Humans are naturally very social beings and the way we communicate is vital aspect of

our lives. More importantly, communicating over long distances is something that
people once struggled with, but thanks to recent advances in technology, it is much
easier for us today. Where we once relied on smoke signals and even carrier pigeons, we
have many more options now. During the 1800s, there was a rush among inventors to
develop newer and better ways to allow long distance and mass communication.

Letters

Writing a letter is a form of communication that has persisted despite all of the high-
speed technologies available today. However, the way it is delivered has changed a great
deal over the years. As far back as the early 1800s, letters were delivered by messengers.
In cities, quite often a servant from a family’s household was sent to deliver a letter on
foot and sometimes they would even wait at the recipient’s house or place of business to
take the answering letter back with them. Longer distances were conquered by sending a
messenger on horseback. By 1837, a British schoolteacher named Rowland Hill came up
with the idea of postage stamps, and this gave birth to postal system. Today we can even
send letters by air or by sea within a few days, where without modern sorting and
shipping techniques, it would have otherwise taken months. Today’s younger
generations tend to be less familiar with the act of writing a letter and even refer to it as
snail mail. The U.S. Postal Service has confirmed that their mail volume decreased by
around twenty percent between 2006 and 2010. However, many businesses and private
citizens still use it as a more formal means of communication.

Morse Code and the Telegraph

Letter writing was still the exclusive mean of written communication well into the first
few decades of the 1800s, although by that time a few inventors had started dabbling
with primitive prototypes of a telegraph. One man, Samuel Morse, who was actually
working as a painter at the time, received a letter that his wife was fatally ill. In the time
it took for him to receive the letter and then return home from her, she had already
passed away. Driven by the inefficiency of hand-delivered letters, Morse worked hard on
developing an electromagnetic telegraph system. More importantly, he also developed a
system of communicating through this machine. It was known as Morse code and
consisted of a series of coded dots and dashes that corresponded with the alphabet.
After patenting his invention, telegrams soon became quite popular as a way of
delivering short amounts of information quickly and across long distances. The
telegraph became even more important when it was heavily used during the Second
World War.

Printing Press

The history of the printing press dates back to the 1400s, when Johannes Guternberg
created a model based on primitive versions already in use. His printing press used
removable metal letters that could be rearranged to create blocks of text. Before that,
people had to pen texts by hand, which was an extremely laborious process. During the
Renaissance, commercial printing presses could churn out almost 4,000 pages each day.
Before the printing press, books were highly valued and treasured objects. Many
families would only have one book in their homes: the Bible. The printing press allowed
people to access books and pamphlets for far lower prices, helping to educate them and
introduce them to new ideas. Johannes Gutenberg’s first creation using his new press
was a copy of the bible; an extremely famous version that is known as the Gutenberg
Bible. Since his time, printing presses have evolved into more sophisticated versions,
but they are still used for the same reasons to distribute news and literature on a mass
scale.

Telephone

After the telegraph was invented, others continued to experiment with electromagnets
and their potential in telecommunication devices. With so many active inventors
sharing ideas and developing machines with overlapping concepts, there is some dispute
as to the original inventor of the telephone. However in 1876, one man, Alexander
Graham Bell, did succeed legally by securing a patent for his version of the telephone,
and so he is remembered best in association with this invention. Several decades earlier,
telephone-type devices required the listener to speak and listen through the same piece.
Later, the phone evolved into a device where the listener had to hold one piece to their
ear and speak into the main phone unit. A later version, the model with which we are
more familiar with today, included both earpiece and mouth piece on one handle. Many
telephone operators were also later replaced by self-dialing systems.

Fun fact: Conference Calls Unlimited was one of the first conference call providers on
the Internet. We’ve been online since 1998!

Radio

After the invention of the telegraph, some inventors started attempting ways to create a
wireless version of the same machine. In doing so, they learned how to generate and use
radio waves. In turn, this helped to develop the radio. It was a Serbian-American
engineer named Nikola Tesla who first started publicly experimenting with radio
frequencies and transmission. In 1897, he got a patent for his invention and explored
ways to use radios for communication. Later, other companies and inventors came up
with variations of the radio using different technology. The first long radio broadcast
only came in 1916, from Tufts University. As more and more radio stations cropped up
across the country, organizations were set up to help regulate the content that was
broadcast. Today the radio is used to deliver news and entertainment, and it is still used
as a communication device in many industries.

Television

Before television, people relied on radio and live entertainment to amuse themselves.
From the late 1800s, a few inventors had been experimenting with displaying images on
a screen. It was a Scottish man named John Logie Baird who was successful in showing
moving images on a screen in 1925. Compared to today’s high-tech sets, Baird’s
invention was quite slow, showing only about twelve frames per minute, but it was
remarkable nonetheless. Several others continued to improve on his original design. The
cathode ray tube was used to create better output on screens. The first TV images were
halftones, and then black and white, before color was finally introduced in 1953.
Television continues to rule many living rooms across the world and we have far more to
choose from in terms of sizes, models and even channels.

Email

Even before the Internet was fully evolved,

electronic mail had been developed in the 1970s as a way to send messages from one
computer to another. In the early days, both users had to be online at the same time in
order to send and receive messages through a central system. It was a computer network
called ARPANET that largely contributed to the development of email. In 1971, the first
email was sent by Ray Tomlinson, an American programmer. Instead of only being able
to send text messages, we can also transfer multimedia and other attachments as well.
Through the 1990s, email quickly caught on as the quick, new way to communicate.
While email is still one of the main means of modern communication methods, it is
facing some competition from instant messaging and social media services.
Cell Phone

In the 1970s, a researcher at Motorola named Martin Cooper began working on portable
communication devices. In 1973, he developed a type of mobile phone. It was a large,
clunky prototype, now colloquially referred to as “the brick” for its awkward size and
shape. For the next couple of decades, the main aim of many cell phone manufacturers
was to make phones that were smaller and sleeker. With digital cell phones, new options
were added, such as the ability to store phone numbers, change ring tones and even play
games. In recent years, this has given way to smart phones. These devices combine
computing power into a cell phone, giving the user Internet access and basic computer
functionality all in a pocket-sized cell phone.

Advancement in communication at first progressed quite slowly. In the beginning

communication was limited to the short distance a person (or carrier pigeon) could travel.
In addition to distance, communication was limited by the amount of time it took to get a
message from one place to another. Can you imagine how long it took to send letters across
the ocean by sail boat? For a very long time this was the most effective form of
communication available. In the 1800’s there was an explosion in the ways we
communicated globally. Telegraphs, radio and telephones made a dramatic difference in
how information can be conveyed. In recent years we have seen another boom in
communication. With new technology we are now able to communicate across the globe
(and even into space) almost instantaneously.