Telecommunications
(WC ~ 920)
Telecommunication, or ‘communication at a
distance’, has been around since ancient times. The Roman historian Suetonius
tells us that a prearranged signal was relayed from Rome to the emperor
Tiberius, who had retreated to the island of Capri, to announce the execution
of Sejanus, who had tried to usurp the emperor’s power in his absence. Tiberius
is said to have “waited on a clifftop for the distant bonfire signals, which he
had ordered to be sent in case his couriers might be delayed.” This use of fire
as a beacon offered the virtually instantaneous reception of the signal.
Similarly, the smoke signals of Native Americans and the drum signals of tribes
in Africa served to convey messages, such as warnings, across significant
distances without much lapse in time. Such signals, which unlike messages sent by couriers, do
not necessitate the conveyance of tangible materials, are known as semaphores. A more modern and complex example of
telecommunication can be found in the optical telegraph of Swedish poet and
inventor A.N Edelcrantz. His optical telegraphs were tower-like structures with
collapsible iron shutters at the top. The shutters were
in three columns, with the two outer columns having three rows and the middle
column having four, so that there was a total of ten shutters. This ten-signal
element was a precursor to modern data systems that rely
on binary code. In Edelcrantz’s system, the shutters could be opened and closed
so that a total of 1024 configurations, or code characters, could be displayed.
The towers were placed at intervals of 10 kilometres, and telescopes
were utilized to view one tower from another. Behind the tower, skilled practitioners,
reminiscent of puppeteers, worked a system of ropes to open and close the
shutters in ordered sequences to communicate coded meaning to the next post.
The next major development in
telecommunications came when Samuel Morse go the idea to harness electricity to
send messages electronically. In 1837, Morse completed his first electric
telegraph, which included a transmitter and a
receiver, the former sending sequences of varied electric currents and the
latter converting them into dots and dashes on paper. Later, with the assistance of experienced
machinist Alfred Vail, Morse made refinements to his original design.
The most significant of these improvements was the addition of a key that could be depressed to make clicking noises, allowing
messages to be sent not only visually but also audibly. The system of code, now
famously known as Morse Code, he developed used symbols consisting of dots and bars. Ingeniously, the simplest symbols were assigned to the
most commonly used letters in English, with
a single dot representing the ubiquitous letter E. The simplicity, ease of
operation, and speed of the Morse telegraph allowed messages to be sent rapidly
over long distances, and made it the preferred telecommunication system of the
19th century.
Transmission of sound would soon dominate
the world of telecommunications, and this trend was facilitated by the advent
of the telephone. Credit for the invention of the telephone is owed to an Italian-American,
Antonio Meucci, who immigrated to New York to perfect and market his
‘teletrofono’, a device he had developed for home use to communicate with his
invalid wife without having to move between the basement and the first floor.
Meucci’s efforts waned, however, when telegraph giant Western Union refused to
meet with him, and his
inability to afford the money for a patent meant that he could not protect his
invention. This gave Alexander Graham Bell the opportunity to patent his
own design, which made him a fortune. Within five years of acquiring the
patent, Bell developed a telephone system that serviced nearly 50,000 phones,
and by 1900, that number had risen to almost 600,000. His company, AT&T, enjoyed a virtual monopoly
on telephone service in the US, and added to it by purchasing Western Union
and taking control of the telegraph industry as well. Ironically, Bell had offered to sell his
telephone patent to Western Union for $100,000 in 1876, but the company
allegedly, and no doubt regretfully, stated, “We do not see that this device
will ever be capable of sending recognisable speech over a distance of several
miles.”
Likewise, radio became a reality around the
same time, and this was the true beginning of wireless telecommunications in
the modern sense. The
possibility of radio telecommunication got underway with German physicist
Heinrich Hertz’s experiment that proved radio waves could be transmitted
through the air. Italian
inventor Guglielmo Marconi further investigated radio waves and came up with
the first commercially viable radio transmission system in 1895. Before
long, radio broadcasts were sending music, news, and live sports commentary far
and wide, and this gave rise to the notion of encoding radio waves with moving
pictures, which Philo Taylor Farnworth achieved by scanning images with a beam
of electrons. Farnsworth first transmitted a single line, followed by a dollar
sign, via an invention that was the predecessor of the modern television.
Each of these early telecommunication
breakthroughs, in a sense, ‘predicted’ the Internet as they all had the
capacity or potential to connect people and disseminate information around the
globe. Although traditional telephones, radio, and television continue to be
used, computers, including smartphones, are the driving factors behind
telecommunication today. Nowadays, approximately 25,000 gigabytes of data are
uploaded to the Internet every single second, and many users seem to be
uncomfortable if they are not connected. A study commissioned by the mobile
provider Nokia discovered that, on average, users check their smartphones every
six minutes.
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