costly and inefficient procedure. Goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg created a printing machine in 1454 using moveable printing blocks. Getting books more inexpensive and widely available was made possible by Gutenberg’s innovation.

History Of Communication Technology: Telegraph

The printing press made communication simpler, but it may take days or even weeks for the printed word to reach its destination. Scientists were looking for a more efficient method of transmitting the information. 

In the late 18th century, French scientists devised a light-based communication system. With the invention of the machine that converts voice to electrical impulses and subsequently to printed letters, the American engineer Samuel Morse made significant improvements to this technology. His telegraph was widely used as a fast means of communication.

The Digital Age

The introduction of computers marked a major technological shift in the field of communication. When machines first came out, they were used to solve complicated mathematical problems. As time went on, scientists recognized that computers could also be used to interact with one other. 

In 1989, scientists were able to communicate documents via their computers using the Internet’s forerunner. After a short period of time, the Internet was made available to the general population. This breakthrough in technology sped up the flow of information like never before.

Ages

Premechanical

As far back as we can go in time, we have the mechanical period of technology. Time from 3000 BC to 1450 AD can be defined. It’s been a long time since then, after all. Petroglyphs, which were basic drawings etched into the rock, were used as a means of communication by early people. The Phoenician alphabet was one of the earliest examples of an alphabet.

Pens and paper were invented as the use of alphabets grew and more people began to take notes. After making markings in wet clay, papyrus plants were used to manufacture paper. Paper created from rags was perhaps the most frequent sort of paper manufactured by the Chinese, according to the history of communication technology.

People began to write down a lot of information, and they needed a mechanism to store it all. First books, as well as libraries, were invented here. It is likely that you have heard about Egyptian scrolls, which were a common method of archiving knowledge. Paper was really being bound into books by some groups of individuals.

The earliest numbering systems were also developed during this time period. The earliest 1-9 system was devised by Indians in 100AD. This number 0 was not created until 775 years later, during the year 875 A.D. 

And indeed, once numbers were invented, people wanted to use them, thus calculators were invented. The earliest evidence of an information processing model was a calculator. The abacus was the most common model at the time.

Mechanical

Our contemporary technology and its forebears may be traced back to the mechanical period. It may be characterized between both 1450 and 1840 as the era of mechanical technology. As interest in new technology grows exponentially, a slew of innovative products is being created. 

This slide rule (an analog computer for multiplication and division) was one of the first of its kind. The Pascaline was a mechanical computer designed by Blaise Pascal. The history of communication technology begins with Charles Babbage’s invention of the difference engine, which solved polynomial equations using the concept of finite differences.

Even while we haven’t yet developed a machine that can perform more than one sort of computation in one go, such as our modern-day calculators, we’re nevertheless learning about how some of our all-in-one devices got their start during this time period. 

It’s hard to comprehend why would anybody want to use these devices now, yet to the people who lived in this period, all of these innovations were enormous in comparison to their power.

Electromechanical

Your modern-day technology is now just a few steps away from being a reality. Between 1840 and 1940, the electromechanical era may be described. When it comes to communications, here is where it all began: It wasn’t until the early 1800s that the telegraph was invented. 

It was in 1835 when Samuel Morse developed the Morse code. Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876, making it one of the most widely used ways of communication ever. Guglielmo Marconi created the first radio in 1894. Every single one of them had a significant impact on information technology advancements.

Around 1940, Harvard University built the Mark 1, a large-scale automated digital computer. Massive: History of communication technology, this computer was 8 feet tall, 50 feet long, and 2 feet broad weighing 5 tonnes – enormous. 

Punch cards were used to program it. Do you think you can handle this hefty piece of metal? People started to look into shrinking all the pieces of these massive machines in order to first make them useful by enterprises and later in your own house. “

Electronic

We are now living in the digital era. In this context, it refers to the period between 1940 to the present day. As a high-speed digital computer, the ENIAC was able to handle a wide variety of computing tasks. 

This computer was built for use by the United States Army in the construction of firing tables for artillery systems. In comparison to the Mark 1, this machine was much larger, occupying 680 square feet as well as weighing 30 tonnes. Vacuum tubes were employed extensively in their computations.