The telecommunications industry doesn’t have a specific
day in which it was founded, but it nonetheless has a long and rich history
that has led us to where we are today with ubiquitous internet and fast mobile
connections. All of it is a culmination of standards, protocols, and science,
each of them working together in harmony to form the highly connected
technology that we take for granted today. The beginnings of all of this were
quite humble, starting with nothing more than a system where you could send Morse
code through miles and miles of wire.
The Early Days
The idea of using electricity for communication came
about very early on, around the year 1753. At the time the idea was deemed too
impractical to implement, putting it on the backburner for many decades to
come.
Further experiments wouldn’t be performed until the
1800’s, with the first electrostatic telegraph being invented by Francis
Ronalds. It used individual wires for each letter of the alphabet, and was
initially set up in his garden, able to transmit signals over eight miles. The
use of Morse code through telegraph lines wouldn’t come until much later,
around the year 1837.
Analog to Digital
Fast forward a number of years, and you’ll hear the familiar
name of Alexander Graham Bell, the person who patented the telephone in 1876.
Bell and Gardiner Greene Hubbard would later go on to found the Bell Telephone
Company, which would later become the American Telephone & Telegraph, or
AT&T. At the time, AT&T was the largest telecommunications company in
existence.
From there, telecommunications really started to take
off, especially when inventions like radio, television, and satellites came
into play. In a relatively short period of time in history, we had invented the
ability to transmit moving pictures and audio to a very wide area, and relay
that signal across the world.
Perhaps the biggest and most significant invention was
the Internet, which continues to change and revolutionize the way we
communicate, work, and live our lives.
Mobile Technology
Today, besides the Internet, cell phones have dominated
the telecommunications industry, accelerated by the invention of the iPhone in
2007, considered by many to be the start of the modern smartphone. Since then,
the entire telephone industry was changed, and today the vast majority of young
people are favoring mobile phones over traditional landlines. Increasingly,
we’re communicating with each other without the use of wires—only
electromagnetic waves invisible to our human eyes.
What’s in Store
As always, it’s difficult to predict the future if you
want to be absolutely accurate about it. However, it doesn’t take a visionary
to see that mobile devices and pervasive Internet connectivity are dramatically
changing our lives. Currently it is the hope of current governments that even
people in the most rural areas should have access to reasonably fast Internet.
And increasingly, this is becoming more of a necessity as things like job
applications start to move entirely online.
Eventually, it wouldn’t be that strange to see pervasive
connectivity take over our lives to the point where it comes the norm—where we
don’t even notice that we’re using this technology because it has become so
seamless and transparent.