See also :Chronology of Communication after electronics to
1998,
Chronology of communication before electricity,
A Convoluted History of Early Telecommunications.
1837- British inventors
William Cooke and
Charles Wheatstone patent workable technologies for the electric
telegraph.
This will quickly make them very rich as the technology effectively ends the troublesome trainwrecks which have 'piled-up'
in England since the
Industrial Revolution began. Meanwhile, Sir Rowland Hill publishes
Post Office Reform: Its
Importance and Practicability which leads to
the elimination of postal charges by distance in favour of a universal penny post, for which patrons pay by purchase of
adhesive stamps. This is fairly cool idea at the time, making distance
communication uniformly affordable for the first
time to just about everyone. Finally,
Samuel Morse granted a patent on the
electromagnetic telegraph, originally a device
that embosses a series of dots
and dashes on a paper roll. This didn't really impress anyone, especially
Congress who thought it was some sort of
astral projection.
1838- The
Brothers Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm undertake the preparation of the Deutsches Wörterbuch, an
authoritative
dictionary of the German language. Numerous scholars labour on the book after the Grimms' death; it appears in
its final form in 1960.
Samuel F. B. Morse develops the
Morse Code, a language coding system for
telegraphy. People now take him quite
seriously. England introduces the
railway post office, in which
mail is sorted on the way to its destination.
1839- Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre and Joseph-Nicéphore Niepce invent the
daguerreotype, the first
widely successful
form of
photography. People are however required to sit for up to an hour at a time while the processing is taking place,
which is why people look so exhausted and morose in old pictures.
Spirit photography also gets a lot of press.
1840- The first adhesive
postage stamp, "the
Penny Black" makes its glorious debut as Great Britain revamped its Penny Post system.
1842- Augusta
Ada, Countess of Lovelace, British
mathematician, creates the first
computer program
for
Babbage's prototype computer, which technically makes her the first
programmer period - later they even name a
language after here,
ADA. She was also a niece of
Lord Byron and a
compulsive gambler who hoped the
Analytical Engine
might be able to eventually pick horses.
1844- The
telegraph is used to report results of
Whig convention in Baltimore to
New York newspapers. Electrified
semaphore now includes 500 stations linking 29 cities in
France.
1845- Perforated strips of
postal stamp are first sold to the public in Britain.
1846- The
Smithsonian Institution is established by
Congress in Washington, D.C. using funds donated by the English
scientist James Smithson. Other major museums of science and industry open in New York, London, Paris, Munich, and other cities
over the course of the century.
1847- George Boole publishes The Mathematical Analysis of Logic: Being an Essay Towards a Calculus of Deductive
Reasoning, providing the mathematical basis for the logic of
digital computation. Much AND, OR, NOT and many, many
flowcharts ensue. A
patent issued for the first rotary press in the United States. The
technology makes
possible the widespread
production of newspapers in the mid nineteenth century.
1848- The Associated Press is formed in the United States to pool
telegraph expenses.
1851- The Great Exhibition opens in London, offering a compendious display of 19th-century technology and culture.
1852- Peter Mark Roget publishes his
Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases. Henceforth, all manner of personages
commence
utilizing parlance of a vastly elongated variety.
1853- The Indian
telegraph system opens, facilitating
British colonial administration, which
translates
roughly, helps keep the
opium flowing. The
Bombay Trading Company and
East India Company and its private army find this
very helpful in running
spice plantations.
1854- Opening of the Astor
Public Library, later the
New York Public library.
1855- The British government sends Roger Fenton to photograph the
war in the Crimea. His pictures
portray
the war favourably, and gloss over the disaster of the
charge of the Light Brigade.
1857- Work begun on the
Oxford English Dictionary.
1858- The first
trans-Atlantic telegraph cable attempted; the first permanently successful cable is laid in 1866,
from Ireland to Heart's Content,
Newfoundland. News that used to take two weeks to cross the Atlantic now moves at roughly
30 words a minute, a fairly major improvement in
bandwidth. Before three weeks are out however, the
insulation of the
wire has broken down. Incidentally, the telegraph station is still in Heart's Content, which has been a very quiet place
since
wireless telegraphy.
c. 1860- The introduction of practical one-sided
carbon paper makes possible the creation of multiple copies at the
time
of composition, and allows copying on thicker paper that can be stored in vertical files. By 1910 it is the chief means of
making copies.
1861- Charles Darwin publishes The
Origin of Species, which spawns some really annoying theories like
Evolutionary
Psychology,
free market nonsense, and lots and lots of nasty
competition.
1865- The American William Bullock gains a patent for the first roll-fed rotary press, improving on earlier innovations;
it
produces 12,000 complete newspapers per hour.
1866- Appearance of Vol. 1 of Larousse's Grand Dictionnaire Universel du XIXe Siecle . The
French Academy takes
their language real serious-like, unlikes us. At the same time, however
Cyrus Field is attempting the
re-installation of the Atlantic Cable.
