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Telegraph

The first steps The first telegraph systems were developed thousands of years ago. They used many different ways of signalling: smoke, fiery beacon, drums, lights, mirrors, flags and semaphores. But the basic idea was always the same - transmit a message faster than a man could run or a horseman could ride. An ancient telegraph Fire and Water (350BC)

The first recorded telegraph was built by a Greek military author named Aeneas around 350 BC. He used water to add time division - allowing different messages to be sent. A flaming torch gave the start signal for both sender and receiver to allow the water to run out of out of identically sized vessels in which corks were floating, with rods attached. As the water went down, so would the rods, each marked with a series of possible messages. According to history this 'hydraulic telegraph' was used to send military messages from Sicily to Carthage during the First Punic War (264-241 BC). Chappes semaphore telegraph (1793) In the late 18th century, the Chappe brothers in France did much to develop the visual telegraph - in a series of machines designed to send messages quickly over long distances. The Chappe semaphore system was used to set up a telegraph network that spanned the whole of Napoleon's empire, and was still in use by the French military as late as the Crimean War - nearly 20 years after the electric telegraph had arrived. Francis Ronalds electric telegraph (1816) In 1816 the British inventor Francis Ronald, who was fascinated by electricity, developed an electric telegraph (using static high voltage electricity) and succeeded in sending messages through eight miles of iron wires. Most were suspended on frames above his garden at Hammersmith, west of London, but some ran underground.
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Morses first telegraph (1835) The American inventor Samuel Morse had spent three years trying to develop a telegraph based on electromagnetism. In 1835 Morse built his first device, an electromagnetic pendulum carrying a pencil in constant contact with a moving strip of paper. His partner, Alfred Vail, the son of a wealthy industrialist, had a more practical (and cheaper) suggestion - a lever at the transmitting end, operating an armature at the other. Cooke and Wheatstone first telegraph (1837)

In June 1837, these two British were granted their first patent on an instrument using six wires, connected to five galvanometer needles arranged in a row across the face of a grid which displayed 20 letters of the alphabet. Each letter was sent in the form of currents flowing down two wires, causing the appropriate needles to swing against stops and point to the right letter. Complex to describe, the system was simple to use: children could, and did, operate it successfully. Transatlantic cable (1866) In 1866 the S.S. Great Eastern was loaded with a new cable and tried to build transatlantic cable. And this first successful transatlantic telegraph cable, 1,852 miles in length, was laid between Valentia Island, Ireland and Newfoundland between July 13 and September 18.

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Baudots code (faster than Morse) (1874) Jean Maurice Emile Baudot was a French engineer who, in 1874, took out a patent on a telegraph code that used five-unit combinations of 'on' or 'off' signals of equal duration. In 1894 Baudot also invented a 'distributor' system for simultaneous transmission of several messages on the same telegraphic circuit or channel (multiplexing). Delaney multiplex (1882) Each operator had to prepare the code for a word before it could be sent and this left small gaps between each transmission. Delaney realised that if several operators used the same wire, one after the other, they could use the gaps left while the other prepared the next code. This was known as time division multiplex (TDM). Teleprinter typing telegraphs

The main drawbacks of telegraphy were that it required two skilled operators (one for sending and one to receive messages) and produced no directly printed output. The idea behind the teleprinter was to automate the telegraphic process by means of a new generation of combined receiving and transmitting machines, using the Baudot code already in use in telegraphy plus a standard typewriter-style keyboard to compose

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messages. The first development was made by F.G. Creed, a British telegraph operator working in Chile, who devised a machine that could punch holes in a paper telegraph tape direct from a typewriter-style keyboard. Telex (1932) Telex, short for Teleprinter Exchange, is a public service using teleprinters connected through exchanges. The UK was the first country to set up a service of this kind in 1932. This provided connections and exchanges to allow written communication using 'fast' printing telegraph devices.

