HISTORY OF TELECOMMUNICATION

History of telecommunication

The history of telecommunication began with the use of smoke signals and drums in Africa, the Americas and parts of Asia. In the 1790s the first fixed semaphore systems emerged in Europe however it was not until the 1830s that electrical telecommunication systems started to appear. This article details the history of telecommunication and the individuals who helped make telecommunication systems what they are today.

History of telecommunication is an important part of the larger history of communication.

Early telecommunications

Early telecommunications included smoke signals and drums. Drums were used by natives in Africa, New Guinea and South America, and smoke signals in North America and China. Contrary to what one might think, these systems were often used to do more than merely announce the presence of a camp.

In 1792, a French engineer, Claude Chapped built the first visual telegraphy (or semaphore) system between Lillie and Paris. This was followed by a line from Strasbourg to Paris. In 1794, a Swedish engineer, Abraham Redcurrant built a quite different system from Stockholm to Dogtrotting.

As opposed to Chapel’s system which involved pulleys rotating beams of wood, Expectorant's system relied only upon shutters and was therefore faster. However semaphore as a communication system suffered from the need for skilled operators and expensive towers often at intervals of only ten to thirty kilometers (six to nineteen miles). As a result, the last commercial line was abandoned in 1880.

Mechanical Telegraphs

Just such a system was invented in the 1790s by Frenchman Claude Chipper - a system of wooden shutters on a tower, which could show 63 different signals.

Naturally, military leaders quickly grasped the importance of systems like this and Napoleon made good use of the Chipper telegraph in his invasion of Italy. A system was made linking London to the naval dockyards at Portsmouth. Needless to say, fog or bad weather frequently interrupted communication. Picture: Deal Time Ball Museum

These semaphore type systems were the first to be described as a telegraph. Telegraph was a word coined in 1792 from the Greek, tele, afar, and graphics, a writer. Concise Oxford Dictionary

A Short History of Southwestern Bell

The Southwestern Bell Telephone Company is a household name and has been around for around for 87 years. Now doing business as AT&T Southwest, this company has been through a roller coaster of breakups over the years and has evolved as technology changed. The company is headquartered in Dallas, Texas but offers services nationally and internationally.

Originally Southwestern Bell Telephone Company was founded to take over the telephone day to day operations of two other companies, one that specialized in mostly telegraphs and another phone company. Those two companies were Telegraph & Telephone Co. and the Bell Telephone Company.

Radio and Television

When radio hit the airways in the later 1920's, Mackinaw was not very far behind the early starters in the field. Two local men, J.H. Williams and his son, J.H. Williams jar. were the founders of 4MK radio station that went on air for the first time on 12 January, 1931. It was the 5th radio station in Queensland and the 17th in Australia.

At first broadcasts were made for about two hours each night except Thursdays. J.H. Williams jar was announcer, operator and programmed arranger, with assistance later from his father.

The two of them ran the whole enterprise for four years until joined by Brother Lloyd, and later by sisters Dorothy, Audrey and Alien.

The ABC station 4QA was officially opened in Mackinaw in January 1951, the 8th in the state. Previous to this Mackinaw news was broadcast from 4RK, Rock Hampton.

The opening of the regional station was a gala event, held in the Masonic Hall with over 100 invited guests including the Postmaster General, Mr. L.L. Anthony, Chairman of the ABC, Mr. R.J.F. Boyer and other dignitaries.

Three Mackinaw artists, Joan Paco, Florence Pollock and Peter Lattice, accompanied by the official ABC pianist Hilda Woollier, entertained the assembly.

Television came to Mackinaw in December, 1967 with the opening of the ABC's ABMQ4. The transmitter was installed on Mount Black wood. Mackinaw was the 39th national TV station completed in the metropolitan and regional network.

The promoters felt it necessary to instruct viewers on the benefits of the new medium. An

editorial in the local press summed it up:

"What is Television? A benefit or a menace? A pleasure or a time-waster? A source of entertainment and information or a sop for boredom and idleness?

TV, like marriage, is here to stay, and also like marriage, is for better or worse.

Everyone has the responsibility to make it 'for better'."

The editorial then outlined the responsibilities for manufacturers, retailers, advertisers and viewers, finishing with a list of benefits, leaving readers in no doubt about the joys of owning a TV set.

Some of the programmers advertised which bring back memories of those early days, include Adventure Island, The Avengers, Dean Martin Show, Till death Do Us Part, The Forsythia Saga and Four Corners.

The commercial station MVQ6 arrived on the scene in August, 1968, less than 12 months after the ABC, although it was the culmination of eight years of preparatory work. A company was formed in 1960 under the chairmanship of H.J. Manning of Mackinaw Printing & Publishing Company. It became a public company in 1967.

