Communication Timeline Outline

The Advantages of Orally Transmitted Traditions
(Circa 30,000 BCE)

Using Carrier Pigeons to Communicate the Results of the Olympic Games
(Circa 750 BCE)

How Herodotus Used Writing and Messages in his Histories
(Circa 450 BCE – 420 BCE)

Postal and Communication Infrastructure in Ancient India
(Circa 300 BCE)

Traversing the Mediterranean in Twenty Days
(700)

The Earliest Surviving Letter Known to Have Been Written from One Englishman to Another
(704 – 705)

Postal System within the Mongol Empire and China
(Circa 1200)

Routine Everyday Messages Inscribed on Rune-Sticks
(Circa 1350)

The First Prepaid Letter Sheets
(1608)

A Universal Language Based on a Classification Scheme or Ontology, and a Universal System of Measurement
(1668)

The World's First Postage Stamp from the First Postal Service to Allow Registration and Pre-Payment
(April 1 – December 1680)

Faster than a Messenger on Horseback
(March 2, 1791)

Invention of Steel Engraving
(Circa 1792 – 1819)

The Chappe Telegraph
(1794)

Phasing Out Latin as the International Language
(1800)

The First Working Electric Telegraph
(1816)

The First Common Carrier Railroad in the United States
(July 4, 1828 – May 24, 1830)

The Braille System of Printing and Reading for the Blind
(1829)

Origins of the Morse Code
(1837)

The Penny Post: Perhaps the Greatest Single Stimulus to Written Communication
(1837 – 1840)

Probably the World's Oldest Picture Postcard
(1840)

The Penny Black
(May 1, 1840)

Morse Transmits the First Message by Morse Code
(May 24, 1844)

"Notes and Queries" Begins Publication
(November 3, 1849)

Using a Fleet of 45 Carrier Pigeons to Deliver News
(1850)

Using a Fleet of 200 Carrier Pigeons and the Telegraph
(1851)

Cyrus Field Intends to Lay an Atlantic Cable
(1854 – 1856)

Cyrus Field and Partners Found The Atlantic Telegraph Company
(1856)

The First Attempt to Lay the Atlantic Cable Fails
(1857)

Reuters Expands, Following Telegraph Lines
(1858)

The Atlantic Cable Operates Successfully for Three Weeksication on the Cable Fails Within 3 Weeks
(August 16 – September 18, 1858)

The Pony Express
(April 3, 1860 – October 26, 1861)

The Origins of Network Neutrality
(June 16, 1860)

New York and San Francisco are Connected by Telegraph
(October 24, 1861)

The True Inventor of the Telephone?
(October 27, 1861)

The Atlantic Cable Snaps after 1200 Miles
(July 1865)

The Third and Successful Atlantic Cable
(July 27, 1866)

The Pigeon Post into Paris: The First Important Application of Microfilm
(1870 – 1871)

Bell Invents and Patents the Telephone
(March 10, 1876)

The First Regular Telephone Line
(1877)

The First Wireless Telephone Communication
(April 1, 1880)

The Telautograph
(July 31, 1888)

Lewis Carroll Wrote or Received 98,000 Letters
(January 14, 1898)

A Logarithmic Law for Communication
(1924)

Sarnoff Creates NBC
(1926)

Hartley's Law
(1928)

The First Electronic Speech Synthesizer
(1936 – 1939)

The Nyquist-Shannon Sampling Theorem
(1940)

Actress Hedy Lamarr Invents Spread-Sprectrum
(1940)

Communication by Geosynchronous Satellites Predicted
(October 1945)

A Mathematical Theory of Communication
(July – October 1948)

The Hamming Codes
(1950)

After 1954 More News Was Distributed Electronically than on Paper
(1950)

"Language and Communication"
(1951)

Sputnik is Launched
(October 4, 1957)

An Improved Modem
(1958)

The U.S. Launches Explorer-1
(January 31, 1958)

The First Voice Transmission from the First Communications Satellite
(December 19, 1958)

Human Versus Machine Intelligence and Communication
(1959)

Technical Basis for the Development of Phreaking
(November 1960)

