Early communications involved images and symbols as found in cave paintings, some over 130,000–150,000 years ago, about the time Homo sapiens first walked the Earth. These were used by tribal groups and had meanings only to themselves, as there were no means of communicating this outside of the group. This cave art, sometimes found in sculptures and vessels, often depicted activities such as hunting and social interactions. This was also a time of body art, such as tattoos and piercings!
Of course, the use of verbal and animated gestures and interactions was also common with story telling a means of continuing historical lineage. The ideas were communicated by audial and visual means, from simple drawings and words to complex images that could express ideas with just one or two symbols. The idea that sound had a hand in developing our understanding and express it visually suggests that learning is done through audial and visual means.
So, what about the written word, and when was it used to communicate information and ideas? The first know writings from around 3,200 BC, in Mesopotamia, were of a cuneiform (wedge‑shaped) script, a series of pictograms that stemmed from an earlier form of symbolic tokens used for accounting. This cuneiform writing was eventually replaced by the phonetician alphabet, which was later adapted by many of ‘modern’ day alphabets such as Greek and Latin.
Sumerian cuneiform script
This change from tokens to script was a natural evolution which simplified the communication of information, at least from a learning perspective! Writing thus became man’s primary means of collecting, storing, and sharing of information.
It was however all written by hand but, around that time, 3,000 BC, the phonetic nature of the signs gave rise to the spoken word. This was perhaps a time when our histories were also passed on through story telling. So, from about this time, we have some historical evidence of communication through language—prior to that we did not really know for how long, or whether humans communicated this way.
Around 500 BC, the Persians used written messages, transported by horses as a postal service throughout the Empire. Relay stations were placed around a day’s ride, which could see about 300 km travelled—hence you could say the message was delivered at 300 km/day! It was interesting to note that even though there were several languages spoken throughout the Persian Empire, from Egypt to India, these messages mainly used one language, Aramaic.
Over the next 1,000 years, the main method used in getting the message across quicker was by building more roads, thus increasing the size of the network. Although not always seen as quicker, it was more reliable as more routes were created. There was still reliance on the mode of transport, a series of horses along the route.
In the 11th century, the idea of using purposely trained pigeons to fly from a source to home made for a quicker delivery of a message, albeit a smaller edition. During this medieval time, well-known conqueror, Genghis Khan utilised pigeons to deliver news from afar. Although quicker, the messages were quite small.
To communicate lots of information, the written word is ‘bound’ together in books, or manuscripts, all originally handwritten. These were compiled by scholars or scribes which were primarily used to record the scriptures, and other important documents—remember the Magna Carta of 1215? But these are still carefully and laboriously hand-written!
During the 1450’s a German inventor, Johannes Gutenberg devised a mechanical system of moveable type and thus the first printing press—the first typeface used was Blackletter. Printed books gave rise to mass communication of information, and to the general public, not just the educated, elite few. Literacy was now on the rise. Perhaps Gutenberg’s most famous book printed was a 42-line Bible—around 180 copies of them.
Gutenberg Press
The printed word begins to find new outlets for communicating information such as pamphlets in the 16th century and newspapers in the 17th. During the 1600s, printed material such as letters is ‘posted’ around the country and to neighbouring communities.
Some communication methods utilised shortened forms, or signals. Later, these would become known as coded messages, of which not all were of a benign nature! ‘Smoke signals’ were an early example, which were used through-out history, perhaps as early as 200 BC. These were a forerunner to other visual types of communication such as semaphores employed during the 17th and 18th centuries—a using a system of flags which were seen at a distance with a telescope, an invention of the time.
The next method to follow was the telegraph, using an electrical signal transmitted over wires, and vast distances. The messages were now sent and received almost simultaneously, instant as you could get at the time. Although attributed to Samuel Morse in 1837, the idea of telegraphy was first devised in 1747 by William Watson. This entailed a simple signal transmitted over a wire and ‘returning’ via the Earth.
In the 1830s, Englishmen Cooke and Wheatstone invented a system based on moving needles that pointed to the corresponding letter, but, still no code. Morse though, developed the code that bears his name today, thus simplifying the transmission, as others had used multiple wires, as many as 26! Yes, you guessed it, one for each letter of the alphabet.
Following the telegraph came the telephone, in 1876, invented by Alexander Graham Bell. Interestingly, this came about by mistake, as Bell was looking for ways to transmit sound over a wire. He had misread a technical article written in German, well diagrams actually, by Hermann von Helmholtz!
Similar to the telegraph, the telephone converted speech into electrical signals. This system used a transmitter, a liquid ‘varying’ resistor, its resistance changing to a needle and diaphragm moving with the input speech, converting movement into electricity. The receiver at the other end reversed this process, recreating the sound through a vibrating diaphragm.
Bell was particularly interested in sounds and speech as his mother had gone deaf and his father was a speech elocution professor. He had opened a school for the deaf called the Vocal Physiology and Mechanics of Speech in 1872, where he taught sign language, lip reading and other techniques.
Bell had other interests in communication…and in 1880, he and his assistant Charles Summer Tainter, transmitted wireless voice messages carried by a light beam over 200 m. This was some twenty or so years before radio, and a century before optic fibre!
Radio communications was demonstrated by Guglielmo Marconi in 1899 using Morse coded signals from a ship to shore. Following the success, German company Telefunken, developed wireless communications equipment in 1904. This led to amateur radio broadcasting around 1914 and later used extensively during the world wars as a means of information exchange. Commercial broadcasting began around 1920 which led to a much cheaper form of entertainment, music over the air-waves, for which people could dance to.
Television was the next best thing. It first appeared at the World’s Fair in New York in 1939. This gave a visual feel to communications, and as they say ‘a picture paints a 1000 words’. From the primitive devices of the 30’s and 40’s, the 50’s began to see better TVs, programs and more viewers. It became the main medium for entertainment and news. Of course, this is transmitted wirelessly via electromagnetic waves—cable television would come later.
In the late 1960’s, the United States defence department funded an internal, private network of computers communicating via a packet switching system. The first message was transmitted between two computers, one at UCLA (University of California) and the other at Stanford University. This was the beginnings of the Internet as we know it today.
After many advancements in technologies, communications protocols and systems, a series of computer networks, and a way to communicate messages, the Internet was formed. In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web which provided a means of exchanging information both with text and images.
So, where to now?
The World Wide Web can transmit information, in any format, to all corners of the World and in milliseconds. The only bottleneck is the communications medium (cable, air or fibre)—this will be the main area of growth for how fast information can travel, although today, it is a lot faster than 300 km/day some 2,500 years ago!
Some believe that communication will evolve into less direct and more implied or perhaps even telepathically through thoughts. It may even be based around a type of short-hand, such as today's ‘system’ of messages, e.g., lol and wth, or a combination of emojis and short messages or ‘initialisms’!
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