Telephone
The telephone was discovered almost by accident. What people thought they were looking for was a way to make the telegraph work faster and more profitably - by sending distinct musical notes or tones simultaneously along the wires with a separate message sent on each frequency. But they soon realised it could also include the human voice - a speaking telegraph. And if you could talk down a wire, wouldn't that be an entirely new and better way of communicating? The individual parts of the telephone were discovered and developed by different people at different times. Someone needed to take all those connections and draw them together into one working instrument. In the end that someone was Alexander Graham Bell - but he only just won the race. Reiss telephone (1860) German science teacher called Philipp Reis began work on the telephone in 1860, inspired by an 1854 paper by a French investigator named Bourseul. His idea was a little shaky. To send sound, the transmitter diaphragm shouldn't completely make or break an electrical contact but instead should vary the current of electricity flowing. His transmitter was a make-and-break device but Reis's receiver (earpiece) used a vibrating rod (a knitting needle in fact) that was magnetised to varying degrees by an electric coil. Grays telephone (1876) On February 14, 1876, the day that Alexander Graham Bell applied for a patent for his version of the telephone, Elisha Gray applied for a caveat - a document indicating that he intended to file his own patent claim within three months. But Gray was a few hours too late, since

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Bell had already filed an actual patent application, and the courts later ruled that this took precedence. The first telephone call (1876)

After hearing their telephone first transmit a sound in June 1875, Bell and Watson spent the next 40 weeks making their telephone actually speak. Finally, on March 10, 1876, Watson heard Bell's voice distinctly in the receiver saying, "Mr Watson, come here, I want you. Watson, who was in another room, dropped the receiver and rushed with wild joy across the hall to tell the glad tidings to Bell, "I can hear you!" he shouted breathlessly. "I can hear the WORDS." The first telephone directory (1880)

The Telephone Company Ltd issued the first known telephone directory on January 15, 1880. It contained details of over 250 subscribers connected to three London exchanges. The first long distance trunk line (1880) The first inter-city trunk telephone line was opened between Halifax and Bradford at the beginning of 1880. The telephone system was growing fast and it was clear that there was a requirement to connect the various exchanges around the country with long distance or 'trunk' wires, linking chief cities and towns through intermediate points. This process was to take more than two decades. Strowger Automatic Exchange (1891)

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The Strowger Automatic Telephone Company was set up to exploit the automatic exchange system invented by its founder Almon B. Strowger. It was formed on Oct 30, 1891, by Strowger and his associates M. A. Meyer and Joseph Harris, who raised money for the venture. A year later they installed the first automatic exchange at La Porte, Indiana, USA. Electromechanical switching (1891)

Although the first patent for an automatic telephone switch was granted already in 1879, the first successful electomechanical telephone switch was invented in 1891 by a Kansas City (USA) undertaker called Almon B. Strowger. He devised a system that used contact arms rotating on shafts to make contact with any one of ten contacts in an arc. This was the 'switching' part of the system. Driving the arms and selectors were 'control' instructions received from the calling telephone, in the form of electrical impulses generated by the dial. The Strowger system worked 'step by step' - each digit dialled set up part of the connection, moving the call through another switching stage to a further group of exchanges or telephones. The first submarine telephone cable (1891) In 1891 The General Post Office's original cable ship, H.M.T.S. Monarch (the first of several cable ships of that name), laid the first submarine telephone cable between England and France, enabling telephone conversations between specially equipped booths in London and Paris. The London-Paris telephone service was inaugurated in April of that year and was controlled and worked from the Central Telegraph Office in London. Pulse Code Modulation (1937) In 1937 an English engineer, Alec Reeves, working in Paris for the International Standard Electric Company, patented the Pulse Code Modulation (PCM) transmission system. PCM turns the human voice into electronically coded sequences of digital pulses which are then transmitted and turned back into speech at the far end. This was a visionary concept, underlying the digital systems of today. But Reeves's ideas were well in advance of his time. The techniques he described for coding and decoding
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signals could not be realised in practical form until suitable components, particularly transistors, became available. International Direct Dialing (1963)

It was almost 100 years from the birth of the telephone before users were able to dial direct to other countries. International Direct Dialling (IDD) was first introduced in the UK in 1963, between London and Paris. The next year, IDD was extended to Birmingham, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester. By that time, the range of IDD destinations covered most of Western Europe. Now, there are very few overseas phone calls that have to be placed via an operator. Meanwhile, the cost of calling overseas has tumbled. In 1966 it cost around 3 to call New York for three minutes equivalent to around 5 per minute in today's prices. The current rate is around 4p per minute. The first video-phone system (1964) Videophones, transmitting a picture of the speaker as well as his or her voice, are older than most people think. Commercial systems were used in France and Germany during the 1930s but they were cumbersome and expensive. Even the American company AT&T's Picturephone of 1956 was crude - transmitting an updated still image only once every two seconds. By 1964 AT&T had developed a complete experimental system, the 'Mod 1'. To test it, the public was invited to place calls between special exhibits at Disneyland and the New York World's Fair. In both locations, visitors were carefully interviewed afterward by a market research agency. The findings were not encouraging. It turned out people didn't actually like Picturephone. It was too bulky, the controls too unfriendly, and the picture too small. The first electronic exchange (1966)

