Telegraph to Smartphone

1837 – 200760 items

communicationstechnology
“Landing the Shore End of the Atlantic Cable” by Robert Charles Dudley, 1866. Metropolitan Museum of Art. CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.
“Landing the Shore End of the Atlantic Cable” by Robert Charles Dudley, 1866. Metropolitan Museum of Art. CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

How a message outran the horse

In 1837 a message went as fast as the rider, the train or the ship that carried it. By 2007 it went at the speed of light, to a phone in a pocket. This timeline follows the 170 years between: copper on poles, cables on the seabed, waves through the air, relays in orbit, and networks that joined them all.

The bands mark each new way of sending, and they overlap, because nothing old disappeared: the telegraph was still carrying news when television arrived.

  • The telegraph age — dots and dashes along a wire

  • Wiring the oceans — from the Channel to the Pacific

  • Wireless telegraphy and the golden age of radio

  • The television age and the satellite era

  • The internet and cellular networks

Six threads

Filter by tag to follow one way of sending through the whole span: wire (telegraph and telephone lines), undersea cables, wireless (radio and television), satellites, internet and mobile. The map runs from Valentia Island to Alice Springs, Buenos Aires and Nairobi.

What hath God wrought — the message Samuel Morse sent from the US Capitol to Baltimore, 24 May 1844

Items

  1. The telegraph age

    ≈ 39 years

  2. Cooke and Wheatstone test their telegraph at Euston

    London and Birmingham Railway, Euston to Camden Town

  3. “A patient waiter is no loser”

    Speedwell Ironworks, Morristown, New Jersey

  4. “What hath God wrought”

    US Capitol, Washington, to Mount Clare, Baltimore

  5. The telegraph catches a murderer

    Slough station

  6. Reuter bridges a gap with pigeons

    Aachen

  7. Wiring the oceans

    ≈ 51 years

  8. A cable crosses the Channel

    South Foreland to Sangatte, across the Strait of Dover

  9. The 1858 Atlantic cable

    27 days · Valentia Island, Ireland, to Trinity Bay, Newfoundland

  10. Queen Victoria cables President Buchanan

    Valentia Island, Ireland, to Trinity Bay, Newfoundland

  11. The telegraph crosses America

    Salt Lake City, Utah

  12. International Telegraph Union founded

    Quai d’Orsay, Paris

  13. The Great Eastern lands the Atlantic cable

    Foilhommerum Bay, Valentia Island, to Heart’s Content, Newfoundland

  14. London is wired to Bombay

    Porthcurno to Bombay, by Lisbon, Gibraltar, Malta, Alexandria, Suez and Aden

  15. Australian Overland Telegraph completed

    Port Augusta to Darwin, by Alice Springs

  16. Bell and Gray file on the same day

    Patent Office Building, Washington

  17. “Mr. Watson, come here — I want to see you”

    5 Exeter Place, Boston

  18. The first telephone exchange opens

    Boardman Building, New Haven

  19. Hertz makes radio waves

    Technische Hochschule, Karlsruhe

  20. Strowger’s automatic exchange

    La Porte, Indiana

  21. Wireless telegraphy

    ≈ 25 years

  22. Marconi’s signal crosses the Atlantic

    Poldhu, Cornwall, to Signal Hill, St John’s, Newfoundland

  23. The Pacific cable closes the loop

    Bamfield, British Columbia, to Southport, Queensland, by Fanning, Fiji and Norfolk

  24. Fessenden’s Christmas Eve broadcast

    Brant Rock, Marshfield, Massachusetts

  25. The first coast-to-coast telephone call

    New York to San Francisco

  26. Room 40 breaks the Zimmermann telegram

    Old Admiralty Building, London

  27. Golden age of radio

    30 years

  28. “Los locos de la azotea” broadcast Parsifal

    Teatro Coliseo, Buenos Aires

  29. KDKA broadcasts the election returns

    Westinghouse works, East Pittsburgh

  30. Baird demonstrates television

    22 Frith Street, Soho, London

  31. Farnsworth sends an electronic picture

    202 Green Street, San Francisco

  32. The television age

    ≈ 71 years

  33. BBC television begins at Alexandra Palace

    Alexandra Palace, London

  34. The War of the Worlds

    CBS Studio One, 485 Madison Avenue, New York

  35. TAT-1: the first transatlantic telephone cable

    Gallanach Bay, near Oban, to Clarenville, Newfoundland

  36. The satellite era

    ≈ 50 years

  37. Sputnik’s beep

    Site 1, Baikonur

  38. SCORE broadcasts a Christmas message from orbit

  39. Telstar’s first live pictures reach Europe

    Pleumeur-Bodou radome, Brittany

  40. The Moscow–Washington hotline

    The Pentagon, Arlington, Virginia

  41. Syncom 3 carries the Tokyo Olympics

    National Stadium, Tokyo

  42. Early Bird: the first commercial communications satellite

  43. Our World: “All You Need Is Love”

    EMI Studios, Abbey Road, London

  44. The internet

    ≈ 38 years

  45. Parkes relays the moonwalk

    Parkes radio telescope, New South Wales

  46. ARPANET’s first message: “LO”

    Boelter Hall, UCLA, to SRI, Menlo Park

  47. Email gets its @

    Bolt Beranek and Newman, Cambridge, Massachusetts

  48. Martin Cooper’s handheld call

    Sixth Avenue near 54th Street, New York

  49. Cellular networks

    28 years

  50. NTT opens the first cellular network

    Tokyo

  51. NMT: one mobile network for the Nordic countries

    Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland

  52. The ARPANET switches to TCP/IP

  53. Commercial cellphone service reaches America

    Soldier Field, Chicago

  54. TAT-8: light under the Atlantic

    Tuckerton, New Jersey, to Widemouth Bay, Cornwall

  55. The first GSM call

    Helsinki

  56. The World Wide Web goes public

    CERN, Meyrin, near Geneva

  57. “Merry Christmas”: the first text message

    Newbury, Berkshire

  58. i-mode puts the internet on a phone

    Tokyo

  59. Apple unveils the iPhone

    Moscone Center West, San Francisco

  60. M-Pesa: money by text message

    Nairobi