In this article we are going to focus on some of the most renowned inventions not only in the communication but also in the media field, which have had a tremendous impact on our lives. It is an attempt to put forward the different inventions that have really improved communication since the early beginnings of human life.
10. Color Printing
In the 9th century the first coloured playing cards appeared. It is thought that the Chinese were the first to use color printing. The process required that coloured inks were applied to blocks of carved woods that where sent to the press after the colour had been applied. Gutenberg was one of the first to use this technique when he printed the “Bible of 42 lines” in red. Later on, in 1457 Peter Schoffer also used the technique but this time he added two colours that were red and blue with some patterns. In the 18th century in France, they introduced a new process that required transparent inks. With this technique they were able to regulate how intense the final colour was thanks to the density of the mezzotint setting. It was a revolutionary process and it was similar to four-colour printing that uses zinc plates.
9. Paper
In the Nile Valley it was common to find a plant from which the fibers were extracted to make Papyrus. The origin of the word paper seems to come from the process in which the Papyrus plant was scraped, interweaved and then compressed to complete the process by letting it to dry in the sun. Tsai Lun was able to produce paper by using cellulose fragments that came from a mulberry tree, old tatters, and fishing nets placed in the water, pulped and squeezed. Paper was first used in China but it was then used in the whole of Asia and the rest of the continents. This means that by the 14th century, Europeans had opened paper mills all across Europe. In 1798 Nicolas Louis Robert from France could develop the first constant manufacturing process basing his work on the fundamentals of the conveyor belt.
8. Photographic Film
Prior to the apparition of the film for photographs, the most widely used photosensitive method were a sheet of albumenized glass, album paper, a collodion plate, negative paper and a special solution of bromide. You had to place the negative paper on a reel, which you then mounted on a glass that would produce the copies. The last step of the process required transparent film that was used instead of glass for printing.
7. Newspaper
In 59 BC Julius Caesar was the first to use and create a newspaper. The first newspaper was made up of a series of copies of handwritten sheets that were offered on the most important buildings of Rome. Julius Caesar decided it call is acta diurna and contained edicts, important events, battle results, nominations, news of all kinds, marriage and birth ceremonies and deaths. Nevertheless, in the years between 618 and 607 newspapers were very common in China because they were used to inform the public of important news and as the newspapers were so effective they used the same format until 1911. In London, between 1590 and 1610, a more modern and quite frequent newspaper called the Mercurius Gallobelgicus appeared and it contained news of Europe. However, in 1605 the Dutch Abraham Verhoeven was able to start publishing a regular newspaper that included a wide range of news, which made it be really popular amongst readers. In 1622, the British published two newspapers namely the Corante and the Weekly News and it took a century until the first newspaper that was published on a daily basis appeared, it was the Daily Courant.
6. Cinema
Joseph Plateau, a Belgian inventor, created a disc that had holes around the edge and a picture showing a girl playing in a ground on one of the sides. You had to put the disc facing a mirror and rotate it on its centre and when the disc moves around, it was possible to see a moving picture through the holes. The progression to the invention of the cinema happened because of two other major events. One of those events was the work of Jules Janssen and the other was the Kinetoscope made by Thomas Edison in 1891. Janssen believed that a big number of consecutive images of an object in motion were possible to produce. He was able to prove what he said by showing more than forty photos of Venus going in front of the sun in only seventy two seconds. Edison was able to show a chain of consecutive pictures on celluloid tape. The cinema as we know it today appeared when the Lumiere brothers used the creations of Janssen and Edison together. They could unwind the celluloid tape without problems and as it contained images, they only had to punch some holes on the film to project the images.
5. Postal System
It is believed that the first postal stations to have appeared in the world did so in the 6thcentury BC in Persia. Nevertheless, back in the times of the Greeks personal messengers were very common in every region of the empire. When the Roman Empire started to expand and as they needed to be in touch with other areas of their empire and send administrative documents they created the cursus publicus, which used horses to transport the mail. Since the documents needed a postage stamp, they were introduced in 1834 and in 1848 the French Post Office Manager decided to start using the stamps. In the UK postage stamps were first used in 1870 and they cost 0,50 d. crenulated stamps appeared in Britain in 1854, which made things a lot easier to separate stamps. When King George V from Britain got to the throne in 1911, the first airmail service between Hendon and Windsor was started and eight years later the service run from London to Paris.
4. Press Agency
The visionary Frenchman, Charles Havas was able to design the first press agency that was based on the written agreement. The agency he created could access really significant information mainly because Havas had a lot of contacts in the national government. Since the telegraph had already been invented the press agency had the chance to send information on an international level. But in 1851 Baron Von Reuter from Germany thought that he could open a telegraphic transmission agency in the city of London. The agency he created was not very successful because he was only interested in broadcasting commercial transmissions using a carrier pigeon. Reuters had the chance to retransmit a historical speech of Napoleon III, which made it turn into a press agency in 1858. However, it is important to say that ever since 1848 several American newspapers shared the expenses of retransmitting telegraphic messages and six of those newspapers founded the Associated press, which had a major role during the American Civil War.
3. Typewriter
The American inventor William Burt from the city of Detroit had the chance to register the typewriter in 1829. The device had a type that was placed on a semicircular structure that could rotate and printed letters on the paper by means of a lever. In 1867, Christopher Latham Sholes introduced a few developments in the device so that it was more useful and he was able to start selling the device, which he called the “piano for literature”, to a gun company called E. Remington and Sons. The company started to commercialize the device only in 1874. However, the first models the company put up for sale didn’t have the success the company expected because it was too big, high-priced and extremely complicated to use since the typist was not able to see the typed text. Sixteen years later, John N. Williams, an American inventor, was able to design a device that allowed people to see what they were typing and that’s when it became popular. As a matter of fact, the first person to ever write a manuscript with a typewriter was Mark Twain.
2. Telephone
Even when all the needed technology was available for creating the phone, Reis could only start working on it in 1861. He was the first inventor to successfully transmit a sound from a considerable distance. As a matter of fact, he was able to build a transmitter that had an electric circuit with a metal point that had to touch a metal band that was placed on a membrane. During the same time, inventors Bell and Elisha Gray were trying to send out various messages with a telegraph by making use of a wire with electricity. Even when they couldn’t get conclusive results of their experiment, they could create the basis of the harmonic telephone. In 1876, after having tried many times, Bell was finally able to use a transmitter to send out voice so he decided to patent it. It only took a year until the invention was out in the market and in 1877 the first telephone call was made in Hartford. However, in 1883 Bell was able to establish the first telephone call between the cities of New York and Boston.
1. Television
In the 19th century, a German inventor called Paul Nipkow decided to register a gadget that required the transformation of an image into a group of lines, which were composed of points of different lights of different intensity. Those lines were then sent out with electromagnetic waves that had various frequencies and strength. Following this, they had to be transformed into currents again of varying rates and strength. Some time later, in 1934, the Russian inventor Vladimir Kosma Zworykin introduced what he called the iconoscope. With this gadget that picture that wanted to be broadcast had to be projected on a screen that had a cathode tube that was full of photoelectric cells. When light hit the screen, the cells in the tube emitted electrons and the current they got produced a strength that was related to how bright each cell was and the resulting image during the scan process.
Source :- http://worldtop10.net/top-10-communication-media-inventions/
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