The Breakthroughs

1753: Charles Morrison proposes the construction of a telegraph consisting of 26 electrical lines, each corresponding to an alphabet. Individual letters were to be indicated by the movement of a light object, which was repelled when a current passed through one of the wires.

1791: The optical semaphore signaling system, invented by Claude and Ignace Chappe to send each other messages while at school, is officially adopted by French legislature. 

1793: The first official semaphore telegram is sent on 15 August to announce the French victory over Austria via Claude Chappe’s network of semaphore stations. Chappe coins the term “Telegraph” for his system of transmitting the message. 

1835: Joseph Henry develops the basic principles of the telegraph which are put into more practical form 11 years later by Samuel FB Morse–these include the electric relay and the use of the Earth as a ground.

1837: Prof Charles Wheatstone and William Fothergill Cook develop a needle telegraph. On 24 July, they successfully transmit a message between two places, almost two kilometers apart. 

1837: Morse patents his version of the telegraph. The idea to use an electromagnet for transmitting signals comes upon him during a transatlantic trip when he sees a demonstration of one.

1839: Dr WBO Shaughnessy, a medical practitioner in Calcutta, starts experiments in electric telegraphy.

1845: Samuel Morse uses his telegraph system using his telegraph code to send a famous message from Washington to Baltimore “What hath God Wrought?”

1851: Siemens and Halske lay the first submarine telegraph cable from Dover, England to Calais, France.

1852: The first telegraph line in India is laid from Calcutta to Diamond Harbour. 

1855: Telegraph service becomes available to public in India.

1862: The Indo-European Telegraph Department was formed to join India to the telegraph network.

1865: The forerunner of the International Telegraph Union (ITU) is established on 17 May (observed as World Telecommunication Day). 20 countries agree to cooperate in telegraph communication. 

1866: First transatlantic submarine telegraph cable laid between the US and France by the legendary cable ship, The Great Eastern.

1870: First submarine cable link to India established from London to Bombay. 

1874: Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell independently develop different types of multiplexed telegraph. While Edison’s Perfected Quadruplex Telegraph could transmit simultaneously four messages in each direction over the common pair of telegraph wires, Bell’s could simultaneously transmit two or more musical tones.

1876: Telephone is invented. Alexander Graham Bell gets the patent for it. Elisha Gray misses it by three hours.

1877: John Kruesi builds the first Phonograph, on the basis of Thomas Edison’s sketch. The first recording is of Edison reciting, “Mary had a little lamb”. 

1878: The first commercial telephone exchange opens in New Haven, Connecticut.

1879: London gets its first telephone system as Bell Telephone opens its first exchange. Edison forms the Edison Telephone Company Ltd.

1880: Alexander Graham Bell transmits a sound over light beams for a short distance. He calls the device photophone and terms it his greatest invention, “greater than the telephone.”

1882: Telephones arrive in India as a 50-line manual exchange is installed in Calcutta.

1882: Lars Magus Ericsson introduces the telephone nicknamed the “Dachshund,” the first telephone for which the handset combines the microphone and earpiece and rests on a cradle. 

1885: Indian Telegraph Act that is still in force, introduced.

1887: Heinrich Rudolf Herz produces radio waves.

1892: Almon B Strowger, an undertaker, invents the first practical telephone switching system, in which the caller determines who the receiver will be without the aid of the human operator.
This leads to the dial telephone. 

1895: JC Bose is able to transmit through wireless. Boss never got the recognition as the inventor of wireless. 

1896: An unknown inventor develops the telephone dialer. Earlier, telephone connections were made through a telephone operator. 

1896: Hollerith establishes Tabulating Machine Company, which later changes to International Business Machine (IBM).

1899: Guglielmo Marconi establishes the first radio link between England and France transmitting greetings to the French scientist Edouard
Branley.

1901: The first transatlantic telegraphic signal transmission takes place as Marconi receives the letter “S” in St. Johns, Newfoundland, that has been transmitted from England.

1901: Donald Murray invents a method for communicating between two teletypewriters over telephone lines. 

1903: Bell Telephone company starts research in developing an automatic telephone switching system. 

