8/13/2019 Communication: c.
3100 BCE - 2010 - Oxford Reference
Oxford Reference
Timeline: Communication
Years: c. 3100 BCE - 2010 Subject: Science and technology,
Engineering and Technology
Publisher: HistoryWorld Online Publication Date: 2012
Current online version: 2012 eISBN: 9780191737466
Year Event
C. 3100 bce Writing is developed, at Sumer, as cuneiform script on clay tablets
The invention of writing marks the transition, in academic terms, from prehistory to history
C. 2500 bce The delicate seals of the Indus civilization are in a script as yet undeciphered
C. 1500 bce The Chinese develop a form of scroll, made of strips of bamboo threaded together and rolled
up like a wooden blind
768 The empress of Japan, in a remarkable start to the story of printing, commissions a million
copies of a Buddhist charm
868 The world's first known printed book, a Diamond Sutra, is commissioned by a Buddhist
monk in honour of his parents
C. 1050 The concept of movable type for printing is pioneered in China, using fired clay, but it proves
impractical
The rulers of Baghdad harness homing pigeons as postmen.
C. 1380 Koreans establish the first type foundry, casting movable type in bronze
1456 A copy of Europe's first book printed from movable type, the Gutenberg Bible, is completed in
Mainz
1653 The English admiral Robert Blake introduces a system of signalling at sea by means of flags
1838
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8/13/2019 Communication: c. 3100 BCE - 2010 - Oxford Reference
US inventor Samuel Morse gives the first public demonstration, in Philadelphia, of his
electric telegraph
1840 Rowland Hill introduces in Britain the world's first postage stamps - the Penny Black and
Two Pence Blue
1844 Samuel Morse and his assistant Alfred Vail complete the first telegraph line, between New
York and Baltimore
1858 US entrepreneur Cyrus W. Field succeeds in laying a telegraph cable across the Atlantic, but it
fails after only a month
1870 Adelaide and Darwin are linked across the entire Australian continent by the Overland
Telegraph Line
1871 Italian US immigrant Antonio Meucci files a patent in New York for the invention of the
telephone
1876 Alexander Graham Bell makes the first practical use of his telephone, summoning his
assistant from another room with the words 'Mr Watson, come here. I want to see you.'
Alexander Graham Bell demonstrates his new invention, the telephone, at the US Centennial
Exhibition in Philadelphia
1895 21-year-old Guglielmo Marconi succeeds in transmitting a radio signal more than a mile at
his home near Bologna
1896 22-year-old Guglielmo Marconi takes out a patent in Britain for the invention of radio
1899 Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi succeeds in transmitting a wireless telegraph message
across the English Channel
Marconi equips two ships to send radio reports to New York on the progress of the yachts
racing for the America's Cup
1901 Guglielmo Marconi transmits a radio message in Morse code 2100 miles, from Poldhu in
Cornwall to St John's in Newfoundland
1907 US inventor Lee De Forest patents the Audion, a sensitive vacuum-tube radio receiver
1910 Lee De Forest broadcasts Enrico Caruso live from the Metropolitan Opera House in New
York, but with mixed success owing to the poor quality
Telegraph messages lead to the arrest of Dr Crippen and his mistress Ethel Le Neve in mid-
Atlantic
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8/13/2019 Communication: c. 3100 BCE - 2010 - Oxford Reference
1913 The US navy begins transmitting by radio a regular time signal, much used by the nation's
watchmakers and menders.
1915 Alexander Graham Bell again summons his assistant Thomas Watson (as in 1876), but this
time he is in New York and Watson in San Francisco
Radiotelephone messages are transmitted from Arlington in Virginia to the Eiffel Tower in
Paris
1926 John Logie Baird gives the world's first demonstration of television to a group assembled in
his attic rooms in London
1929 The British Broadcasting Corporation uses Logie Baird's system for its first trial TV
broadcasts
1965 The first communications satellite, Early Bird, is launched from Cape Canaveral
1976 Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs design and market a personal computer, calling it the Apple
1989 At CERN, in Geneva, Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau build ENQUIRE, a first step
towards the future World Wide Web
1990 Tim Berners-Lee, working at CERN in Geneva, publishes the first formal proposal for the
World Wide Web
1991 Tim Berners-Lee, using CERN computers, puts online the first website at
http://info.cern.ch
1997 Larry Page and Sergey Brin, both Ph.D. students at Stanford University, register the domain
name google.com
2001 Wikipedia, the 'Free Encyclopedia', is put online by Jimmy Wales as an empty shell which
members of the public are invited to fill with content
2006 Google pays $1.65 billion for the website YouTube, launched less than two years previously
2007 Apple's iPhone goes on sale in the USA and 270,000 are sold in the first thirty hours
2010 The website Wikileaks publishes more than 90,000 classified internal reports about US
involvement in Afghanistan since 2004
Wikileaks publishes another batch of US government documents, this time diplomatic cables
of which about 100,000 are marked 'secret' or 'confidential'
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