Precursor of Word Processing and Email
(1961)

The Gutenberg Galaxy
(1962)

The Information Economy
(1962)

The First Satellite to Relay Signals from Earth to Satellite and Back
(June 10, 1962)

The First Geosynchronous Communications Satellite is Launched
(July 26, 1963)

The First Geostationary Communication Satellite
(August 19, 1964)

Email Begins
(1965)

The U.S. Postal Services Introduces OCR
(1965)

The First Commercial Communications Satellite to be Placed in Geosynchronous Orbit
(April 6, 1965)

The First "Actual Network Experiment"
(October 1965)

The First Message Sent Over the ARPANET
(October 29, 1969)

The @ in Email
(March 1971)

The First Email Management Program
(July 1971)

The First Public Computerized Bulletin Board System
(1973)

First Electronic Pagination System, Forerunner of Email and Instant Messaging
(1973)

Launching "Messages in a Bottle" into the Cosmic Ocean
(1977)

TEX and Metafont
(1977 – 1979)

The Network Nation
(1978)

The Minitel
(1978 – June 30, 2012)

The First Dial-UP CBBS
(February 16, 1978)

The First Cellular Telephone Service in the United Sates
(December 16, 1982)

The Declining Role of Print in Total Information Flow
(1983)

The First Commercial Analog Cellular Telephone Service
(October 13, 1983 – 1984)

Critique of Computational Linguistics
(1987)

The First Commercial Network-Based Groupware Program
(1988)

The First Gateways Between Private E-Mail Carriers and the Internet
(1989)

TED: Technology, Entertainment and Design
(1990)

Neil Papworth Sends the First SMS Text Message
(December 3, 1992)

The Web's First and Longest Continuously Running Blog
(1993)

The First Tablet Computer with Wireless Connectivity
(April 1993 – July 1994)

More Email is Sent than Paper Mail
(1996)

The Average Person Receives 733 Pieces of Paper Mail Each Year, Half of Which is Junk
(1998)

Bluetooth
(1999)

Origins of Cyberspace
(2002)

The First U.S. Standards for Sending Commercial E-Mail
(December 16, 2003)

The Institute for the Future of the Book
(2004)

The First Intelligible Word from an Extinct South American Civilization?
(August 12, 2005)

Like Teleporting in Star Trek
(June 2006)

Google Apps are Introduced
(August 2006)

Twitter: "What Are You Doing?"
(October 2006)

Change.gov is Founded
(November 5, 2008)

First Reported Case of ZZZ-Mailing
(December 15, 2008)

U.S. Households Received and Sent 176 Billion Pieces of Physical Mail in 2009
(2009)

Reinventing Email and Internet Communication
(May 28, 2009)

"The Web Pries Lid off Iranian Censorship"
(June 23, 2009)

After the Earthquake in Haiti, Donating by SMS Text
(January 13, 2010)

World Texting Competition is Won by Koreans
(January 14, 2010)

Introduction of Apple's iPad
(January 27, 2010)

"Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication. . . "
(February 2010)

Cell Phones Are Now Used More for Data than Speech
(May 13, 2010)

Spam Declines from 90% of Email Traffic to Only 72.9%
(July 2010 – June 2011)

Data on Mobile Networks is Doubling Each Year
(August 1, 2010)

Twitter Has 175 Million Users
(October 30, 2010)

U.S. E-Book Sales Predicted to Reach $1,000,000,000 in 2010
(December 11, 2010)

An App the Promotes the Value of Impermanence
(2011 – 2013)

The First Independently Published Magazine Exclusively for the iPad
(January 2011)

Voice-Activated Translation on Cell Phones
(January 12, 2011)

The U. S. National Broadband Map
(February 17, 2011)

Nearly 50% of U.S. Mobile Subscribers Own Smartphones
(March 29, 2012)

The First Teleportation from One Macroscopic Object to Another
(November 8, 2012)

"Anonymous" Plans to Shut Down Syrian Government Websites in Response to Countrywide Internet Blackout
(November 29 – December 1, 2012)

The Library of Congress Has Archived 170 Billion Tweets
(January 4, 2013)