An Opinion

Communications Have Come a Long Way

Friday, 26 February 2010 00:00

In fact, one of my favorite sayings is, “The name of the game is to communicate.”

So, as I pondered what to write about this week, I decided to do some research about how we have communicated over the years. After “yelling,” came smoke signals. So long as the senders and receivers were on hilltops, the communications could be seen for miles.

Next, as the result of wars, it became very important to communicate from battlefields to the King or Emperor. Messages were sent by horse, and at times, it took a series of horses to deliver them because of the distances to be covered. At the same time, it was essential to have paper to write on, because clay tablets just wouldn’t work. The written message goes back to about the 6th century B.C.

From then until about the 11th century AD, the only way the delivery of a message could be delivered faster was to speed up the messenger – faster horses and short cuts. Then, in the 11th century AD, a new faster messenger came along – the homing pigeon. It was Genghis Kahn who used homing pigeons to deliver messages about his successes in battle to the homeland in Mongolia.

Next came the printing press. Gutenberg and the origins of western printing started in the mid-1400s. With printing presses, more information could be distributed much faster and more often. There is no doubt that the late 1400s launched the “press” as we know it today.

Communicating took another giant leap forward as a “postal service” was developed in England around 1633. Imagine the idea that any person could send a message anywhere in the country. In 1639, the first postal service was established in the New World. Massachusetts set up a system to deliver mail.

While flags and optical signals were also used in the 17th and 18th centuries, another major step forward came with photographs in the mid-1850s. Interestingly, the first war to be fully documented with photographs was the American Civil War. Around 10,000 glass negatives have been saved and are still available today.

But, the speed really took hold with the development of the ability to send instantaneous electronic signals. In 1836 Samuel Morse created the Morse Code. Then, in 1879, the first telephone was created, and we could effectively communicate for hundreds and hundreds of miles.

The next step was to be able to communicate across oceans. Just 48 years ago, the first transatlantic TV signal was sent via satellite.

And today, we have cell phones, texting, emails and the capability to have personal video sent anywhere in the world. Who knows what will be next.