One of the traits that sets us, as humans, apart from the rest of the animal kingdom is our ability to communicate in a variety of ways.
Granted, other animals communicate in one form or another.
But it is our ability to use language, both written and spoken, and complex symbolism, and deliver these through other systems, such as radio, telephone, pictures, etc. to communicate with other human beings.
But it was not always so.
The history of communication begins with hand signs and body language to communicate to others the most elemental things like hunger or pain.
From there, a long, winding road stretches to our times.
Here are 10 milestones in human communication.
Pictograms
Pictographs are the earliest form of communication we know but much different from what we consider “writing” today.
A pictograph is a pictorial representation for a word or phrase.
A good example of pictograms is the Chinese characters or symbols, often called ideograms, used for communication.
Chinese pictograms represent ideas or things and don’t have to be spelled out, as they are understood in their entirety by the reader.
This form of representation is foundational to human communication, marking the initial steps towards the development of complex writing systems.
Our cave-dwelling ancestors used two kinds of pictograms to communicate with each other: petroglyphs and petrographs.
Petroglyphs are made by carving images onto a surface with a sharp, pointed instrument, while petrographs are made by painting images onto rocks.
Eventually, petroglyphs lent themselves to the creation of cuneiform, a type of writing employed by the Sumerians. Writing was born.
Alphabets
Cuneiform, one of the earliest forms of writing dating back to the 4th millennium BCE, began as a way to keep track of commodities, and then developed into a form of accounting.
The Sumerians gradually incorporated syllables until it became a complete writing system.
The script was later adapted to the Akkadian (spoken in Mesopotamia), Hurrian, Hittite (spoken in Turkey), Ugaritic (spoken in Syria) and Old Persian languages.
The development of alphabets allowed for more advanced and widespread communication, laying the groundwork for modern civilizations.
Other writing systems emerged later on such the Egyptian hieroglyphs, the Elamite script, Chinese characters and the Phoenician alphabet, among others.
The Phoenician alphabet gave rise to the Aramaic and Greek alphabets which in turn led to the creation of the written languages of Western Asia and Europe.
The Postal Service
“The mail is a wonderful thing. Just one letter can change a person’s life.”
Takayuki Ikkaku
With writing systems firmly in place, the stage was set to expand and extend communication beyond the confines of a limited geographical area.
There’s still scholarly debate as to who first instituted a postal service but the likely candidates seem to be the Persian King, Cyrus the Great, or Hammurabi and Sargon II.
This early form of communication infrastructure enabled the exchange of information over large distances, serving as a precursor to modern mailing and communication systems.
The latter devised a system where riders would carry information over long distances on horseback periodically changing horses at several strategic posts to continue the journey.
That would be the model for postal services throughout the world for centuries, with slight variations. Civilizations like the Indian, Roman, Mauryans and the Chinese all had postal service by horse.
Pigeon Post
The next great innovation in postal services came by way of another animal—the pigeon.
Though the practice of using carrier pigeons to transport messages began in ancient times, especially in battlegrounds, it wasn’t until the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 that the method proved to be thoroughly efficient.
This use of carrier pigeons under dire circumstances reveals the resourcefulness and resilience of human communication methods when conventional options are unavailable.
With Paris besieged by the Prussians and all communication cut off (postmen and telegraph cables), the Parisians turned to the docile but mighty pigeon to transmit messages in and out of the City of Lights for the duration of the siege.
Despite efforts by the Prussians to thwart the Parisian pigeon post, like the use of specially trained falcons to interrupt the service, the Parisians managed to receive and send 150,000 official and 1 million private communications during the four-month siege.
Morse Code & the Telegraph
With the discovery of electricity and its applications came new inventions, one of them the telegraph.
In 1836, Samuel Morse, an American artist, along with American physicist Joseph Henry, and inventor Alfred Vail developed a novel system that transmits a series of pulses of electric current along wires creating sounds or signals known as “dots” and “dashes” or “dits and “dahs.”
Their next step was to come up with a code that could transmit natural language, a feat that Morse accomplished brilliantly and simply.