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The limitations of electronic switching demonstrated by the trial electronic exchange at Highgate Wood in the 1960s, persuaded designers to adopt a solution that used electronics to control miniature relay switches called 'reed relays'. Development was concentrated in this area, leading eventually to the successful TXE2 and later the TXE4 systems - 'TXE' meaning Telephone Exchange, Electronic. The first fully operational production TXE2 reed relay exchange was opened at Ambergate, Derbyshire, in 1966. This was the first electronic telephone exchange in Europe and the first small-tomedium sized one in the world.

Mobile communication

Cellular phones are proposed (1947) The basic concept of cellular phones started in the late 1940s in Britain and America. Researchers looked at existing police mobile (radio) car phones and realised that by restricting the range or 'service area' of transmitters, they could re-use the same radio frequencies again and again. In theory, this would allow many users to share the network. However, the computer technology to achieve this just didn't exist at that time. In 1947 AT&T in the USA proposed that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) allocate a large number of radio-spectrum frequencies to allow mobile telephone services to become a reality. But the FCC decided to limit the amount of frequencies available to the point that only 23 simultaneous phone conversations would be possible in the same service area. This effectively killed the potential market and because no companies were prepared to invest in the technology, mobile phone research was set back 20 years. It took America's FCC more than two decades to realise it had made a mistake in restrictng the frequency allocation for mobile phones. In 1968 it reconsidered its position stating 'if the technology to build a better mobile service works, we will
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increase the frequency allocation, freeing the airwaves for more mobile phones.' AT&T and Bell Labs quickly proposed a cellular system of many small, low-powered, broadcast towers, each covering a 'cell' a few miles in radius. Each tower would use only a few of the total frequencies allocated to the system. As the phone user travelled across the area, his call would be automatically handed on from tower to tower. The first mobile phone and call (1973)

Dr Martin Cooper, a former general manager for the systems division at Motorola, is considered the inventor of the first modern portable handset. Cooper made the first call on a portable cell phone to his rival, Joel Engel, head of research at Bell Laboratories. Bell had introduced the idea of cellular communications in 1947 with their police car technology and had been racing to beat Motorola. But in the end Motorola was first to incorporate the technology into a portable device designed for use outside a vehicle. The first mobile phone services (1979) Japan was easily first to introduce a commercial cellular telephone service operating in Tokyo in 1979. It wasn't until 1983 - nearly four years later - that Ameritech opened a similar service in Chicago, using Bell's Advanced Mobile Phone System (AMPS). It would be a further two years before cellular mobile phones reached the UK. Expanding the network (1985) (from one call to thousands) When you switch on your mobile today you assume there will be a service in most places. Indoors or outdoors, in the city and in much of the country, you take coverage for granted. But it was not always like that. When Cellnet opened for business in 1985 there was just one transmitter or base station, sited on top of the BT Tower in London, covering the whole Greater London area. Vodafone had more cells - but not many. Development was rapid and soon all major cities were covered, along with the motorways connecting them. Additional base stations then filled in the gaps. Digital mobile communication (1991)

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The future was clearly digital however and an international consortium of network operators and equipment manufacturers made plans for a universal digital cellular system known as GSM - Global System for Mobile Communication. In 1991 the vision became a reality, when Vodafone launched its digital (GSM) mobile phone service, the first in the UK. Handsets cost 1,000 each and were in short supply.

Radio Technology

Radio waves (1864)

