History of Telecommunications Timeline

The first commercial telephone services were set up in 1878 and 1879 on both sides of the Atlantic in the cities of New Haven, Connecticut in the US and London, England in the UK.

Image source: History of the telephone

In 1880, Alexander Graham Bell and co-inventor Charles Sumner Tainter conducted the world's first wireless telephone call via modulated lightbeams projected by photophones, predating radio-based voice transmission.

Image source: Photophone

The first transcontinental telephone call occurred on January 25, 1915, connecting the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of the United States by wire for the first time.

Image source: First transcontinental telephone call

Transatlantic voice communication remained impossible for customers until January 7, 1927, when a connection was established using radio, opening regular transatlantic telephone service.

Image source: Transatlantic communications cable

No cable connection existed until TAT-1 was inaugurated on September 25, 1956, providing 36 telephone circuits across the Atlantic. It was the first transatlantic telephone cable to incorporate hundreds of electronic amplifiers.

Image source: TAT-1

Over several years starting in 1894, the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi worked on adapting the newly discovered phenomenon of radio waves to telecommunication, building the first practical wireless telegraphy systems based on radio.

Image source: Guglielmo Marconi

Millimetre wave communication was first investigated by Bengali physicist Jagadish Chandra Bose during 1894–1896, when he reached an extremely high frequency of up to 60 GHz in his experiments.

Image source: Jagadish Chandra Bose

In 1900, Reginald Fessenden was able to wirelessly transmit a human voice, a landmark achievement in the development of radio broadcasting and voice communication.

Image source: Reginald Fessenden

Jagadish Chandra Bose introduced the use of semiconductor junctions to detect radio waves when he patented the radio crystal detector in 1901, pioneering semiconductor technology decades ahead of its time.

In December 1901, Marconi established wireless communication between St. John's, Newfoundland and Poldhu, Cornwall (England), earning him a Nobel Prize in Physics (shared with Karl Braun) in 1909.

Image source: Wireless telegraphy

In 1924, Japanese engineer Kenjiro Takayanagi began a research program on electronic television that would produce some of the world's first fully electronic television receivers.

Image source: Kenjiro Takayanagi

In 1925, Takayanagi demonstrated a cathode-ray tube (CRT) television with thermal electron emission, followed in 1926 by a CRT television with 40-line resolution, the first working example of a fully electronic television receiver.

On March 25, 1925, Scottish inventor John Logie Baird publicly demonstrated the transmission of moving silhouette pictures at the London department store Selfridge's, an early milestone in television history.

Image source: John Logie Baird

In October 1925, Baird was successful in obtaining moving pictures with halftone shades, which were by most accounts the first true television pictures. This led to a public demonstration of the improved device on 26 January 1926 again at Selfridges.

In 1927, Takayanagi increased the television resolution to 100 lines, which was unrivaled until 1931. In 1928, he was also the first to transmit human faces in half-tones on television, influencing the later work of Vladimir K. Zworykin.

Philo Farnsworth demonstrated crude silhouette images of a fully electronic CRT television to his family in Idaho on September 7, 1927. In 1934, he gave the first public demonstration of the television at Philadelphia's Franklin Institute and opened his own broadcasting station.

Image source: Philo Farnsworth

Baird's invention formed the basis of semi-experimental broadcasts done by the British Broadcasting Corporation beginning September 30, 1929, launching the world's first regular television service.

On September 11, 1940, George Stibitz was able to transmit problems using teletype to his Complex Number Calculator in New York City and receive the computed results back at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, an early demonstration of remote computing.

ARPANET's development centred on the Request for Comments process, and on April 7, 1969, RFC 1 was published, establishing the collaborative documentation tradition of the Internet.

Image source: Request for Comments

A four-node network emerged on December 5, 1969, between the University of California, Los Angeles, the Stanford Research Institute, the University of Utah and the University of California, Santa Barbara. This network would become ARPANET, which by 1981 would consist of 213 nodes.

Image source: ARPANET

In June 1973, the first non-US node was added to the network belonging to Norway's NORSAR project, extending ARPANET beyond American borders for the first time.

A patent for the Token Ring protocol was filed by Olof Söderblom on October 29, 1974, contributing an important local area networking technology to the growing field of computer communications.

Image source: Token Ring

The first Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) specification, RFC 675 (Specification of Internet Transmission Control Program), was written by Vinton Cerf, Yogen Dalal, and Carl Sunshine, and published in December 1974.

Image source: Transmission Control Protocol

A paper on the Ethernet protocol was published by Robert Metcalfe and David Boggs in the July 1976 issue of Communications of the ACM, laying the foundation for the dominant local area networking technology.

Image source: Ethernet

The User Datagram Protocol (UDP), a more relaxed transport protocol that, unlike TCP, did not guarantee the orderly delivery of packets, was submitted on 28 August 1980 as RFC 768.

In September 1981, RFC 791 introduced the Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4), which became the core addressing protocol of the Internet and remains widely used today.

Image source: Internet Protocol version 4

An e-mail protocol, SMTP, was introduced in August 1982 by RFC 821, standardizing electronic mail delivery across networks and enabling the widespread adoption of email.

Image source: Simple Mail Transfer Protocol

HTTP/1.0, a protocol that would make the hyperlinked Internet possible, was introduced in May 1996 by RFC 1945, powering the growth of the World Wide Web.

Image source: HTTP

The first satellite to relay communications was Project SCORE in 1958, which used a tape recorder to store and forward voice messages, inaugurating the age of satellite telecommunications.

Image source: SCORE (satellite)

Courier 1B, built by Philco and launched in 1960, was the world's first active repeater satellite, capable of receiving, storing, and retransmitting communications rather than merely reflecting them.

Image source: Courier 1B

In 1960 NASA launched an Echo satellite; the 100-foot (30 m) aluminized PET film balloon served as a passive reflector for radio communications, bouncing signals between ground stations.

Image source: Project Echo

Belonging to AT&T as part of a multi-national agreement between AT&T, Bell Telephone Laboratories, NASA, the British General Post Office, and the French National PTT, Telstar was launched by NASA from Cape Canaveral on July 10, 1962, the first privately sponsored space launch and the first commercial telecommunications satellite.

Image source: Telstar

Relay 1 was launched on December 13, 1962, and became the first satellite to broadcast across the Pacific on November 22, 1963, extending satellite communications to new regions of the globe.

Image source: Relay program

After commercial long-distance telephone service was established via communication satellites, a host of other commercial telecommunications were adapted to similar satellites starting in 1979, including mobile satellite phones, satellite radio, satellite television and satellite Internet access.

Image source: Communications satellite

Realization and demonstration, on October 29, 2001, of the first digital cinema transmission by satellite in Europe of a feature film by Bernard Pauchon, Alain Lorentz, Raymond Melwig and Philippe Binant.

Image source: Digital cinema