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A Brief History of Communication
A Brief History of Communication
By Tuan C. Nguyen
Updated on January 31, 2021
Humans have communicated with one another in some shape or form ever
since time immemorial. But to understand the history of communication, all we
have to go by are written records that date as far back as ancient Mesopotamia.
And while every sentence starts with a letter, back then people began with a
picture.
The Kish tablet, discovered in the ancient Sumerian city of Kish, has
inscriptions considered by some experts to be the oldest form of known writing.
Dated to 3500 B.C., the stone features proto-cuneiform signs, basically
rudimentary symbols that convey meaning through its pictorial resemblance to
a physical object. Similar to this early form of writing are the ancient Egyptian
hieroglyphs, which date back to around 3200 B.C.
Written Language
Elsewhere, written language appears to have come about around 1200 B.C. in
China and around 600 B.C. in the Americas. Some similarities between the
early Mesopotamian language and the one that developed in ancient Egypt
suggests that a writing system originated in the Middle East. However, any kind
of connection between Chinese characters and these early language systems is
less likely since the cultures don’t seem to have had any contact.
Among the first non-glyph writing systems not to use pictorial signs is the
phonetic system. With phonetic systems, symbols refer to spoken sounds. If this
sounds familiar, it’s because the modern alphabets that many people in the
world use today represent a phonetic form of communication. Remnants of
such systems first appeared either around 19th century B.C. thanks to an early
Canaanite population or 15th century B.C. in connection with a Semitic
community that lived in central Egypt.
Phoenician System
Over time, various forms of the Phoenician system of written communication
began to spread and were picked up along the Mediterranean city-states. By the
8th century B.C., the Phoenician system reached Greece, where it was altered
and adapted to the Greek oral language. The biggest alterations were the
addition of vowel sounds and having the letters read from left to right.
Long-Distance Communication
And as humans neared the end of the B.C. period, systems of long-distance
communication started to become more commonplace. A historical entry in the
book “Globalization and Everyday Life” noted that around 200 to 100 B.C:
"Human messengers on foot or horseback (were) common in Egypt and China
with messenger relay stations built. Sometimes fire messages (were) used from
relay station to station instead of humans."
In the year 14, the Romans established the first postal service in the western
world. While it’s considered to be the first well-documented mail delivery
system, others in India and China had already long been in place. The first
legitimate postal service likely originated in ancient Persia around 550 B.C.
However, historians feel that in some ways it wasn’t a true postal service
because it was used primarily for intelligence gathering and later to relay
decisions from the king.
“…he took sticky clay and cut in it characters as thin as the edge of a coin. Each
character formed, as it were, a single type. He baked them in the fire to make them
hard. He had previously prepared an iron plate and he had covered his plate with a
mixture of pine resin, wax, and paper ashes. When he wished to print, he took an
iron frame and set it on the iron plate. In this, he placed the types, set close
together. When the frame was full, the whole made one solid block of type. He
then placed it near the fire to warm it. When the paste [at the back] was slightly
melted, he took a smooth board and pressed it over the surface, so that the block of
type became as even as a whetstone.”
By the 19th century, the world was ready to move beyond the printed word.
People wanted photographs, except they didn’t know it yet. That was until
French inventor Joseph Nicephore Niepce captured the world’s first
photographic image in 1822. The early process he pioneered, called
heliography, used a combination of various substances and their reactions to
sunlight to copy the image from an engraving.
Color Photographs
Other notable later contributions to the advancement of photography include a
technique for producing color photographs called the three-color method,
initially put forth by Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell in 1855 and the
Kodak roll film camera, invented by American George Eastman in 1888.
The foundation for the invention of electric telegraphy was laid by inventors
Joseph Henry and Edward Davey. In 1835, both had independently and
successfully demonstrated electromagnetic relay, where a weak electrical signal
can be amplified and transmitted across long distances.
The Telephone
Naturally, the next hurdle was to figure out a way to transmit sound to far off
distances. The idea for a “speaking telegraph” was kicked around as early as
1843 when Italian inventor Innocenzo Manzetti began broaching the concept.
And while he and others explored the notion of transmitting sound across
distances, it was Alexander Graham Bell who ultimately was granted a patent in
1876 for "Improvements in Telegraphy," which laid out the underlying
technology for electromagnetic telephones.
Sources
“Cai Lun.” New World Encyclopedia.
“Dream Pool Essays by Shen Kuo by Kuo Shen.” Goodreads, 24 June 2014.
Renaissance Rhetoric
History of Electricity
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