1903: Coin collecting pay telephones are introduced in New York. The collector was a single slot model and the charge for a local call was 10 cents.

1905: Marconi invents the directional radio antenna.

1906: Reginald Aubrey Fessenden uses high-frequency alternator to transmit music and voice via radio waves to ships at sea that he has equipped with receivers. Fessenden calls it “wireless telephony”.

1906: First telephone directory featuring classified business advertising on yellow pages issued in Detroit by the Michigan State Telephone Company.

1906: Lee DeForest gets the US patent (No 879,532 titled “Space Telegraphy”) for vacuum tube amplifier. This revolutionizes telecommunication systems. 

1907: Mississippi in the US becomes the first state to regulate telecom services.

1908: General Electric develops 100 KHz, 2 KW alternator for radio communication purposes.

1909: Marconi of Italy and Karl Ferdinand Braun of Germany win the Nobel Prize in physics for wireless telegraphy.

1910: The first automatic exchange established in the US.

1913: Edouard Belin invents the portable facsimile machine (fax) which he calls Belinograph and is capable of using ordinary telephone lines. 

1913: AT&T commits to the Attorney General to dispose of its telegraph stock, provide long distance connection to independent telephone systems, and not to purchase any more independent telephone companies except as approved by the Interstate Commerce Commission. This letter from AT&T to the Attorney General of the US is referred to as the Kingsbury Commitment.

1914: Belin’s portable fax machine is used to send the first remote photo news story from the World War I over the telephone lines. 

1914: AT&T sells its holdings of Western Union Telegraph Company stock to comply with the Kingsbury Commitment. 

1915: 25 January marks the official ceremonies to open the first transcontinental line from New York to San Francisco. Graham Bell, in New York, speaks to Thomas Watson in San Francisco
repeating the first complete sentence transmitted by telephone, “Mr Watson, come here, I want you.”

1915: Overhead telephone cable disappears within the city of London and Birmingham with the laying of underground cables. 

1915: The first transatlantic radiotelephone conversation takes place between Arlington, VA, and Eiffel Tower, Paris.

1917: Telephone transmission from airplane to ground is demonstrated. 

1918: Woodrow Wilson, the then US President, issues a proclamation assuming control of the telephone and telegraph systems in the US, placing them under the direction of the Post Office Department. 

1922: Graham Bell dies at his summer home, Beinn Breagh, near Baddeck, Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia on
2 August. On 4 August, telephone service is suspended for one minute on the entire telephone system of the United States and Canada, during the funeral services of Graham Bell.

1923: A group of Indian entrepreneurs–Sir Rahimtoola Chinoy, Sir Cursow Wadia, Sir Ness Wadia, Sir Ibrahim Rahimtoola, and Sir Purushottamdas Thakurdas–establishes the Indian Radio Telegraph Company. 

1924: On 19 May, Bell System engineers publicly demonstrate the first transmission of pictures over telephone wires.

1925: Western Electric Research Laboratories and part of the engineering department of AT&T are consolidated to form Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc. 

1925: AT&T introduces commercial wirephoto service. 

1926: John L Baird produces television images of moving objects and succeeds in transmitting pictures over telephone lines between London and Glasgow. 

1927: A public demonstration of television by wire from Washington, DC to Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York City is made.

1927: The first picturephone conversation takes place. The device allows transmission of pictures as people speak.

1927: On 23 July, Lord Irwin sends the first wireless telegraph from India to King George V in London.

1927: Ralph VL Hartley introduces the concept of information as a measure for the quantity of data in a message. 

1928: Teleprinter is invented and put to use by Siemens & Halskey in Germany. 

1932: Marconi discovers microwaves. The first application of
such waves in radar takes place 10 years later. 

1934: The Communications Act in the US becomes effective on 1 July. Approved by President Roosevelt, this act brought interstate telephone business under regulation by the Federal Communications Commission instead of the Interstate Commerce Commission.

1934: Radar is invented in the UK. 

1936: First coaxial cable is demonstrated. 

1937: The combined handset telephone introduced commercially. 

1938: The first crossbar central office installation goes into service at Troy Avenue, Brooklyn, US.

1938: Konrad Zuse completes the first working computer to use a binary code.

