1816- Joseph Niepce achieves the first photographic image

 Early fixed images

The first partially successful photograph of a camera image was made in approximately 1816 by Nicéphore
Niépce, using a very small camera of his own making and a piece of paper coated with silver chloride, which
darkened where it was exposed to light. No means of removing the remaining unaffected silver chloride
was known to Niépce, so the photograph was not permanent, eventually becoming entirely darkened by
the overall exposure to light necessary for viewing it.

French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce is now widely accepted as the creator of photography as we now
know it. Using a homemade camera, he produced the first partially successful photograph in 1816 on paper
coated with silver chloride. Though this photograph no longer exists, letters from Niépce to his sister give
evidence of a successful photograph. The first surviving photograph is also by Niépce and is now in the
permanent collection of the University of Texas-Austin. It dates to 1826 or 1827 and is a scene from his
window in Burgundy. All this makes Niépce widely accepted as the inventor of the first functional camera.

1844- Samuel Morse sent the first recorded telegraph

The electrical telegraph is one of America's gifts to the world. The credit for this invention belongs
to Samuel Finley Breese Morse. Other inventors had discovered the principles of the telegraph, but Samuel
Morse was the first to understand the practical significance of those facts and was the first to take steps to
make a practical invention; which took him 12 long years of work.

In that year [1836] Samuel Morse took into his confidence one of his colleagues in the University, Leonard
Gale, who assisted Morse in improving the telegraph apparatus. Morse had formulated the rudiments of
the telegraphic alphabet, or Morse Code, as it is known today. He was ready to test his invention.

Samuel Morse and his partners then proceeded to the construction of the forty-mile line of wire between
Baltimore and Washington. Ezra Cornell, (founder of Cornell University) had invented a machine to lay pipe
underground to contain the wires and he was employed to carry out the work of construction. The work
was commenced at Baltimore and was continued until experiment proved that the underground method
would not do, and it was decided to string the wires on poles. Much time had been lost, but once the
system of poles was adopted the work progressed rapidly, and by May 1844, the line was completed.

On the twenty-fourth of that month, Samuel Morse sat before his instrument in the room of the Supreme
Court at Washington. His friend Miss Ellsworth handed him the message which she had chosen: "WHAT
HATH GOD WROUGHT!" Morse flashed it to Vail forty miles away in Baltimore, and Vail instantly flashed
back the same momentous words, "WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT!"

1876- Alexander Graham Bell patents the electric telephone

While he was moving jobs and locations around the UK and North America, Bell had developed an
overriding desire to invent a machine that could reproduce human speech.

Speech had become his life: his mother had gone deaf, and Bell’s father had developed a method of
teaching deaf people to speak, which Bell also taught. His research into mechanizing human speech had
become a relentless obsession: in the UK it had driven him almost to collapse.
Financial Backing for a Voice Telegraph

In 1874 Bell was 26. The first electrical telegraph lines had been built forty years earlier, in the 1830s. These
allowed electrical clicks (Morse code) to be instantly transmitted over great distances. Bell wanted to
transmit human speech instead of clicks, and he was getting close to doing it.

He had found that human speech came in wave like patterns. He now hoped to produce an electrical wave
that would follow the same patterns as someone’s speech.

He won financial backing from Gardiner Hubbard and Thomas Sanders, two wealthy investors. Hubbard
also brought in Anthony Pollok, his patent attorney. The money enabled Bell to hire Thomas Watson, a
skilled electrical engineer, whose knowledge would complement Bell’s.

Patenting the Telephone

Aged 27, in 1875, Bell and his investors decided the time had come to protect his intellectual property using
patents.

Bell had a patent written for transmission of speech over an electrical wire. He applied for this patent in
the UK, because in those days UK patents were granted only if they had not first been granted in another
country. Bell told his attorney to apply in the USA only after the patent had been granted in the UK.

By 1876, things in the USA had become murkier. In February of that year, Elisha Gray applied for a US patent
for a telephone which used a variable resistor based on a liquid: salt water.

In the transmitter, the liquid resistor transferred to an electric circuit the vibrations of a needle attached
to a diaphragm which had been made to vibrate by sound. The electrical resistance of the circuit changed
in tandem with the needle’s position in the liquid, and so sound was converted into an equivalent electrical
signal. The receiver converted the electrical signal back into sound using a vibrating needle in liquid
connected to a diaphragm which vibrated to recreate the sound that had been transmitted.

On the same day, Bell’s attorney filed his US patent application.

