History of Media

Holly Wisdom
Pictograms Pictograms

• The first version of communication was pictograms (before 3000BC),

like cave paintings and hieroglyphs.
• They usually conveyed their meaning through images that resembled
a physical object, like a picture of a stick figure running after a bull
would mean hunting.
Greek Alphabet Greek Alphabet
• Realising that the pictograms were limited,
the Ancient Greeks created an alphabet.
• It had been used since the late 9th or 8th
century (BC), and was the first script to have
distinct letters for vowels as well as consonants.
Writing/Printing
• People began using the alphabet to write things down, and wrote
stories and events down to create books. Monks began to mass-write
each book by hand, but after seeing what a tedious process it was,
Johannes Gutenberg created the Printing Press.
Morse Code and the Telegraph
-- --- .-. … . -.-. --- -.. .

• Morse code was invented in 1832 after Samuel Morse had realised
(after his wife dying), that they needed some sort of high-speed
communications, and so he developed the Morse code and the
Telegraph.
The Typewriter
• The first typewriter to be commercially successful was invented in
1878 by Americans Christopher Latham Sholes, Frank Haven Hall,
Carlos Glidden and Samuel W. Soule.
• This was picked up and improved upon over the years, until it was
adapted to the “Noiseless Typewriters” in 1917.
• Some of the adaptations include the shift key to create uppercase
letters (1878 Remmington), coloured inks, character sizes, the tab key,
and font striking(1893).
The Radio
• Guglielmo Marconi, an Italian inventor, proved the feasibility of radio
communication. He sent and received his first radio signal in Italy in
1895. By 1899, he flashed the first wireless signal across the English
Channel and two years later received the letter "S," which was
telegraphed from England to Newfoundland.
• After both Marconi(1937) and Tesla’s (1943) death, the supreme US
court ruled that Marconis patents for the radio were invalid and
awarded them to Testla.
The Television
• The electronic television was successfully displayed for the first time
on Sept. 7, 1927 in San Francisco. This predecessor of the modern
television was invented by Philo Taylor Farnsworth.
• John Logie Baird demonstrated the world's first color transmission on
July 3, 1928.
• In the 1980’s, the Digital Television was created.
Fibre optics to Phones
• Fibre optics allowed for faster and more efficient communication of
data, and was created in the 1960’s.
• Mobile phones came 20 years later in the 1980’s.
Internet
• The internet was developed in the 1950’s in case of a nuclear attack.
This was so countries and bases would be able to stay in touch with
each other should all other communication be lost.
• In the 1990’s, the internet was released for public use and has been
growing since then.
3g and 4g
• 3G was created due to research and development work carried out by
the international telecommunication union (ITU) in the early 1980s. It
was developed over 15 years and was made available to the public
under the name IMT-2000.
• 4G was created in 2009 and is the successor of 3G