1939: George Stibitz and Samuel B Williams introduce the principle of operating a computer via a terminal.

1940: Broadband carrier systems are introduced allowing for simultaneous calls over a single pair of wires.

1941: Zuse devices the first working universal computer controlled a by
programme.

1942: Bell Telephone Laboratories applies for a patent on an oscillator circuit which almost at once proved of great value in radar systems used in the War.

1943: First electronic calculating device developed.

1944: J Presper Eckert and John Mauchly develop an early form of computer memory that stores data as acoustic pulses running down a tube filled with mercury. 

1945: Arthur C Clark proposes a geosynchronous satellite, which would hover over the same spot on Earth because it revolves at the same speed as Earth’s rotation. 

1946: The first mobile telephones are introduced. 

1946: ENIAC, the first computer is officially launched. 

1947: Bell Labs scientists William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter
H Brattain invent transistor. The world has never been the same again. 

1948: Claude Shannon, John
R Pierce, and Bernard M Oliver develop pulse code modulation. 

1948: Indian Telephone Industries (ITI) set up at Bangalore as independent India’s first public sector unit.

1948: The first cable television system introduced in the US. 

1948: IBM introduces the Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator which has electronic circuits for performing calculations and data storage. 

1949: On 14 January, the US Attorney General filed suit against AT&T Company and Western Electric Company, alleging violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and asking that Western Electric be separated from the Bell System. 

1949: John William Mauchly develops the Short Code, which allows computers to recognize mathematical codes consisting of two numbers. This is considered to be the first high-level programming language. 

1949: Shannon publishes “The mathematical Theory of Communication”, proposing that information is a measurable quantity and establishes the basic rules governing all kinds of communication including electronic forms. 

1949: Mauchly and Hohn Presper Eckert build the Binary Automatic Computer, the first electronic-stored program computer in the US. 

1950: Mauchly and Eckert found the first company setting out to commercialize computers.

1951: Paging starts in New York, with no facility to page someone from the
PSTN.

1952: Bell introduces the first hearing aids equipped with junction transistors.

1955: The first electronic switching demonstrated in Morris, Illinois. 

1955: Scientist Narender S Kapany, born in Moga, India, introduces the optical fibre. He discovers that a glass fibre surrounded by a cladding can conduct light over great distance with little loss of intensity. 

1955: IBM introduces the Semi-Automatic Business Related Environment (SABRE) connecting 1,200 teletypewriters–the first large network linked to a database–used by American Airlines for passenger reservations.

1955: Bell Telephone builds the first computer that uses transistors instead of electron tubes.

1956: The first transatlantic telephone cable, linking Scotland with Newfoundland, is put into operation. 

1956: A judgment delivered limiting Bell System to common carrier communications and government projects but preserving the long standing relationships between the manufacturing, research, and operating arms of the Bell System. AT&T retains Bell Laboratories and Western Electric Company. 

1957: On 4 October, USSR launches Sputnik I, the first artificial satellite. Laika, the dog, travels to the space through Sputnik II the same year.

1958: Bell System’s Dataphone service, which permits high-speed transmission of data over regular telephone circuits is announced in January. 

1958: Jack St Clair Kilby, an engineer at Texas Instruments invents the monolithic Integrated Circuits (IC).

1960: Echo, the first passive communication satellite is launched. John Robinson Pierce, the man behind the project, feels that future of communication lies in satellites. 

1960: Paul Baran of the Rand Corp. develops the principle of packet switching, a way of interchanging data between computers that uses discrete bundles of information for each interchange.

1960: American physicist Theodore Maiman demonstrates the generation of a pulse of coherent red light by means of a solid ruby, the first laser. The idea, however, dates back to the days of Albert Einstein. 

1960: Customer trials begin of the world’s first electronic Telephone Central Office in Morris, Illinois.

1960: The first STD call in India introduced between Kanpur and
Lucknow.

1961: 16 January, Bell System proposes a new service called TELPAK which would create “electronic highways” between specific points, over which many types of communications could be transmitted. 

1961: On 18 January, the FCC
authorizes AT&T to operate experimental radio stations for basic earth-satellite communications study (“Project
Telstar”).