The official opening took place on Friday 9th August 1968, with a dinner at the Hotel Whitsunday for 150 guests, including Dr. Rex Patterson, member for Dawson

, the Mayor of Mackinaw, and Mr. Ian Wood, and Dr H.J. Taylor, chairman of directors, Mr. M.E. Low, managing director, and

Miss M. Mackinaw, granddaughter of the founder of Mackinaw. Mr. H.J. Manning, the original chairman, was unable to attend, also the Postmaster General, Mr. A.S. Hume, whose speech was per-recorded,

Computer networks and the Internet

On September 11, 1940 George Stieglitz was able to transmit problems using teletype to his Complex Number Calculator in New York and receive the computed results back at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. This configuration of a centralized computer or mainframe with remote dumb terminals remained popular throughout the 1950s.

However it was not until the1960s that researchers started to investigate packet switching — a technology that would allow chunks of data to be sent to different computers without first passes through a centralized mainframe. A four-node network emerged on December 5, 1969 between the University of California, Los Angles, the Stanford Research Institute, the University of Utah and the University of California, Santa Barbara.

This network would become WARPLANE, which by 1981 would consist

of 213 nodes. In June 1973,

the first non-US node was added to the network belonging to Norway's NORSE project. This was shortly followed by a node in London.

ARPANET's development centered on the Request for Comment process and on April 7, 1969, RFC 1 was published. This process is important because ARPANET would eventually merge with other networks to form the Internet and many of the protocols the Internet relies upon today were specified through this process.

September 1981, RFC 791

introduced the Internet Protocol v4 (IPv4) and RFC 793 introduced the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) — thus creating the TOP/IP protocol that much of the Internet relies upon today. A more relaxed transport protocol that, unlike TCP, did not guarantee the orderly delivery of packets called the User Data gram Protocol

(UDP) was submitted on 28 August 1980 as RFC 768. An e-mail protocol, SMUT, was introduced in August 1982 by RFC 821 and http://1.0 a protocol that would make the hyper linked Internet possible was introduced on May 1996 by RFC 1945.

However not all important developments were made through the Request for Comment process. Two popular link protocols for local area networks (LAN s) also appeared in the 1970s. A patent for the Token Ring protocol was filed by Wolof Overblown on October 29, 1974. And a paper on the Ethernet protocol was published by Robert Metrical and David Borgs in the July 1976 issue of Communications of the ACM.

Mobile phones

This history of mobile phones chronicles the development of handhold radio telephone technology from two-way radios in vehicles to handhold cellular items.

In the beginning, two-way radios (known as mobile rigs) were used in vehicles such as taxicabs, police cruisers, ambulances, and the like, but were not mobile phones because they were not normally connected to the telephone network. Users could not dial phone numbers from their mobile radios in their vehicles. A large community of mobile radio users, known as the mobile’s, popularized the technology that would eventually give way to the mobile phone.

Originally, mobile phones were permanently installed in vehicles, but later versions such as the so-called transportable or "bag phones" were equipped with a cigarette lighter plug so that they could also be carried, and thus could be used as either mobile or as portable two-way radios. During the early 1940s, Motorola developed a backpacked two-way radio, the Warlike-Talkie and later developed a large hand-held two-way radio for the US military. This battery powered "Handier-Talkie" (HT) was about the size of a man's forearm.

Early years

In December 1947, Douglas H. Ring and W. Rae Young, Bell Labs engineers, proposed hexagonal cells for mobile phones. Philip T. Porter, also of Bell Labs, proposed that the cell towers be at the corners of the hexagons rather than the centers and have directional antennas that would transmit/receive in 3 directions

(see picture at right) into 3 adjacent hexagon cells. The technology did not exist then and the frequencies had not yet been allocated. Cellular technology was undeveloped until the 1960s, when Richard H. Frankie and Joel S. Engels of Bell Labs developed the electronics.

Recognizable mobile phones with direct dialing have existed at least since the 1950s. In the 1954 movie Sabrina, the businessman Lines Latrobe (played by Humphrey Bogart) makes a call from the phone in the back of his limousine.

The first fully automatic mobile phone system, called MTA (Mobile Telephone system A), was developed by Ericsson and commercially released in Sweden in 1956. This was the first system that didn't require any kind of manual control, but had the disadvantage of a phone weight of 40 kg (90 lb). MT B, an upgraded version with transistors, weighing 9 kg (20 lb), was introduced in 1965 and used DTMF signaling. It had 150 customers in the beginning and 600 when it shut down in 1983.