The story of radio began almost 30 years before Marconi with a Cambridge professor called James Clerk Maxwell. Though he had never seen or experienced radio waves, Maxwell successfully forecast most of the laws that govern their propagation, calculating their speed and noting their resemblance to light waves. Maxwell showed how radio waves could be reflected, absorbed and focused like the beam from a torch, and could change the very nature of the object on which they were focused. Hardly anybody believed Maxwell in 1864, however, the theories were later quantified by Oliver Heaviside into two equations, and in 1879, Prof. David Hughes walked up Portland Place with a device that caught the sound of radio waves. In 1887, German scientist Heinrich Hertz carried out a famous set of experiments that proved Maxwell had been right all along - and in 1894, the British scientist Oliver Lodge succeeded in transmitting wireless signals over 150 yards. Marconis first wireless signal (1893) In June 1896 a 22-year-old Italian physicist called Guglielmo Marconi, who had settled in London the previous year, called upon the Engineer-in-Chief of the Post Office to demonstrate his new system of 'telegraphy without wires'. He had already approached the Italian government - but it showed no interest. The Post Office was more receptive and allowed Marconi to set up his transmitter on the roof of the Central Telegraph
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Office, and a receiver on the roof of a building called 'GPO South' in Carter Lane, 300 yards away. On July 27 Marconi succeeded in sending the signals between the two locations. It was the world's first recorded wireless message. The following month The Post Office gave Marconi backing to experiment with wireless apparatus on Salisbury Plain and in coastal locations. The first ship to shore wireless transmission (1897) In July 1897, while on a visit to Italy, Marconi made the first radio contact from ship to shore over a distance of 12 miles. Simultaneously he showed, for the first time, that wireless could reach into the 'great unknown' beyond the visible horizon. So it was the Italian navy that first used radio communication. The radio telephone (1906) During the early 1900s electrical engineers developed vacuum tubes that could be used to detect and to amplify radio signals. Lee De Forest, an American inventor, patented a vacuum tube called a triode or audion in 1907. This tube became the key element in developing radio telephony - allowing wireless to talk. There are many claims for the first transmission of human speech over the air. Most historians give credit to Reginald A. Fessenden, a Canadian-born physicist. In 1906 Fessenden spoke by radio from Brant Rock, Massachusetts, to ships offshore in the Atlantic Ocean. Another inventor who did much to improve radio receivers was the American inventor Edwin H. Armstrong. In 1933 he discovered how to make FM broadcasts - using Frequency Modulation to produce radio signals unaffected by static or distortion. This was a key breakthrough in allowing clearer radio telephony. The first ground to air telephone call (1920)

On August 19, 1920, Sir Samuel Instone, chairman of the Instone Air Line was able to have a telephone conversation by wireless radio between his home in London and a passenger on board on of his Vickers aeroplanes en route to Paris. This is thought to have been the first radio telephone call to an aircraft in flight.

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The first radio programme (1920) From 1911 the US Authorities started licensing commercial companies to make experimental radio transmissions, other countries soon following suit. The Dutchman Hanso ldzerda launched the first of his 'musical evenings' in November 1919 with broadcasts specifically intended for British enthusiasts from April 1920 from station PCGG in the Netherlands. There were also experimental radio telephony 'broadcasts' from Chelmsford by the Marconi Company from February 1920. In Canada the first 'scheduled' (i.e. pre-announced) entertainment transmission took place on May 20, 1920 - but this too was from an experimental station.

Satellite and microwave technology

Boses microwave demonstration (1895)

Up to 1900 the focus of invention had been on sending and receiving communication signals. As the 20th century progressed scientists worked with longer radio wavelengths (lower frequency signals) to achieve ever-greater distances. But some scientists were going the other way, looking at the properties of very short wavelengths. The theory was that by shortening the wave, you could pack more electromagnetic energy into the signal. One of the pioneers was J.C. Bose in India. In 1895 he gave his first public demonstration of very short wavelengths, ranging from 2.5cm down to 5mm - equivalent to a frequency of 60 Gigahertz (GHz). He used these transmissions to ring a bell remotely and to explode a charge of gunpowder. The first microwave links (1930)

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Microwave links first came into practical use during the 1930s. In 1931 Britain's Standard Telephone & Cable Ltd (STC) demonstrated its 'Micro-Ray' microwave communications link across the Channel between Dover and Calais. The following year, Britain's first ultra short wave radio telephone link was set up by The Post Office across the Bristol Channel, spanning a distance of 13 miles. The first radar (1935) In 1932 Sir Robert Watson-Watt figured out a way to harness the power of very short waves to detect objects far away. He came up with the idea of pulsing energy out on very short wavelengths in order to 'bounce' it off a target and detect the reflected signals. He wrote a paper (with A.F. Wilkins) describing this new technique in 1935 and the idea was taken up rapidly. By the autumn of 1938 his Radio Direction Finding (RDF) systems were in place along the south and east coasts of Britain. During the Battle of Britain in 1940, the British were able to detect enemy aircraft at any time of day and night and in any weather conditions, proving the defensive value of RDF or, as it would soon come to be called, 'radar' - short for Radio Detection And Ranging. Arthur C. Clerks proposal for communication satellites Once Werner von Braun's V2 missiles ceased raining destruction on London and other cities, a young RAF technician called Arthur C. Clarke conceived a vision for the postwar future in a magazine called Wireless World. In a letter headed 'V2 for Ionospheric Research', Clarke explained how a network of satellites could be placed in stationary orbit, 22,300 miles above the Earth's surface. Later, in an article titled 'Extra-Terrestrial Relays' published in October 1945, Clarke explained how these satellites could be used to transmit radio, TV and telephone signals around the world. Geostationary orbits (1945) The notion of the geostationary (or geosynchronous) orbit was first proposed in 1945 when the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke published his visionary concept of relaying communication signals from one ground station to another via artificial

