- Have you ever wondered of how the first phones were like?
- Do you knew that people also communicated using only a point and a dash?
- Do you know the real origin of the word “television”?
If you want to know more about the communications don’t hesitate and start reading! Hope you like it.
Communications means any way of sending and receiving messages containing information.
There are many different ways of communicating. One of the simplest ways is by using our face, per example: smiling sends a message to other people showing him/her that you are happy. Also some basic signs made with our hands can be a starting point to communicate with other people. This is probably how people first communicated when they had to carry out joint tasks such as hunting. However, this way of communicating is a bit limited though. You cannot convey any complicated messages so, for these, you need a language.
Once you have a language, you may communicate easily, but there appears another barrier: the distance. To face that problem, firstly, people started to use smoke signals, fire, drum beats and horns (this one were firstly made from animals and then by metal).
Then people start using messengers, which also could use horses. When the Romans copied that system and called it positus, the postal service was born.
Do you know that…
…if your message is really urgent you need it to travel even faster… Solution: Homing pigeons!
They have been used right up to the 21st century. The homing pigeons were used in both World War I and World War II to carry important messages across enemy territory.
In fact, few people worked out ways of doing communications in long distances and, in the 1830s, two of the best ideas emerged: one in Britain, by Charles Wheatstone and William F. Cooke, and the other one in America, by Samuel F. B. Morse. Both of these machines were types of telegraph.
Do you know that…
…the word “telegraph” is made up of two Greek words: “tele” means “far” or “at a distance” and “graph” means “writing”?
…the Morse code is a way of communication using just a point and a dash?
About 40 years after the telegraph was first used, the telephone was invented by Alexander Graham Bell and this way people could talk to each other over the wires.
Another 20 years after that, the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi got rid of the wires and managed to send a signal from Penarth in Wales to Weston-super-Mare in England and, in 1901, he sent a wireless signal across the Atlantic Ocean. This way Morse code could be sent by radio. This was called wireless telegraphy. Soon the two inventions of radio and the telephone were put together so that speech could be sent wirelessly too.
Do you know that…
…on March 10, 1876 the first words spoken on the telephone, by Alexander Bell himself, were: “Mr. Watson, come here, I want you”. The Mr Watson in question was his assistant Thomas.
…the U.S. Supreme Court granted to Nikola Tesla the merits of establishing the radio, considering that Marconi had use 19 Tesla’s patents in his project?
About the same time as the telephone was being worked on, another inventor, Thomas Edison, was trying to record sounds and play them back. This led to the development of the record player.
Thousands of copies of a record could be made very cheaply and so recordings became another type of mass communication. Although we can buy tapes and CDs today, there is still plenty of vinyl around.
Do you know that…
…the first records were made of wax and easily broken, but they improved over the years and were eventually made of a plastic called viny?
John Logie Baird, a Scottish inventor, brought together a number of devices invented by others to send pictures of moving images for the first time. The BBC used his system to start television broadcasts in 1927 and started the first high-quality public broadcasts nine years later. In those days there was only one channel and you had to be quite rich to afford a TV set.
…the first TV remote control, sold in the 1950s, was called the “Lazy Bones”?
…the word “television” is truly international? It was originally a French word that is a mixture of Greek and Latin parts and was dreamt up by a Russian in 1900.
The first electro-mechanical computer was built by Konrad Zuse. In 1936, the German engineer built from relays to perform the calculations and data read from tape perforated, the Z1.
Since that computers have evolved more and more and achieved popularity by people from each age, but mostly by children (to play), teenagers (to play, chat or do school works) and adults (mainly to work).
Do you know that…
…one of the first computers had the following dimensions: 30 meters in length x 1 meter wide x 3 meters high!?
…the first use of the word “computer” was recorded in 1613, referring to a person who carried out calculations, or computations, and the word continued with the same meaning until the middle of the 20th century. From the end of the 19th century onwards, the word began to take on its more familiar meaning, describing a machine that carries out computations.
The evolution of computers:
The Internet is one of the most fabulous things nowadays. With it we can send instant messages and receive the answer in a very short period of time, know the last news, search, “travel” the world without leaving home. Of course not all speak the same language, so, with the spread of English in education, the Internet and the need of people to communicate with some foreign things to them in which they use English, this language is becoming more popular.
Do you know that…
…Queen Elizabeth II sent her first email in 1976?
…the Internet is a product of the Cold War? It was originally designed by ARPA (the Advanced Research Projects Agency), a US military research organization, as a decentralized communications network that could not be destroyed in a single nuclear attack.
…the name for unwanted emails is “spam” and this name comes from a sketch performed by the British comedy team Monty Python about the tinned meat made from pork and ham, known as spam. In the sketch a couple in a restaurant tries, unsuccessfully, to order a meal that does not include spam. From this spam came to mean something that nobody wants but that is difficult to avoid!
The two most important developments in communications recently have been mobile communications and computers. Mobile phones are everywhere! Computers have changed things enormously, and the arrival of the Internet and the World Wide Web have made possible e-mail, messageboards, chatrooms, websites, blogs and so on. All this new technologies have been increasingly entering into our lives and we are so addicted that seems we could not live without them. So we just need to appreciate this evolution (but trying not to get too addicted) and wonder “what next?”
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