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Seven Wonders of Communication
The most accepted Seven Wonders of Communication are:
Wireless Telegraph Samuel Finley Breese Morse,
inventor of several improvements to the telegraph, was born in Charlestown,
Mass. on April 27, 1791. After moving to New York in 1825, he became a founder and the first president of the National Academy of Design. He also ran for office, but was defeated in both his campaigns to become New York mayor. Meanwhile, Morse maintained a steady interest in invention, taking out three patents for pumps in 1817 with his brother Sidney Edwards Morse. It wasn't until 1832 that he first became interested in telegraphy. That year, Morse was traveling to the United States from Europe on a ship, when he overheard a conversation about electromagnetism that inspired his idea for an electric telegraph. Though he had little training in electricity, he realized that pulses of electrical current could convey information over wires. The telegraph, a device first proposed in 1753 and first built in 1774, was an impractical machine up until that point, requiring 26 separate wires, one for each letter of the alphabet. Around that time two German engineers had invented a five-wire model, but Morse wanted to be the first to reduce the number of wires to one. Between 1832 and 1837 he developed a working model of an electric telegraph, using crude materials such as a home-made battery and old clock-work gears. He also acquired two partners to help him develop his telegraph: Leonard Gale, a professor of science at New York University, and Alfred Vail, who made available his mechanical skills and his family's New Jersey iron works to help construct better telegraph models. Morse's first
telegraph device, unveiled in 1837, did use a one-wire system, which produced an
EKG-like line on tickertape. The dips in the line had to be de-coded into
letters and numbers using a dictionary composed by Morse, this assuming that the
pen or pencil wrote clearly, which did not always happen. By the following year
he had developed an improved system, having created a dot-and-dash code that
used different numbers to represent the letters of the English alphabet and the
ten digits. Photography and Moving Pictures
Photography is the art or process of producing images on a sensitized surface by the action of radiant energy and light. The name "Photography" comes from Sir John Herschel who first used the term in 1839 when the photographic process became public. It is derived from the Greek words for light and writing. The idea of a way to keep images permanent was not a new one. A prediction was made by de la Roche (1729-1774) in a book called Giphantie. The tale said it was possible to capture images from nature, on a canvas which had been coated with a sticky substance. This surface would provide a mirror image that would become permanent after it had been dried in the dark. Only several years after de la Roche's death, the invention of the photograph came into existance. Photography is not a natural phenomenon; it has its basis in science, and thus, had to be invented. Photography has no single inventor, it evolved over hundreds of years. Experimenters were working on the same problem unaware of each other's work. A small discovery would be made by one man; years later another man would build upon it. This continued until the pieces of information finally fit together and became the camera.
Phonograph & Other Recording Devices On December 4, 1877 Thomas Alva Edison became the first person to ever record and play back the human voice.
The technology
to produce the phonograph was also provided by a combination of the telephone
and the telegraph. Early in 1877 Edison and his staff were working with both the
telephone and the telegraph. For the telephone Edison was experimenting with how
a diaphragm could change a voice into an electrical signal. At the same time he
was working on the telegraph repeater. This Edison invention used a stylus
(basically a needle) to indent paper with the dots and dashes from a telegraph
signal. Printing
Invented by Johann Gutenberg in c1450, the printing press made the mass publication and circulation of literature possible. Derived from the presses farmers used to make olive oil, the first printing press used a heavy screw to force a printing block against the paper below. An operator worked a lever to increase and decrease the pressure of the block against the paper. The invention of the printing press, in turn, set off a social revolution that is still in progress. The German printing pioneer Johannes Gutenberg solved the problem of molding movable type. Once developed, printing spread rapidly and began to replace hand-printed texts for a wider audience. Thus, intellectual life soon was no longer the exclusive domain of church and court, and literacy became a necessity of urban existence. The printing press stoked intellectual fires at the end of the Middle Ages, helping usher in an era of enlightenment. This great cultural rebirth was inspired by widespread access to and appreciation for classical art and literature, and these translated into a renewed passion for artistic expression. Without the development of the printing press, the Renaissance may never have happened. Without inexpensive printing to make books available to a large portion of society, the son of John Shakespeare, a minor government official in rural England in the mid-1500s, may never have been inspired to write what are now recognized as some of history's greatest plays. What civilization gained from Gutenberg's invention is incalculable. Gutenberg's name does not appear on any of his work but he is generally accredited with the world's first book printed with movable type, the 42-line (the number of lines per page) Bible, also known as the Gutenberg Bible or the Mainz Bible (for the place where it was produced).
Radio
Marconi's first radio transmissions, in 1896, were coded signals that were transmitted only about 1,6 km (a mile) far. Marconi realised that it held huge potential. He offered the invention to the Italian government but they turned it down. He moved to England, took out a patent, and experimented further. In 1898 Marconi flashed the results of the Kingstown Regatta to the offices of a Dublin newspaper, thus making a sports event the first "public" broadcast. The next year Marconi opened the first radio factory in Chelmsford, Essex and established a radio link between Britain and France. A link with the USA was established in 1901. In 1909 Marconi shared the Nobel prize in physics for his wireless telegraph. Marconi became a wealthy man. Signals only Marconi was not the first to invent the radio, however. Four years before Marconi started experimenting with wireless telegraph, Nikoli Tesla, a Croatian who moved to the USA in 1884, invented the theoretical model for radio. Tesla tried unsuccessful to obtain a court injunction against Marconi in 1915. In 1943 the US Supreme Court reviewed the decision. Tesla became acknowledged as the inventor of the radio - even though he did not build a working radio.
Television Probably no
other invention in history has been so hotly disputed as the prestigious claim
to the invention of 'Tele-vision or 'long-distance sight' by wireless.” |
In
the 1870s, two inventors Elisha Gray
and Alexander Graham Bell both independently designed devices that could
transmit speech electrically (the telephone). Both men rushed their respective
designs to the patent office within hours of each other, Alexander Graham Bell
patented his
telephone first. Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell entered into a famous
legal battle over the invention of the telephone, which Bell won.
As a student at Yale College, Morse became interested in both painting and in
the developing subject of electricity. After his graduation in 1810, he first
concentrated on painting, which he studied in England. He would later become a
well-known portrait artist. 
Over
the years, photography has developed into an art form as well as a medium of
expression and communication. Society would be different without any pictures,
such as television and movies. The invention of photography came about, because
of the need of rendering perspective correctly.
Basically,
printing is the process of making multiple copies of a document by the use of
movable characters or letters. The process was developed independently in China
and Europe. Before the invention of printing, multiple copies of a manuscript
had to be made by hand, a laborious task that could take many years. Printing
made it possible to produce more copies in a few weeks than formerly could have
been produced in a lifetime by hand. 
Marconi
(1874-1937) was born in Italy and studied at the University of Bologna. He was
fascinated by Heinrich Hertz's earlier discovery of radio waves and realised
that it can be used for sending and receiving telegraph messages, referring to
it as "wireless telegraphs."
transmission
of photographs by wire as well as fiber optics and radar, demonstrated a
mechanical scanning device that was an early precursor to modern television.
Belin’s machine took flashes of light and directed them at a selenium element
connected to an electronic device that produced sound waves. These sound waves
could be received in another location and remodulated into flashes of light on a
mirror.