A Global Network

The first networks were the ancient pathways and trails that followed the geography of rivers and coastlines and valleys. The Romans built 51,000 miles of paved roads throughout its empire, with great stone aqueducts to cross rivers and valleys. The consular roads such as the Appian Way were 24 feet wide with stone markers every mile, a rest station every tenth of a mile, and an inn every 30 miles with saloon and store and brothel. A series of semaphores informed Rome when ships arrived at seaports. Augustus developed a postal system for official correspondence, using carriages and horses that covered 100 miles per day. Private individuals could use this post only if granted a government "diploma" (double-folded, or passport). After the fall of the Roman Empire, the Roman church created a network of monasteries that exchanged goods and services and valuable manuscripts during the Middle Ages. The rise of nation-states in the 15th century created a bureacracy of state officials linking every village and province with the royal government.

Chappe semaphore, from SI
1775- The Continental Congress appointed Benjamin Franklin to be the new nation's first Postmaster. When Samuel Osgood began as Postmaster General in 1789, the nation had a network of 75 post offices and 2,000 miles of post roads. The Post Office Act of 1792 allowed newspaper editors to exchange papers without charge, and newsmen were often the local postmaster.

1792 - Claude Chappe in France developed a mechanical semaphore system with towers using mechanical arms pointing to numbers used to make words. Towers 20 miles apart could send a message 210 miles from the German border to Paris in 10 minutes, but only in good weather during daylight.

1794 - Abraham Edelcrantz in Sweden constructed 40 towers to send messages to islands near Stockholm.

1802 - Thomas Jefferson began construction of the National Road to link the eastern states with the growing western territories. A transportation revolution began building roads and canals and steamboats and railroads.

1848 - The Post Office Department subsidized the Pacific Mail Steamship Company to carry mail to California by ship from New York to Panama, across Panama by the first transcontinental railroad, then to San Francisco by ship. In 1858, the Post Office subsidized the Overland Mail Company stage line of John Butterfield to carry the mail by stagecoach 2,800 miles from Tipton, Missouri, to San Francisco. Both routes usually took over a month to travel. After April 1860, the Pony Express carried mail from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento in 10 days, until replaced by the transcontinental telegraph in October 1861.

TELEGRAPH

Field's globe, from SI

1851 - John and Jacob Brett of England built the first electrical telegraph line across the English Channel, sending the first message from England to France September 25. The line was insulated with gutta percha, a natural plastic discovered in the 1840s similar to rubber from the sap of trees in Southeast Asia. The technique of woven iron wires came from the shipbuilding industry and was used to wrap the copper center line and give the cable strength.

1854 - Cyrus Field looked at the globe in his office and dreamed of a telegraph across the Atlantic. With the support of Samuel F. B. Morse, he started by building a telegraph line in Newfoundland, the first stage of an Atlantic cable that, after numerous failures, would finally succeed in joining North American to Europe with two cables by 1866.

1861- On Oct. 24, Western Union completed a single transcontinental telegraph line from Washington DC to Sacramento, replaced after May 10, 1869, by a multi-wire system built by the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads, who joined at Promontory, Utah, on May 10 to create the transcontinental railroad.

1869 - A French company added a third transatlantic cable, linking North America with France.

1872 - Undersea telegraph cables reached Japan and China and India and Australia.

TELEPHONE

1876 - March 10, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in Boston using a liquid transmitter, and by Oct. 8 were able to transmit human speech a distance of 2 miles. Bell formed his first Bell company in 1877 (known as American Bell after 1880, and as AT&T after 1899).

1878 - The first telephone exchange with 21 telephones opened Jan. 28 in New Haven CT. President Rutherford B. Hayes installed the first telephone in the White House.

1880 - Theodore Vail began creating the Bell telephone system, with a group of regional companies owned by American Bell that provided local service, and a long distance company (called AT&T after 1885) that provided a toll service, and a manufacturing company (called Western Electric).

RADIO

1895 - Guglielmo Marconi made his first experimental wireless tests from the Shepherdess Stone in Salvan, Switzerland, transmitting a spark signal 1.5 kilometers while he was visiting the local health resort to recover from a repiratory ailment.

1901 - On Dec. 12 Guglielmo Marconi at Signal Hill in Newfoundland, received the first transatlantic radio transmission, the letter 's' in Morse code generated by a spark transmitter designed by John Ambrose Fleming from Poldhu in Cornwall, England.

1904 - Valdemar Poulsen in Denmark used arc converter that he had invented in 1902 to transmit continuous-wave radio signals to Britain. Arc transmitters would be used in radio until the development of the vacuum tube.

1915 - On January 25 AT&T completed the first transcontinental telephone line between New York City and San Francisco. On Oct. 20, the first transatlantic radio transmission was made between Arlington VA and the Eiffel Tower in Paris. The development of the vacuum tube by Bell Labs made long distance wired and wireless communication possible.

1920 - KDKA radio station in Pittsburgh began regular commercial radio broadcasting with the presidential election returns on November 2.

1922 - Oct. 18 the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) was formed for radio broadcasting. David Sarnoff of RCA created the National Broadcasting Network (NBC) in 1926, and William S. Paley created the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) in 1928. Radio networks using telephone lines and, after 1936, coaxial cables made it possible for many local radio stations to retransmit a single program simultaneously to a national audience.