1867- American inventor Christopher Latham Scholes builds the first practical
typewriter. In 1873
Remington begins
to
manufacture the machines in large numbers. By 1886 there are more than 50,000 machines in use. They fill offices in rows and
go
about making things extremely loud in the
work environment.
1869- Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleyev publishes the
periodic law of the elements.
c. 1870- Development of the sulphite process for pulping wood allows increased production of printed material and
books,
and effectively throws the early
recycling industry,
rag and bone men, out of work. A century later software starts doing
the same thing to bank tellers, travel agents and accountants.
1870-1890- A
museum boom leads to the building of museums in most major cities in
Europe and the Americas. In
England, more than 100 museums are opened in this period.
Paul Valery, poet of the time, then points out 'only an
irrational civilization, one devoid of taste, could have devised such a domain of incoherence...this system of putting
together
works which simply negate one another as arranged units of incompatible pleasure by order of number and abstraction,' i.e.
don't belive the hype.
1870- Balloons are used to deliver mail during the siege of Paris.
Walter Benjamin writes later that at the same
time,
government soldiers in Paris shot the faces of public clocks to thwart citizens from organizing effective resistance.
1871- R. L. Maddox introduces dry-plate process in
photography. It will free photographers from the use of
tripod
and
lead to fast
portable cameras. The first
telephone exchange, or central switching point, is installed in
New Haven,
Connecticut, later home to
the
NSA.
Thomas Edison, is this year perfecting
duplex telegraphy, which allows sending and reception at the
same time on the same wire.
1874- Twenty-two nations sign a treaty in
Bern establishing the General Postal Union, later the
Universal Postal
Convention, which sets procedures for the exchange of international
mail.
1875- Frank Stephen Baldwin patents an "arithometer" that can add, subtract, multiply and divide. In 1891, in
association
with James Monroe, he patents the Monroe calculator.
1876- Thomas Edison patents the
spirit duplicator, which with other methods of
mimeography makes possible
efficient
diffusion of written
communication in large
office organizations.
Alexander Graham Bell introduces the
telephone.
Melvil Dewey outlines the classification system later known as
Dewey Decimal, after spending a lot of time drinking and
being very bored in upstate New York, one suspects.
Victorianism bred this kind of
urge to
classify. And Henry Martin
Robert, a U.S. Army officer, writes the standard manual on procedure in the United States, known as
Robert's Rules of Order.
Alexander Graham Bell sends his first signal.
1877- Thomas Edison patents the
phonograph.
Melvil Dewey establishes the first
university school for
librarians at
Columbia University.
c. 1880- Henry R. Towne publishes first graph of management data in the Transactions of the American Society of
Mechanical Engineers, presaging the increasing use of graphs in
scientific management. Edward Muybridge makes the first
motion picture presentation in
San Francisco.
Herman Holllerith, a
statistician, develops the first
punch-card
machine to process the results of the US
Census. He later founds the company that is to become
IBM. The cards are based on the slips fed into the
Jacquard loom
used decades before.
1883- Joseph Pulitzer purchases the New York World and initiates a program of sensationalist journalism. Within three
years
the paper's circulation has gone from 15,000 to 250,000, signalling the new era of mass newspapers and the birth of "
yellow
journalism."
Frederick C. Taylor performs the first
time-and-motion study of work practices at the Hydraulic Works of
Philadelphia, laying the groundwork for the scientific study of
industrial management.
Henry Ford later picks up this,
and
industrial capitalism does a little dance of joy.
1884- Publication of
Mark Twain's
Huckleberry Finn, the first
novel submitted to a
publisher in a typewritten
form. That same year, L.E. Waterman produces and markets the
fountain pen.
1885- George Eastman introduces the
Kodak camera, containing film for 120 exposures, to be returned to factory for
developing and recharging. Francis Galton introduces the first system for classifying
fingerprints, after proving that each
set is
unique.
Heinrich Hertz soon after begins to experiment with
wireless radio.
1890- Jacob A. Riis publishes How the Other Half Lives, a photographic record of the lives of the poor in New York City
that stimulates legislative reforms.
Herman Hollerith, U.S. census employee, develops punched data cards and machines
which can read them.
1892- Emile Reynaud popularizes the projection of
film on the Praxinoscope at the Musée Grevin, three years before the
Lumière brothers publicly demonstrate the Cinématographe. Automatic
telephone switchboard invented.
1893- Thomas Edison constructs the world's first
motion picture stage, Black Maria, and in the following year
introduces the Kinetoscope, with peepholes that allow one person to watch a moving image. The
vertical file is presented at
the Chicago World's Fair, where it wins a
gold medal. It permits a more
rational organization of
documents for large organizations.
c. 1896- In France,
Auguste and Louis Lumière produce the first motion-picture documentaries and newsreels, while in
the
UK, Sir William Crookes invents the
cathode ray tube.
