Timeline of communication technology
- 3500s BC – The Sumerians develop cuneiform writing and the Egyptians
develop hieroglyphic writing - 1500s BC – The Phoenicians develop an alphabet
- 170 BC – Parchment is discovered in Pergamum
- 105 – Tsai Lun invents paper
- 350 – The Chinese develop a method for printing pages using symbols carved on a wooden block
- 1450 – The Chinese develop wooden block movable type printing
- 1454 – Johannes Gutenberg finishes a printing press with metal movable
type - 1793 – Claude Chappe establishes the first long-distance semaphore telegraph line
- 1831 – Joseph Henry proposes and builds an electric telegraph
- 1835 – Samuel Morse develops the Morse code
- 1843 – Samuel Morse builds the first long distance electric telegraph line
- 1876 – Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Watson exhibit an electric
telephone - 1877 – Thomas Edison patents the phonograph
- 1889 – Almon Strowger patents the direct dial telephone
- 1901 – Guglielmo Marconi transmits radio signals from Cornwall to Newfoundland
- 1925 – John Logie Baird transmits the first television signal
- 1942 – Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil invent frequency hopping spread
spectrum communication technique - 1948 – Claude Shannon writes a paper that establishes the mathematical
basis of information theory - 1958 – Chester Carlson presents the first photocopier suitable for office use
- 1966 – Charles Kao realizes that silica-based optical waveguides offer a practical way to transmit light via total internal reflection
- 1969 – The first hosts of ARPANET, Internet’s ancestor, are connected.
- 1973 – Akira Hasegawa and Fred Tappert propose the use of solitary waves to carry information in optical fibers
- 1977 – Donald Knuth begins work on TeX
- 1980 – Linn Mollenauer, Rogers Stollen, and James Gordon demonstrate that solitary waves can be propagated through optical fibers
- 1989 – Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau built the prototype system which became the World Wide Web at CERN
- 1991 – Anders Olsson transmits solitary waves through an optical fiber with a data rate of 32 billion bits per second