1928 - On April 7 the Detroit Police Dept. began the first one-way mobile radio system in the U.S. to send radio messages from a central transmitter to police cars equipped with receivers. In 1933, the Bayonne NJ Polic Dept. began a two-way AM radio system. In 1940, the state of New Jersey adopted FM radio for police use.

TELEVISION

1932 - Aug. 22 the BBC began regular broadcasting using Baird's 30-line system until Nov. 2, 1936, when it changed to an electronic 405-line system. In 1938 the RRG in Germany broadcast the Olympic Games in Berlin with a 180-line electronic system.

1936 - On Nov. 30, Frank B. Jewett of AT&T used the first coaxial cable to speak by telephone with FCC officials in Washington.

1946 - On June 17 AT&T introduced the first commercial mobile radio-telephone service in the U.S. operating on six channels in the 150 MHz band.

1954 - SAGE computer network started as air defense system

1956 - At&T with the British General Post Office built TAT-1, the first transatlantic telephone cable, composed of two lines each transmitting 36 telephone channels in one direction.

SATELLITES

1962 - July 9 AT&T launched Telstar into orbit, the first communications satellite. On July 11, the first transatlantic TV signal was transmitted by the 7-story horn antenna at Andover, Maine, to the giant antenna at Pleumeur-Bodou, France.

1963 - The world's largest radiotelescope at Arecibo in Puerto Rico began operation, using a dish 1000 feet in diamter to receive radar and radio waves from outer space.

1965 - Early Bird, the world's first commercial communications satellite, was built for the Communications Satellite Corporation (COMSAT) by Hughes. The satellite was launched into synchronous orbit on April 6, 1965, and placed in commercial service on June 28.

FAX

1966 - Xerox introduced a small practical fax machine able to transmit a document over existing telephone lines in six minutes. The first fax machine was invented by Alexander Bain in 1843 and improved by Giovanni Caselli for the French Post & Telegraph agency that used Caselli's "pantelegraph" to communicate between Paris and Marseilles in the 1860s. Ernest A. Hummel invented the Telediagraph in 1895 that found long use in newspapers such as the New York Herald and St. Louis Republic. Arthur Korn invented telephotography in 1902 and sent the first photo by electrical facsimile transmission from Munich to Berlin in 1907. Edouard Belin in France invented the Belinograph that used a light beam to scan a cylinder to convert an image into electrical impulses, and sent his first fax from Paris to Lyon in 1907. The Belinograph was widely used by the 1920s for newspapers and businesses and government agencies, for the AT&T Wirephoto in 1925 and the RCA Radiophoto in 1926, and became the foundation for the modern fax machine that finally achieved widespread use by the late 1980s.

1967 - Corning Glass began research to develop an optical cable, succeeding in transmitting over one kilometer by 1970.

CELL PHONES

1973 - Martin Cooper at Motorola made the first cell phone call on April 3 walking down the street in Manhattan with a large 30-ounce portable handset that he had designed. He made the call to Joel Engel at Bell Labs where researchers had been working on police car cellular communications using multiple towers since1947. Public trials of a prototype cellular system began in 1978 in Chicago. The first commercial cellular system began in 1979 in Tokyo. The FCC in 1982 authorized cellular phones in the U.S., and the first handsets went on sale in 1983 for $3500. Ameritech offered the first analog FDMA, or Frequency Division Multiple Access cell phone network in Chicago, in 1983.

1974 - Motorola introduced the first Pageboy I portable pager that used a dedicated radio frequency within a limited range to alert a recipient, without display or memory.

1977 - GTE inaugurated the first fiber-optic telephone line between Long Beach and Artesia, California, that used an LED transmitter rather than laser.

1980 - The first cordless phones used a frequency of 27 MHz. In 1986 the FCC allowed a frequency of 47-49 MHz, in 1990 of 900 MHz, and in 1998 of 2.4 GHZ using a Digital Spread Spectrum (DSS).

1988 - AT&T with the British and French telephone companies, built the first transatlantic fiber-optic cable, TAT-8.

1991 - The Telecommunications Industry Asoociation created a new TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access) standard for the cell phone industry. Two digital standards emerged during the following decade: CDMA and GSM.

INTERNET

1991 - World-Wide Web (WWW) developed by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN was a landmark in the history of the Internet.

1993 - Mosaic "web browser" software was created by student Marc Andreesen and programmer Eric Bina at NCSA in the first 3 months of 1993. The beta version 0.5 of X Mosaic for UNIX was released Jan. 23 and was an instant success. The PC and Mac versions followed in the next few months. Mosaic was the first software to interpret a new IMG tag to display graphics along with text. Netscape Navigator 1.0 was released in December, 1994, given away free, and soon gained 75% of world browser market. Microsoft Explorer 3.0 was released summer 1996. The WWW grew fast because infrastructure was already in place: the Internet, desktop PC, home modems connected to online services such as AOL and Compuserve.

WI-FI

1999 - In July, Apple introduced an Airport card for its laptop computers that allowed high-speed wireless transmission within a range of 100 feet. Other computer companies soon followed, as did audiovisual and appliance manuacturers, making Wi-Fi the ideal technology for a home network. The IEEE had defined the 802.11 standard in 1997 at the request of NCR seeking to create a network for its cash registers. The IEEE used one of the three unlicensed freuqencies set aside by the FCC in 1985 for short range spread spectrum uses. The IEEE created the name "Wi-Fi" because it sounded similar to Hi-Fi that consumers already understood and would accept.

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revised 8/15/05 by Steven Schoenherr at the University of San Diego