1898- Eugène Atget starts to produces an extended photographic record of Paris urban life that he continues until 1927.
Largely ignored during his lifetime, his work is rediscovered by the
surrealists around the time of his death. Outbreak of
the
Spanish-American War, largely incited by
William Randolph Hearst's New York Morning Journal and
Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, an indication of the new political power of the mass press. Hearst's maxim, '
You provide
the pictures, I'll provide the war.'
1899- Herbert Putnam appointed head of
Library of Congress, and transforms it into one of the most important national
collections. He introduces
library services that include the publishing of bibliographies and the
Library of Congress Classification System .
Andrew Carnegie makes the first of grants that will eventually build more than two thousand public
libraries in the
United States, Canada and Britain.
1900- The proportion of typists and stenographers who are women reaches 77 percent, a four-or five-fold increase over
the
previous fifty years, reflecting the reorganization and specialization of work practices induced in part by technologies like
the
typewriter and dictating machine.
1902- Photographs are transmitted by
telegraph for the first time by German inventor Arthur Korn, which effectively
acts like a
fax machine, the resolution actually being just as good as a
dot matrix printer. Police catch on to the
crime-busting potential of this quickly, when London police use it to send a picture of a murder suspect to Halifax, NS
when they learn the man fled there aboard an ocean liner. Police in Halifax pick him off the gangplank there.
1904- The lithoset or offset
printing developed. French psychologist Alfred Binet develops the modern
intelligence test. First telegraphic transmission of
photographs, anticipating the
fax machine and Sir Ambrose
Flaming invents the electronic
vacuum tube.
1907- Autochrome, the first practical colour photography process, is introduced in France by
Auguste and Louis
Lumière. Canada passed its first Wireless Telegraph Act, naming as licensing authority the Department of Marine and Fisheries.
1911- Airmail service begins in England.
1915- D.W. Griffith's
Birth of a Nation establishes the American
narrative film style and marks the arrival of
cinema as an
art form. There are now 1/2 million telephones in NY homes; 90,000 in
Paris. The first trans-Atlantic
phone call is placed.
1917- The use of multiple
frequency transmission makes possible broadcast
radio.
1920- The first
commercial radio station, KDKA, goes on the air in Pittsburgh with a broadcast of the returns of the
Harding-Cox election.
1922- The
British Broadcasting Company is established to co-ordinate production of radio programming.
1923- Americans Henry R. Luce and Briton Hadden found
Time Magazine, which establishes the form for modern magazine
journalism.
Credit cards are introduced in United States at hotels and gasoline stations. The
usury section of
Hell
gets a big boost.
1926 - The
National Broadcasting Company establishes a network of radio stations to which it distributes daily
programs. The Book of the Month club is founded in the United States, distributing over 200,000,000 copies of books to areas
where there were few bookstores and introducing "negative option" mail-orders.
Metropolis by
Fritz Lang debuts.
1927- The Radio Act the sets up the agency now called the
Federal Communications Commission to allocate radio
frequencies. The phenomenal success of The Jazz Singer ensures the conversion of the motion-picture industry to sound films.
1928- Eastman Kodak introduces the Recordak system of microfilming, soon widely used in the storage of organizational
records.
1931- Emergence of the
telex, the antecedent to the
FAX, in the UK, the U.S., and several European countries.
1932- The
Radio Corporation of America demonstrates an all-electric
television using a camera tube called the
iconoscope (patented by Vladimir Zworykin in 1923) and a
cathode-ray tube in the
receiver.
1933- Publication of Oxford English Dictionary (
OED), begun in 1857. The Indian
librarian and educator Shiyali
Ramamrita Ranganathan devises the system of colon
classification for
research libraries.
Vannevar Bush of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology constructs the
differential analyser,
a powerful
analogue computer. The Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission (later called the
CBC) is born.
1934- U.S. National Archives are opened to supplement the
Library of Congress, housing the retired records of the
national government.
c. 1935- Frequency modulation is developed to overcome radio
transference. The Farm Security Administration
commissions a group of photographers, including Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange,
to document conditions among the poor. Their photographs of victims of the Depression help move states to establish camps for
migrant workers.
1937- The
coronation of King George VI is telecast from
Hyde Park Corner.
Alan Turing publishes his essay, "On
Computable Numbers," which theorizes
digital computation.
1938- Orson Welles' radio presentation of
H. G. Wells'
War of the Worlds creates panic among thousands of
radio
listeners who have become so accustomed to receiving news by radio that they take the reports of a
Martian invasion of New
Jersey in earnest. The Hungarian Laszlo Biro, living in
Argentina, patents and successfully markets the ball-point pen. The
Englishman Allen Lane launches
Penguin books, initiating
mass production of good-quality
paperback books.
1939- The
National Broadcasting Company initiates regular television broadcasts for two hours per week. The CBS
and Dumont networks soon follow suit, but broadcasting is interrupted by
World War II.