That Randy Brown

Shrinking the World

In the 1830s, Samuel Morse provided the first communication tool that allowed information to be spread at the speed of electricity: the telegraph. Within 25 years, the Atlantic and Pacific were connected, providing the first means to transmit information across the ocean and around the world that didn't rely on some animal or vessel crossing the ocean or traveling around the world. The telegraph increased the speed of information transmission and might have been the first wave of the coming information age.

The one downside of the telegraph is that it sent encoded messages via dots and dashes, and required encoding and decoding by workers knowledgeable in the language. However, in the late 1800s, this transmission-oriented mechanism was replaced by the approachability of the human voice via the telephone.

The limitation of telephones and telegraphs was their reliance on wired connections, restricting communication to where wires were installed, with the familiar switchboard connecting two people by completing the circuit of information between them. In the early 1900s, short-wave radio communication was finally manifested, having been a theoretical innovation on the telegraph model for some time. Radios could reach as far as their signal could travel, and so radio towers and repeater networks augmented telephone wires.

As communication technologies advanced, they not only met existing needs but also created new possibilities, driving even greater demand for more flexible and far-reaching methods. Radio and its sibling television were further enshrined with the capabilities of satellites, enabling messaging from around the world and beyond it. Around the same time satellite technology was maturing as a means for mass communication, the world's first computer networks were in their infancy.

The rise of computer networks gave birth to the internet and later the World Wide Web, while satellite networks and phone towers enabled phones to follow the path previously tread by radios, becoming mobile themselves. The convergence of cellular communication, computer networking, and the World Wide Web gave birth to the smartphone. Just as the internet has mostly replaced all previous communication strategies, the computer has replaced most of our previous communication devices.