Highlights in Telecom history

Some interesting Highlights and interesting facts in telecommunications history are as follows:

• 1837: Samuel Morse develops the electrical telegraph and signaling system. Embarrassingly, he couldn’t get it to work during the unveiling demonstration!
• 1849: Antonio Meucci invents the first device to electronically transmit the human voice (i.e., phone). It flopped because to hear, users had to put the receiver in their mouth.
• 1866: First transatlantic telecommunication is made.
• 1876: Alexander Bell and Elisha Gray independently invent the telephone. Although Gray filed his patent application first, bad legal advice and a clerical error led him to withdraw his application and the patent was awarded to Bell.
• 1878: First commercial telephone service set up in New Haven, Connecticut (home of Yale University) and the following year in London.
• 1901: Guglielmo Marconi positions himself to win the 1909 Nobel Prize in physics by inventing a working wireless radio that functions between Canada and England.
• 1925: John Baird demonstrates the transmission of moving pictures at Selfridges, a London’s departmental store which conveniently sells couches.
• 1929: The BBC makes the first experimental TV broadcast.
• 1940: George Stibitz makes the first computer transmission using a mainframe system and remote terminals. Mammoth mainframes dominate the emerging industry through the next two decades.
• 1960: Computer geeks start experimenting with packet switching, bypassing the mainframe to send large packets of data directly to different computers.
• 1969: The first network – just 4 modes – is in operation.
• 1970: Scientists at Corning Glass Works produce the first viable optical fiber, ushering in a new era in telecommunications and enabling the internet.
• 1978: The first international packet switched network connects the U.S. and Europe.
• 1989: While working for CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau invent the web.
• 1990: Fledgling micro-networks slowly merge to become the behemoth that today we call the “net.”

And today its 2017, the path from discovery to implementation and production moves literally at the speed of light.