The History of Telecommunications

Telecommunications has been around as long as the need to communicate, from human voice to rudimentary smoke signals, flags and mechanical semaphores, however it wasn’t until 1753 that Charles Morrison proposed the electrostatic telegraph system. His system used 26 wires, one for each letter of the alphabet, and was complex and prone to error. Ten years later, Bosolus reduced the wires needed down to only two by using a letter code. In the half century since Samuel Morse was born in 1791, many advances were made in telegraph technology, but it wasn’t until the death of Morse’s wife when he was 25, and the two weeks it took for the news to reach him, that Morse began to develop his famous Morse code, which allowed the binary transmission of telegraph signals, leading to the eventual automation of the telegraph system. May 24th, 1844 was the date when the first long distance telegraph message, “What hath God wrought” was successfully received along a 37-mile telegraph line between Baltimore and Washington D.C.

Transatlantic Cable

By 1858, transatlantic cables between Europe and America had been laid, although these suffered many breakages. In some ways, this was the first Internet. Interestingly, in 1867, along with Alexander Bell’s famous invention of the telephone, the U.S. bought Russian America (now Alaska) from Russia partly in order to lay a telegraph line through the Bering Strait to Europe, although the eventual success of the trans-Atlantic cable in 1868 meant this never went ahead. Thomas Edison developed the first successful electric lamp a few years later, and in 1883 demonstrated his “Edison effect” and patented the first diode. Five years later, German Heinrich Hertz discovered radio waves, and by 1894 Italian physicist, Guglielmo Marconi was sending radio transmissions ¾ of a mile, and within three years, the Marconi Company demonstrated long-range ship to shore radio communications and the radio revolution was begun.

Triode

1906 brought with it the invention of the “triode” by Lee de Forest, the first amplifying vacuum tube and device that allowed high powered, long distance radio communications, although it wasn’t until twenty years later that the first commercial transatlantic radio telephone service was begun, heralding the beginning of modern global telecommunications.

Optic Fibre

In 1966, Charles Kao first proposed using optical fibres to transmit information, and by 1970, researchers at Corning Glass Works had invented a working optical fibre. Optical fibres greater information carrying ability has seen them gradually replace copper cables, since the first optical transatlantic cable in 1988 up until today where the majority of the world’s high-speed telecommunication network is optical based.

Satellites

One other major telecommunication technology hasn’t been mentioned here – satellites. Despite their capability for cross-national communications and common use in television and telephone networks, they are rarely used for Internet communications due to their relatively slow transmission speeds.

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