Communications

Communication is a process that began even before we knew how to write or spell the word "communication". Communication is perhaps dating back to the introduction of life itself. What evolved from simple body language or old messages, images carved into rocks metamorphosis already rather developed communication channels like telephone, TV and off course the World Wide Web, which brought the world as close as it could be! 

Although various complex theories and principles, there can be only communication is defined as a process where information is exchanged between individuals through a common system of symbols, signs, or behavior. (Of course, the term is not limited to humans because the animals have their own forms of communication, too!) 

Here is an attempt to trace the origin of communications ...

Body Language: A friendly handshake, a gracious smile or even a warm hug. Body language is communication using simple body gestures. Time of appearance of body language can not accurately or precisely calculated or intended. But the use of body language as a medium of communication has always been in relation to modes of communication used by animals.

Speech: The available fossil evidence suggests that modern adaptations for speech showed somewhere between 1.5 million and 500,000 years ago. The dynamics of evolution of speech acquisition is complex, since it is influenced by factors such as culturally transmitted sounds and genetic evolution.

Written: The Story of Writing goes back to the different writing systems that evolved in the Early Bronze Age (late 4th millennium BC) out of Neolithic proto-writing. The development of writing is said to have evolved from proto-typing, which means visual messages / symbols / scribbles that can not be called "real-writing". For convenience, we divide the evolution of writing in the following subcategories:

Symbols:

Cave Paintings 

Petroglyphs / petroglyphs 

Pictograms 

Ideograms 

Writing

Symbols: Symbols developed as a communication tool that not only ensures a better understanding, but also increased longevity of the message.

Cave Paintings: The Upper Paleolithic cave paintings, which are a form of rock art, is the oldest known symbols. Homo sapiens' first crack to disseminate information was painting. The oldest known cave painting is that of the Chauvet Cave dating back to 30,000 BC.

Petroglyphs: Petroglyphs are sheer rock carvings. These Petroglyphs dating back to 10,000 BC, when homo-sapiens have been known to have acquired the art of carving by making incisions or cuts on the rock surface. There have been cases of Woodcarving and even tattoos.

Pictograms: Pictographs was the next step in the development of writing. A prominent feature that separates petroglyphs from pictograms is that the petroglyphs depict only a single event, but the pictograms tell a story about the event, and thus can be used to disseminate the chronology of multiple events. Pictograms have been observed in the history of various ancient cultures, since around 9000 BC. Pictograms gave way to the development of Cuneiform script, which is considered the earliest known form of written expression.

Ideogram: An ideogram is an advanced version of the pictogram. It is a visual or graphic symbol representing an idea. Several municipalities around the world came up with different characters to represent many ideas, however, since ideas as expressions of emotions are universal in nature, many ideograms. Ideograms is the source of departure for most of the logo graphic writing systems like Chinese characters.

The invention of the first writing systems is presumed to be synonymous with the beginning of the Bronze Age in the late Neolithic period in the late 4th millennium BC. The first writing system was supposedly invented in the Sumerian regime of the 20th or 21st century BC to the late 3rd millennium develop into the Archaic Cuneiform script. 

The development of Egyptian hieroglyphs is also analogous to that of the Mesopotamian scripts. The Egyptian proto-hieroglyphic symbol that has been developed for archaic hieroglyphs by 3200 BC and more widespread understanding of the mid third millennium, which was the time, Pyramid Texts. Indus script developed during the third millennium, either as a form of proto-writing, or an old-fashioned way of writing. The Chinese characters are said to have arisen independently around the 16th century BC.

The Alphabets: The Egyptians were the first to come with an alphabetic system around 2700 BC, which consisted of 22 heiroglyphs. Each hieroglyph began with a single consonant of their language, plus a vowel (or no vowel) to be delivered by the speaker. Initially, these glyphs were used as a guide to pronunciation of Logogram, to mark grammatical intonation and register foreign names. This script is transmitted to many other civilizations and inspired various alphabetic systems such as Phoenician alphabets, scripts, Arabic, Hebrew, Latin alphabets, Italic alphabets Glagolithic alphabets or the Cyrillic alphabet.

Telecommunications: Semaphore or the optical telegraph system was a device to convey information using visual signals. The system used towers with rotating blades or paddles, in a matrix. There was encoded by the placement of mechanical elements and the message can be interpreted by the location of the magazine. Although mention of the idea of a semaphore has been registered in the name of an English scientist Robert Hooke, the idea was put to practice in France in the 1700s, when an engineer named Claude Chappe covered France with a network of 556 stations over a distance of 4800 kilometers.

 

Other benchmarks in the history of communication:

The invention of radio: Although construction of the radio is based o Michael Faraday's law of electromagnetic induction by Faraday proposed in 1831, it was William Henry Ward, who implemented the principles and successfully got the patent for radio development in 1872.

Invention of the telephone: Although there were several disputes about the claim to the invention of the phone. Although the Italian scientist Antonio Meucci was recognized by the U.S. Congress on 11 June 2002 for his contribution to the invention of the telephone, the Alexander Graham Bell, who patented the telephone apparatus for transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphic style.

The invention of television: The answer is very controversial, although it is known that a Scottish inventor John Logie Baird was the first to publicly demonstrate television on 26 January 1926, in his laboratory in the Soho district of London. But it was an American engineer Philo Farnsworth, who researched television picture transmission and developed the dissector tube, which is the basic element in all current electronic televisions. In 1927, Philo Farnsworth was the first inventor to transmit a television image.

The invention of the first computer: The first computer was called ENIAC, an acronym for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, and was completely developed in 1945 at Iowa State University.

The invention of the Internet: The design of the Internet was formulated in 1973 and published in 1974. It took as many as ten years to bring the idea into reality and the Internet was created in 1983. Not many people know that the term Internet was developed by an American computer scientist Vinton Cerf as part of a project sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.