A Brief History of Telecommunications

BrianB (1184 days ago)

‘Telecommunication’ is a term coming from Greek and meaning ‘communication at distance’ through signals of varied nature coming from a transmitter to a receiver. In order to achieve effective communication, the choice of a proper mean of transport for the signal has played (and still plays) a fundamental role.
In ancient times, the most common way of producing a signal would be through light (fires) and sound (drums and horns). However, those kinds communications were insecure and certainly left room to improvement as they did not permit message encryption nor a fast transmission of information on a large scale.
The true ‘jump’ in terms of quality came with the advent of electricity. Electromagnetic energy, in fact, is able to transport information in an extremely fast way (ideally to the speed of light), in a way that previously had no equals in terms of costs reliability. Therefore, we may say that the starting point of all modern telecommunications was the invention of the electric cell by Alessandro Volta (1800).