In this article you will get to know the most important stages of Telecommunication history from prehistorical times to 21century, which is the evidence of a person's never-ending aspiration for progress.
Prehistoric Era: Prehistoric man used fire and smoke signals as well as drum messages to encode information over a limited geographic area when they wished to contact neighboring clans.
5th century BCE: Pigeon post: Persia and Syria are considered to the first to use pigeon messaging system approximately in the 5th century BCE.
4th century BCE: Hydraulic semaphore: In the 4th century BCE, the hydraulic semaphore was designed in ancient Greece as a method of communication.
15th century CE: Maritime flag semaphore: Communication between ships was very difficult before the 15th century. At that time, flag semaphore, a special code involving the positions of two hand-held flags, was introduced. Each position and motion represented a letter or number. This made it very easy for fleets to communicate.
1672: First experimental acoustic (mechanical) telephone: Robert Hooke is first credited with creating an acoustic telephone in 1672. Hooke discovered that sound could be transmitted over wire or string into an attached ear piece or mouthpiece.
1838: Electrical telegraph: Samuel B. Morse, Alfred Vail and Leonard Gale discovered that when connecting two model telegraphs together and running electricity through a wire, you could send messages by holding or releasing the buttons in a series of intervals. This became known as Morse code and lay the foundation for modern land-line phones.
1877: Acoustic phonograph: Thomas Alva Edison made incredible strides in sound recording and transmission when he completed the first acoustic phonograph in August of 1877.
1896: Radio: In 1896, Marconi sent his first long-distance wireless transmission. The signal was sent over a distance of 2 kilometers. The recipient of this signal waved a white kerchief to show that it had been received. This earned Marconi a place in the history books as the man who gave us the first radio.
1927: Television: Phillip T. Farnsworth gave us the first television prototype.
1969: Computer networking: In October of 1969, the first data traveled between nodes of the ARPANET, a predecessor of the Internet. This was the first computer network and was invented by Charley Kline and Bill Duvall.
1973: First modern-era mobile phone: Inventor Martin Cooper placed the first cellular mobile call in 1973 to his rival at Bell Labs, Joel Engel. The first mobile phone had a maximum talk time of 30 minutes, and it took a year for the battery to recharge. The phone would eventually be a prototype for Motorola's first mobile phones.
1983: Internet: On January 1, 1983, the Internet was officially born. ARPANET officially switched its old network control protocols (NCP) and Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) became standard.
2003: VoIP Internet telephony: In 2003, phone calls were now capable of being transmitted over a computer through Internet protocols. This meant that long-distance charges were not applicable, as callers would use already-established computer networks.