Morse code's longevity and eventual replacement signify the enduring quest for more efficient, universal forms of communication. Its final message encapsulates the emotional resonance of technological obsolescence, capturing a moment of transition between eras.
The telegraph and Morse code remained the principal means of communication for decades for governments, financial institutions and private citizens.
As a testament to its efficiency, Morse code was used until 1999 when it was replaced by the Global Maritime Distress Safety System.
Its swan song was eloquently transmitted by the French Navy in its last message in Morse with the dits and dahs for “Calling all. This is our last cry before our eternal silence.”
Wireless Telegraph
“The wireless telegraph is not difficult to understand. The ordinary telegraph is like a very long cat. You pull the tail in New York, and it meows in Los Angeles.”
Albert Einstein
In other words, radio. Samuel Morse et al conquered communications via wires, but the next big step involved some of the most formidable minds of the era to produce a wireless device to transmit Morse code.
Some of the names that participated in the endeavor have gone down in history: Edison, Tesla, Marconi, Morse, Faraday, Hertz, Maxwell and other lesser-known geniuses but equally important in the wireless adventure.
The history of radio obviously begins with its predecessor—Morse’s telegraph. Morse’s invention worked by creating a “loop” between two stations and two wires, one outgoing and the other incoming.
But by 1837, Carl August von Steinheil, a German physicist, discovered that by burying a metal plate into the ground and connecting one leg of the telegraph device to it, he could do away with one of the loop’s wires and still maintain communication. Wireless communication was first proposed by James Maxwell in 1864.
Marconi claimed the glory, but let's not forget the myriad intellects who co-wrote this symphony of wireless communication.
His research suggested that invisible frequencies could travel through the air. Heinrich Hertz proved Maxwell right when he was able to transmit and receive a signal over short distances.
Unfortunately, Hertz saw no practical applications in his discovery, but he is still honoured by naming all frequencies after him.
After this, the great minds of the era rushed to contribute to solidifying wireless radio in one way or another, but it is Marconi who finally came up with a practical device composed of an aerial, a condenser and a connection to earth.
More importantly, he was the first to patent the invention and thus take credit for this great discovery.
The Typewriter
A child of Gutenberg’s moveable type printing machine, itself an important innovation in mass communication, and parent to the PC, the typewriter revolutionized writing and communications for decades.
Though the first patent for a writing device was granted to Henry Mill in Britain in 1714, the invention of the typewriter is an accumulation of knowledge and trial and error by many people around the world.
However, it seems that Pellegrino Turri was the first to invent a “typewriter” and carbon paper as ink in 1808.
William Austin Burt was the next person to invent what he called a “typographer,” but the machine used a dial instead of keys and thus made it slower than handwriting. In the end, Burt was unable to find a buyer for his patent and it all came to naught.
Not until the appearance of Rev.
The typewriter emerged from a crucible of collective ingenuity, each contributor adding a unique twist.
Rasmus Malling-Hansen, a Danish inventor, and his Hansen Writing Ball, did the typewriter begin mass production and enjoy commercial success.
The Writing Ball was the first of its kind and was used extensively in offices, as well as the public in general, well into 1909.
This first successful incursion into the marketplace was followed by another typewriter invented by Carlos Glidden, Christopher Latham Sholes, and Samuel W. Soule, from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Once the patent was secured (by E. Remington and Sons), the typewriter underwent a serious upgrade, using a QWERTY keyboard layout that made typing easier and faster.
It was an immediate success and was commercialized as the Sholes and Glidden Typewriter or Remington No. 1. From here it was a short jump to applying electricity to the new invention, and the rest is history.
The Telephone
“The day will come when the man at the telephone will be able to see the distant person to whom he is speaking.”
Alexander Graham Bell
With the printed language now shored up by technology— books were being printed by the millions and sold around the world thanks to Gutenberg’s invention and its descendants–, and the typewriter facilitating intra-personal, governmental and business communications, and the human voice now travelling over thousands of miles via wire, albeit one way, the stage was now set for two-way voice communications—the telephone.
Two men were pitted against each other for recognition as being the first to invent the telephone: Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell.
While both men had come up with similar devices, or “harmonic telegraphs,” Bell beat Gray to the patent office in 1876 and is now credited with the invention.
