HISTORY OF TELECOMMUNICATION
Telecommunication is the transmission of information over significant distances to
communicate. In earlier times, telecommunications involved the use of visual
signals, such as beacons, smoke signals, semaphore telegraphs, signal flags, and optical heliographs, or audio messages via
coded drumbeats, lung-blown horns, or sent by loud whistles, for example. In
the modern age of electricity and electronics, telecommunications now also
includes the use of electrical devices such as telegraphs, telephones, and tele-printers, the use of radio and microwave communications, as well as fiber optics and their associated electronics, plus
the use of the orbiting
satellites and the Internet.
A
revolution in wireless
telecommunications began in the
first decade of the 20th century with pioneering developments in wireless radio communications by Nikola
Tesla and Guglielmo Marconi. Marconi won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1909 for his efforts. Other highly
notable pioneering inventors and developers in the field of electrical and
electronic telecommunications include Charles
Wheatstone and Samuel Morse (telegraph), Alexander Graham Bell (telephone), Edwin Armstrong, and Lee de Forest (radio), as well as John Logie Baird and Philo
Farnsworth (television).
The
world's effective capacity to exchange information through two-way
telecommunication networks grew from 281 petabytes of (optimally compressed) information
in 1986, to 471 petabytes in 1993, to 2.2 (optimally compressed)
Exabyte in 2000, and to 65
(optimally compressed) Exabyte in 2007. This is the informational
equivalent of 2 newspaper pages per person per day in 1986, and 6 entire
newspapers per person per day by 2007. Given
this growth, telecommunications play an increasingly important role in the
world economy and the worldwide telecommunication industry's revenue was
estimated to be $3.85 trillion in 2008. The
service revenue of the global telecommunications industry was estimated to be
$1.7 trillion in 2008, and is expected to touch $2.7 trillion by 2013.
A parabolic satellite
communication antenna at the biggest facility for satellite communication in
Raisting, Bavaria, Germany.
Telegraph and telephone
Main articles: Electrical
telegraph, Submarine communications cable,
and History of the telephone
The first commercial electrical telegraph was constructed
by Sir Charles Wheatstone and Sir William Fothergill Cooke, and its use
began on April 9, 1839. Both Wheatstone and Cooke viewed their device as
"an improvement to the [already-existing, so-called] electromagnetic
telegraph" not as a new device.
The businessman Samuel F.B.
Morse and the physicist Joseph Henry of
the United States developed their own, simpler version of the electrical
telegraph, independently. Morse successfully demonstrated this system on
September 2, 1837. Morse's most important technical contribution to this
telegraph was the rather simple and highly efficient Morse Code,
which was an important advance over Wheatstone's complicated and significantly
more expensive telegraph system. The communications efficiency of the Morse
Code anticipated that of the Huffman code in digital communications by over 100
years, but Morse and his associate Alfred Vail developed
the code purely empirically, unlike Huffman, who gave a detailed theoretical
explanation of how his method worked.
The first permanent transatlantic telegraph cable was
successfully completed on 27 July 1866, allowing transatlantic electrical
communication for the first time. An
earlier transatlantic cable had operated for a few months in 1859, and among
other things, it carried messages of greeting back and forth between President James
Buchanan of the United States and Queen
Victoria of the United Kingdom.
However, that transatlantic cable failed soon, and the
project to lay a replacement line was delayed for five years by the American Civil War. Also, these transatlantic
cables would have been completely incapable of carrying telephone calls even
had the telephone already been invented. The first transatlantic telephone
cable (which incorporated hundreds of electronic amplifiers) was not operational
until 1956.
The conventional telephone now in use worldwide was first patented by Alexander Graham Bell in March 1876. That
first patent by Bell was the master patent of the telephone,
from which all other patents for electric telephone devices and features
flowed. Credit for the invention of the electric telephone has been frequently
disputed, and new controversies over the issue have arisen from time-to-time.
As with other great inventions such as radio, television, the light bulb, and
the digital computer, there were several inventors
who did pioneering experimental work on voice transmission over a wire,
and then they improved on each other's ideas. However, the key innovators were
Alexander Graham Bell and Gardiner Greene Hubbard, who created the
first telephone company, the Bell Telephone Company in the United
States, which later evolved into American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T).
The first commercial telephone services were set up in
1878 and 1879 on both sides of the Atlantic in the cities of New Haven, Connecticut, and London,
England.
A replica of one of Chappe's semaphore towers in Nalbach