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satellites circling the Earth. Keeping a steady flow of information between two ground stations and the satellite would need the satellite to remain in a fixed position in sight of both stations. Clarke reasoned that if the satellite orbited in the same direction and the same orbital speed as the Earth's rotation, it would appear to remain in a fixed position in the sky. He correctly calculated that the satellite would exactly match the speed of the Earth's rotation and keep in constant orbit at an altitude of 35,800km (22,300 miles) above the equator. NASAs syncom programme (1963)

In July 1963 the Hughes Aircraft Corporation launched the experimental Syncom 2 for NASA, the world's first geosynchronous communications satellite. Its earlier sister, Syncom 1, had been blown up on launch earlier that year, but version two was a huge success. It carried the first live two-way satellite call between heads of state when President John F. Kennedy in Washington, D.C., telephoned Nigerian Prime Minister Abubaker Balewa in Africa. The third Syncom satellite transmitted live television coverage of the 1964 Olympic Games from Tokyo. Syncom blazed the trail for the new generation of communications satellites in geosynchronous orbit.
Computer Networks

ARPANET (1960) In 1969 the Pentagon commissioned ARPANET for research into networking. The following year, Vinton Cerf and others published their first proposals for protocols that would allow computers to 'talk' to each other. ARPANET began operating Network Control Protocol (NCP), the first host-to-host protocol. In 1974 Vint Cerf joined Bob Kahn to present their 'Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection' specifying the detailed design of the 'Transmission Control Program' (TCP) - the basis of the modern
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Internet. In 1978 TCP was split into TCP (now short for Transmission Control Protocol) and IP (Internet Protocol). Pre-Internet online services (1970s) As the 1960s turned into the 1970s new mass information systems were devised using people's television screens for display. The modem speed was slow by modern standards but, being text only, the pages downloaded rapidly nonetheless. The overall experience was similar to the World Wide Web, only information was directly accessed from a single computer, rather than from multiple servers, and pages were accessed using numeric addresses typed on the TV's remote control. The service offered basic commercial services such as banking, e-mail and travel booking; in fact the travel industry still uses a similar service today. Transaction telephone (1980)

Using a credit card in the early 1980s was a pretty painful experience by today's standards. The whole transaction was done by hand, and if the price of the goods was too high, the shop, bar or restaurant had to telephone up the credit card company to get an authorisation code, which gave them permission to put the sale through. An alternative was process was introduced with these authorisation telephones. Now the retailer dialled the number, swiped the card through the slot on top and waited for an automatic code to be sent down the line. This was still a long way from making an actual payment online, but it was the first step on the road to today's much slicker operation. Invention of e-mail (1972) One of the founding firms of ARPANET and the Internet was a company called BBN. In late 1971 a BBN engineer called Ray Tomlinson invented an e-mail program that allowed users to exchange messages across a distributed network. In 1972 Tomlinson modified his e-mail program to run on ARPANET where it became a quick hit. Tomlinson chose the @ sign from the punctuation keys on his Model 33 Teletype because it meant 'at'. The same year Larry Roberts wrote the first e-mail management program to list, selectively read, file, forward and respond to messages.
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World Wide Web (1991)

By the end of the 1980s the European Particle Research Laboratory CERN in Geneva was one of the premier Internet sites in Europe. CERN desperately needed a better way of locating all the files, documents and other resources that now threatened to overwhelm it. A young British scientist, Tim Berners-Lee, working as a consultant for CERN, had the answer. His 'World Wide Web' system assigned a common system of written addresses and hypertext links to all information. Hypertext is the organisation of information units into connections that a user can make, the association is called a link. In October 1990 Berners-Lee started working on a hypertext graphical user interface (GUI) browser and editor. In 1991 the first WWW files were made available on the Internet for download using File Transfer Protocol (FTP). By 1993 the world was starting to wake up to the World Wide Web. In October that year there were around 200 known HTTP servers. Within a year there would be thousands.

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