It was only in March 1876 that Bell actually got his invention to work, using a design similar to Gray’s. Hence
Gray lay claim to have invented the telephone.

On the other hand, Bell had established the concept before Gray, and in all demonstrations of a working
phone Bell gave or developed commercially he used his own setup rather than a water based variable
resistor. In fact, in 1875, Bell had filed a patent for a liquid mercury based variable resistor, predating Gray’s
liquid variable resistor patent.

Bell had to fend off around 600 lawsuits before he could finally rest in bed at night as the legally
acknowledged inventor of the telephone.

“Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you.”

THE FIRST WORDS SPOKEN IN A TELEPHONE CALL: ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

By summer 1876, Bell was transmitting telephone voice messages over a line several miles long in Ontario.
Images are: A model of Bell’s very first telephone (top-left). Alexander Graham Bell in 1874, aged 26, when
he became a professor at Boston University (bottom-left). Bell, aged 45, making the first call from New York
to Chicago when the exchange opened in 1892 (right).

1877- Thomas Edison invented phonograph

Thomas Edison created many inventions, but his favorite was the phonograph. While working on
improvements to the telegraph and the telephone, Edison figured out a way to record sound on tinfoil-
coated cylinders. In 1877, he created a machine with two needles: one for recording and one for playback.
When Edison spoke into the mouthpiece, the sound vibrations of his voice would be indented onto the
cylinder by the recording needle. What do you think were the first words that Edison spoke into the
phonograph?

"Mary had a little lamb" were the first words that Edison recorded on the phonograph and he was amazed
when he heard the machine play them back to him. In 1878, Edison established the Edison Speaking
Phonograph Company to sell the new machine.

The use of photographic film was pioneered by George Eastman, who started manufacturing paper film in
1885 before switching to celluloid in 1888-1889. His first camera, which he called the "Kodak," was first
offered for sale in 1888. It was a very simple box camera with a fixed-focus lens and single shutter speed,
which along with its relatively low price appealed to the average consumer.

1895- Lumiere brothers presented projected moving pictures to a paying audience

No one person invented cinema. However, in 1891 the Edison Company in the USA successfully
demonstrated a prototype of the Kinetoscope, which enabled one person at a time to view moving pictures.
The first to present projected moving pictures to a paying audience (i.e. cinema) were the Lumière
brothers in December 1895 in Paris. [Window Title]

With their first Cinématographe show in the basement of the Grand Café in the boulevard des Capucines
in Paris on 28 December 1895, the Lumière brothers have been regarded as the inventors of cinema—the
projection of moving photographic pictures on a screen for a paying audience. However, they were
probably not the first to do this: the Latham brothers in New York were screening boxing films to paying
audiences from 20 May 1895, using their Eidoloscope projector.

Nevertheless, the achievement of the Lumières was considerable. Their Cinématographe was the first
satisfactory apparatus for taking and projecting films, and its claw mechanism became the basis for most
ciné cameras.

1902- Guglielmo Marconi transmits the first radio signal to travel the Atlantic Ocean

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", telegraphed from England to Newfoundland. This was the first
successful transatlantic radiotelegraph message in 1902.
Italian inventor and engineer Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1937) developed, demonstrated and
marketed the first successful long-distance wireless telegraph and in 1901 broadcast the first
transatlantic radio signal. His company’s Marconi radios ended the isolation of ocean travel and
saved hundreds of lives, including all of the surviving passengers from the sinking Titanic. In 1909
he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for his radio work.

1927- John Logie Baird transmitted the first television signal

In January 1926 a blurry, black-and-white image of a ventriloquist dummy’s face flickered on a screen at
inventor John Logie Baird’s workshop in London. It is considered to be the first demonstration of live
television.

By 1927, a year after Baird’s live TV demonstration, he successfully transmitted moving images over
telephone wires between London and Glasgow. He formed the Baird Television Ltd., in London.

On 26 January 1926 he gave the world's first demonstration of true television before 50 scientists in an
attic room in central London. In 1927, his television was demonstrated over 438 miles of telephone line
between London and Glasgow, and he formed the Baird Television Development Company. (BTDC). In 1928,
the BTDC achieved the first transatlantic television transmission between London and New York and the
first transmission to a ship in mid-Atlantic. He also gave the first demonstration of both colour and
stereoscopic television.

John Logie Baird stands beside his electromechanical TV system, which he demonstrated in 1926 by
broadcasting a live image of a dummy's face.

1969- Computer Networking