Skip to main content

10 crucial communication breakthroughs

TEN CRUCIAL COMMUNICATION BREAKTHROUGHS

The Alphabet
When: 4000-1200BC
the ability to record information was arguably most significant breakthrough in human communication after speech. sumerian cuneiform, a pictographic writing system denoting concepts and syllables, evolved around 4000Bc. it was replaced by the Phoenician alphabet comprising characters that represent single sounds.


Postal Service
27BC–Ad 14 it’s thought that the Persians were the first to introduce a kind of postal service around 550Bc. But the earliest and bestdocumented evidence of such a system, enabling the public to send written messages, dates from the reign of the roman emperor Augustus.


Paper
Ad 105 official records credit chinese inventor cai lun with the first production of paper, although archaeological research suggests that paper was being used in the country much earlier than that.


Gutenberg press
1450 for centuries, literacy and literature were restricted to religious scholars and wealthy intellectuals. then German Johannes Gutenberg invented the metal printing press with movable type, enabling multiple copies of publications to be made quickly and cheaply.


Semaphore 1792
By peppering 566 towers topped with mechanical arms throughout his native france, claude chappe invented the first optical semaphore system, allowing the
military and government to send quick messages over vast distances.


Morse Code
 1840 the telegraph had already been invented, but in 1840 American painter samuel morse filed his first patent for an improved device that used electric signals to communicate information encoded as a series of dots and dashes.


Telephone
1876 many people lay claim to the invention of the telephone, but Alexander Graham Bell filed the first patent for a device that enabled people in different places to talk to each other.


Wireless transmissions
1895 Guglielmo marconi built on the work of others to develop and improve a system using electromagnetic radiation to transmit messages wirelessly. in 1895, he sent and received signals over a distance of almost 2.5km. By 1901, he was able to
communicate across the Atlantic.


Television
1925 the first equipment allowing the viewing of live pictures, rather than prerecorded footage, appeared in 1925. similar technology had been developed over the previous 50 years, but scotsman John logie Baird made the first public demonstration of television in 1925.


Arpanet
1969 modern networks were born when technology allowed computers to connect and communicate with each other. that technology led to the creation of Arpanet (Advanced research Projects Agency network), a system to help us research labs exchange information, laying the foundations for the internet.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

DOES HOLDING YOUR BREATH MAKE YOU STRONGER?

It won’t make you stronger in the sense of building muscle in your heart or diaphragm, but holding your breath while training for certain sports has been shown to improve the ability of your muscles to cope with short, intense exertions. This works by increasing the concentration of bicarbonate in the blood, which helps to neutralise the lactic acid produced during anaerobic exercise. For this technique to work, you need to exhale normally and hold your breath when your lungs are empty, rather than taking a big breath in and holding that. There are significant risks, though. A 2009 study found that free divers who regularly held their breath for several minutes had elevated levels of a protein called S100B in their blood, which is an indication of long-term brain damage.
Post a Comment
Read more

HOW DO STARS DIE?

Stars die because they exhaust their nuclear fuel. The events at the end of a star’s life depend on its mass. Really massive stars use up their hydrogen fuel quickly, but are hot enough to fuse heavier elements such as helium and carbon. Once there is no fuel left, the star collapses and the outer layers explode as a ‘supernova’. What’s left over after a supernova explosion is a ‘neutron star’ – the collapsed core of the star – or, if there’s sufficient mass, a black hole. Average-sized stars (up to about 1.4 times the mass of the Sun) will die less dramatically. As their hydrogen is used up, they swell to become red giants, fusing helium in their cores, before shedding their outer layers, often forming a ‘planetary nebula’. The star’s core remains as a ‘white dwarf’, which cools off over billions of years. The tiniest stars, known as ‘red dwarfs’, burn their nuclear fuel so slowly that they might live to be 100 billion years old – much older than the current age of the Universe....
Post a Comment
Read more

Do video games change the brain?

Do video games affect behaviour? Video games are likely able to affect the way we behave in a number of ways. For instance, there’s concern about whether violence in games makes young people more violent. It’s not uncommon for news outlets to blame games every time a crime happens, but how true is that claim? This is controversial even within the scientific community. Yes, exposure to violence seems to affect the brain, but studies have also found that we’re good at distinguishing between real and virtual violence, and aggressive behaviour is better explained by other, mainly socio-economic factors. Numerous studies about the effects of games on the brain had been published, but all that information had not been put together until now. How did you review the research?  We gathered all scientific articles to date and compared results. In total, we found 116 experiments, the first from the 1980s. Many compared regular video game players with people who had never played; other...
Post a Comment
Read more