Gray and Bell, forever bound by a race against time, share a heritage rooted in the genius of overlooked predecessors like Meucci.
However, even before these men had taken up the challenge of transmitting speech through a wire, other men were busy with the same endeavor, most notably Antonio Meucci, who, again, through personal problems and problems with the patent office, could not duly register his device.
Still, both Gray and Bell owe a great deal to the research of others. Bell’s harmonic telegraph could send multiple messages over the same wire at the same time by transmitting signals through a membrane that could vary electronic currents and a receiver to convert them into audio.
Such a paramount invention debuted with the mundane words: “Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you.”
Bell’s voice travelled through a wire and became sound again in Watson’s ear and history was made.
Television
“Television is like the American toaster, you push the button and the same thing pops up everytime.”
Alfred Hitchcock
Not content with hoisting speech onto wires and writing onto paper by mechanical means for all eternity, the scientists and inventors of the 19th century came up with the idea of duplicating, or recreating, reality by capturing it and transmitting it via wires onto a screen.
The quest to capture reality essentially began with two men: Paul Gottlieb Nipkow and John Logie Baird.
As a young student in Germany, Nipkow invented and patented the first electromechanical TV system.
The system used a scanning disk full of holes spiraling toward the center.
A device originally too complex for practical application is now responsible for our daily deluge of information — what an irony!
As the disk rotated, it would catch light and let it pass through onto a selenium sensor to produce electrical pulses.
This was the rasterization method. As an image was focused on the rotating disk, each hole captured a horizontal “slice” of the entire image.
It was ingenious but not practical.
Baird, on the other hand, is credited with having invented the world’s first true mechanical television, the first publicly demonstrated colour television system; and the first purely electronic colour television picture tube.
Years later, Arthur Korn and Lee De Forest would turn television into a functioning mechanism.
Computers
“Everybody should learn to program a computer, because it teaches you how to think.”
Steve Jobs
The invention of the computer also stems from the 19th century, although calculating machines did exist in ancient times.
British mathematician, polymath and true genius Charles Babbage designed the first Analytical Engine, which serves as the basic framework for computers today.
The 19th century saw the advent of many mechanical calculators, but the world would have to wait until the 20th century to see a true computer.
Well into the 20th century, computers can be classified into three periods.
The first from 1937 to 1946 when Dr. John V. Atanasoff and Clifford Berry built the first digital computer called the Atanasoff-Berry Computer, or ABC.
The next big step came with the Colossus Computer built for the military in 1943, and then the ENIAC in 1946.
The ENIAC was enormous and cumbersome weighing in at 30 tons and needing 18,000 vacuum tubes for processing.
The next period saw the first computer for commercial use in 1951 called the UNIVAC I and IBM came out with its series 650 and 700.
Babbage never lived to see his Analytical Engine materialize; what would he think of our pocket-sized computational wonders?
Computers really took off at this point with 100 different programming languages created, memory and operating systems making their appearance.
The third period comprises 1963 to the present and the innovations have been mind-boggling. Integrated circuits became the mainstay of third-generation computers, making them smaller, faster, more reliable, more powerful and able to do a variety of tasks at the same time.
The 1980s gave us MS-DOS, IBM Personal Computers and Apple came out with its Macintosh computer, while Bill Gates introduced us to his Windows operation system.
While all of these have been great advances, not just in technology but also in design, the 21st century has seen PCs fly out of this world in terms of power and speed.
Computers are getting smaller and smaller with each decade, to the point where our mobiles now double as pocket PCs, so who knows what the future holds in store?
#IronyIn8WordsOrLess
The ceaseless march of human ingenuity in communication, from grunting cave dwellers to keyboard warriors!
We’ve gone from etching symbols on rocks to sending emojis faster than you can say “LOL.”
Yet, as we revel in the speed and convenience of our modern marvels, let’s not forget that the essence of communication isn’t in the medium, but in the message.
So, whether you’re tweeting or sending a carrier pigeon, remember: It’s not about how fast you say it, but what you’re actually saying.
Ah, but who am I kidding?
You’ve probably already stopped reading to check your latest notifications.
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