The Development of Telecommunications

Modern-day telecommunications is so accessible and easy-to-use that most people take it for granted. Today, just by pressing a few numbers on a telephone, a person can communicate with someone who is located thousands of miles away. In the past, telecommunications was not so easy and efficient.

The earliest known forms of telecommunications were performed with smoke and drum signals. The natives of Africa, South America, and New Guinea used smoke to communicate over long distances, while the people in North America and China sent signals by sounding drums. There was no significant advancement of telecommunications from those times onwards, until the year 1792, when Claude Chappe, a French engineer, developed the first semaphore system that ran between Paris and Lille. In 1839, Sir Charles Wheatstone and Sir William Fothergill Cooke of England built the first electrical telegraph for commercial use. This device sent messages by the deflection of needles, and it operated over a distance of 13 miles along the Great Western Railway.

In America, Samuel Morse designed another type of electrical telegraph, but it did not work successfully when he demonstrated it in 1837. Then, Alfred Vail made a register to complement his invention, which would enable the telegraph to record messages on a paper tape. This made Samuel Morse?s invention a success, and it managed to send messages over a distance of 3 miles in 1838, and then, 40 miles in 1844. In 1866, the first transatlantic telegraph cable was established.

The next great advancement in telecommunications technology was the telephone, which was invented by Alexander Graham Bell. At the time when Bell was developing the telephone, another inventor, Elisha Gray, was also working on the same invention. However, Bell brought his invention to the patent office just a few hours ahead of Gray, and he was given credit as the inventor of the telephone. At the time when he was making experiments to develop the telephone, telegraphy had been around for about 30 years. Even though the telegraph was successful in transmitting messages over long distances, it could not send more than one messages at a time. Therefore, Bell decided that he would develop a ?harmonic telegraph? which would allow several notes to be transmitted on a single wire. He reasoned that such transmission would be possible if the signals had different pitches. As he continued to work on his invention, Bell found out that it was possible to develop a device that could transmit speech with electricity. In 1876, he completed his invention of the telephone.

After the telephone was invented, many improvements were made to enable the device to transmit speech over longer distances and produce better sound quality. However, the major turning point in the history of telephone took place when Martin Cooper, manager of Motorola, made a phone call to Dr. Joel Engel, head researcher of AT&T, using a cellular phone. That was the beginning of the era of the mobile phone, which has become a necessity item for many people around the world today. With the advent of the Internet, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) was also developed to allow online telephone communication.