20 MOST IMPORTANT INVENTIONSCommunication

PHOENICIANS ALPHABET

3500 BC to 2900 BC Developed by the Phoenicians A non-pictographic consonantal alphabet. It was used for the writing of Phoenician, a

Northern Semitic language, used by the civilization of Phoenicia.

SMOKE SIGNALS The smoke signal is one of the oldest forms of long-

distance communication Polybius, a Greek historian, came up with a more complex

system of alphabetical smoke signals around 150 BC In Ancient China, soldiers stationed along the Great Wall

would alert each other of impending enemy attack by signaling from tower to tower. In this way, they were able to transmit a message as far away as 750km in just a few hours.

THE FIRST LIBRARY Ashurbanipal created the world's first libary in Assyria, this

libary known as The Royal Library of Ashurbanipal Named after Ashurbanipal, the last great king of the Neo-

Assyrian Empire. A collection of thousands of clay tablets and fragments

containing texts of all kinds (royal inscriptions, chronicles, mythological and religious texts, ect..)

MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE A message in a bottle is a form of communication

whereby a message is sealed in a waterproof container and released into the sea or ocean.

The first recorded messages in bottles were released around 310 BC by the Ancient Greek philosopher Theophrastus, as part of an experiment to show that the Mediterranean Sea was formed by the inflowing Atlantic Ocean.

MORSE CODE

Morse code is a method of transmitting text information as a series of on-off tones, lights, or clicks that can be directly understood by a skilled listener or observer without special equipment

Each character (letter or numeral) is represented by a unique sequence of dots and dashes

Beginning in 1836, the American artist Samuel F. B. Morse, the American physicist Joseph Henry, and Alfred Vail developed an electrical telegraph system

WALKIE-TALKIE

A walkie-talkie is a hand-held, portable, two-way radio transceiver.

Its development during the Second World War has been variously credited to Donald L. Hings, radio engineer Alfred J. Gross, and engineering teams at Motorola.

THE FIRST TELEVISION Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving

moving images that can be black-and-white or colored, with or without accompanying sound

A 23-year-old German university student, Paul Nipkow proposed and patented the first electromechanical television system in 1884.

In 1884 Paul Gottlieb Nipkow, a 23-year-old university student in Germany [4], patented the first electromechanical television system which employed a scanning disk, a spinning disk with a series of holes spiraling toward the center, for rasterization

COMPACT DISK

The Compact Disc, or CD for short, is an optical disc used to store digital data

Developed by Philips and Sony independently in the mid and late 1970s

It was originally developed to store and play back sound recordings only, but the format was later adapted for storage of data (CD-ROM),

DVDS

DVD is an optical disc storage format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995

DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions.

FAX Fax, sometimes called telecopying, is the telephonic transmission

of scanned printed material, normally to a telephone number connected to a printer or other output device.

The original document is scanned with a fax machine which processes the contents as a single fixed graphic image, converting it into a bitmap, and then transmitting it through the telephone systemScottish inventor Alexander Bain worked on chemical mechanical fax type devices and in 1846 was able to reproduce graphic signs in laboratory experiments. He received the first fax patent in 1843.

EMAIL

Electronic mail, also known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients.

Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the same time, in common with instant messaging.

Today's email systems are based on a store-and-forward model

RADIO Radio is the transmission of signals through free space by

electromagnetic waves with frequencies significantly below visible light, in the radio frequency range, from about 3 kHz to 300 GHz

Information, such as sound, is carried by systematically changing some property of the radiated waves, such as their amplitude, frequency, phase, or pulse width.

The prefix radio- in the sense of wireless transmission, was first recorded in the word radioconductor, a description provided by the French physicist Édouard Branly in 1897.

COMPUTER A computer is a general purpose device that can be programmed

to carry out a finite set of arithmetic or logical operations The first electronic digital computers were developed between 1940

and 1945 in the United Kingdom and United States. The first program-controlled computer was invented by Konrad Zuse

, who built the Z3, an electromechanical computing machine, in 1941

INTERNET The Internet is a global system of interconnected

computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide.

It is a network of networks that consists of millions of private, public, academic, business, and government networks, of local to global scope, that are linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless and optical networking technologies.

The origins of the Internet reach back to research of the 1960s, commissioned by the United States government in collaboration with private commercial interests to build robust, fault-tolerant, and distributed computer networks.

COMPACT CASSETTE

A magnetic tape sound recording format. In 1962 Philips invented the compact audio

cassette medium for audio storage, introducing it in Europe in August 1963

Between the early 1970s and the late 1990s, the cassette was one of the two most common formats for prerecorded music.

CELL PHONES A mobile phone is a device that can make and receive

telephone calls over a radio link whilst moving around a wide geographic area.

It does so by connecting to a cellular network provided by a mobile phone operator, allowing access to the public telephone network.

The first hand-held mobile phone was demonstrated by Dr Martin Cooper of Motorola in 1973, using a handset weighing around 2.2 pounds.

In 1983, the DynaTAC 8000x was the first to be commercially available

GRAMAPHONE

The gramophone was the primary device for recording and replaying sound and music

The gramophone plays a disc shaped analogue sound record that is vinyl and most commonly known as the phonograph record.Emile Berliner, a German immigrant who lived and worked in Washington D.C. during the 1800s, concluded his invention of the gramophone and records on November 8, 1887.

GLOBAL POSITIONING SYSTEM The Global Positioning System is a space-based satellite navigation

system that provides location and time information in all weather, anywhere on or near the Earth, where there is an unobstructed line of sight to four or more GPS satellites.

It is maintained by the United States government and is freely accessible to anyone with a GPS receiver.

The GPS program provides critical capabilities to military, civil and commercial users around the world. In addition, GPS is the backbone for moder

The GPS project was developed in 1973 by the U.S. Department of Defense to overcome the limitations of previous navigation systems, integrating ideas from several predecessors, including a number of classified engineering design studies from the 1960s.

TEXT MESSAGING Text messaging, or texting, is the exchange of brief written text

messages between two or more mobile phones or fixed or portable devices over a phone network.

Text messaging is most often used between private mobile phone users, as a substitute for voice calls in situations where voice communication is impossible or undesirable

Matti Makkonen has been referred to in different contexts as the “father of text messaging” but he rejects this epithet.

BLU RAY DISK

Blu-ray Disc is an optical disc storage medium designed to supersede the DVD format

The major application of Blu-ray Discs is as a medium for video material such as feature films

The first Blu-ray Disc prototypes were unveiled in October 2000, and the first prototype player was released in April 2003 in Japan.