1962: In March, the FCC approved “Bellboy” radio paging system on a developmental basis for use at the Century 21 World’s Fair in Seattle. This marked the first commercial application of the paging system. 

1962: On 10 July, the world’s first international communications satellite–Telstar– rocketed into space. First transmission came during Telstar’s sixth orbit of the earth. 

1964: The first commercial communications satellite, Early Bird, is launched from Cape Kennedy on 6 April. 

1964: The first Soviet communications satellite, Molniya 1, which carries our transmissions of television programs, is launched. 

1964: First plans are drawn for the Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA) of the US Defense Department to establish ARPANET, a computer network that can connect different types of computers and that uses packet switching form of communication.

1964: An International Telecommunication Satellite Organization (Intelsat) is set up by the US and 11 other countries to develop a global commercial satellite system. 

1968: The FCC renders “The Carterphone Decision”, a landmark decision. Under this decision, the FCC strikes down existing interstate telephone tariffs prohibiting attachment of connection to the public telephone system of any equipment or device that was not supplied by the telephone companies (Bell System). 

1969: ARPANET, the percusor to Internet launched by the US Department of
Defence.

1970: On 26 June, the FCC in the US formally announces its place for regulating the cable television industry.

1970: Intel introduces a memory chip that can store 1024 bits of data, replacing the voluminous ferrite core memories used by computers.

1971: Direct telephone dialing as opposed to operator assisted calling begins between parts of US and Europe. 

1971: The first electronic mail is sent which becomes a common application over the ARPANET. 

1974: The Department of Justice in the US files an anti-trust suit against AT&T.

1974: Frenchman Roland Moreno invents Smart Cards.

1975: Bob Metcalfe writes his famous Ph.D thesis on LANs and then joins Xerox. He, alongwith colleagues at Xerox, develops Ethernet, the most popular LAN standard till date. 

1976: AT&T installs its first digital switch. 

1977: First lightwave system is installed in Chicago, Illinois.

1977: Cellular trials begin in the US.

1979: The first commercial network of cellular telephones is set up in Tokyo, Japan.

1979: The International Maritime Satellite Organization (Inmarsat) is formed to provide communication and navigation services via satellite.

1980: The FCC issues its Computer Inquiry II decision which differentiated between basic and enhanced services. Basic services require regulation. 

1981: IBM introduces the desktop personal computer (IBM PC). Microsoft develops DOS for the PC.

1984: Philips and Sony introduces CD-ROM, an optical disk that can store very large amounts of digital data.

1984: The AT&T Divestiture creates seven regional Bell operating companies. 

1984: British Telecom is privatized.

1984: Motorola sells its first portable cellular telephone.

1984: IBM buys ROLM Corp., the US third largest business telephone system manufacturer and provider. 

1984: Manufacture of telecom equipment for the subscriber end opened to the private sector.

1985: Department of Telecom (DoT) and Department of Posts (DoP) separated in India.

1985: Microsoft develops Windows for IBM PCs. 

1985: C-DOT, established by the Government of India to be a research organization, develops Rural Automatic Exchange (RAX), which revolutionizes Indian telecom spread. 

1986: The Overseas Communication Service (OCS) of DoT converted to VSNL. 

1986: Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd (MTNL) set up. 

1988: Thirteen European countries issued simultaneous tender for GSM equipment heralding a new era in communication.

1988: The first transatlantic fibre optic cable is completed.

1990: Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau, engineer of the European Organization for Particle Physics, part of the Centre Europe´en de Recheiche Nucle´aire (CERN), draft a proposal for an innovative “hypertext” information system, which they call the World Wide Web or W3 for the international high-energy physics community. The proposal is approved, and the World Wide Web is launched.

1990: IBM sells ROLM Corp. to Germany-based telecommunications
giant–Siemens Corp. 

1991: Bell Labs develops photonic switching.

1991: A small team led by James Gosling at Sun develops a programming language called Oak, which was renamed Java in 1994.

1992: The Cable TV Act is
introduced in the US to regulate CATV pricing.

1993: The first digital mobile network is established in the US.

1993: Europe sets 1998 as the date for full liberalization of its telecom
markets.

1993: The US National Centre for Supercomputer Applications (NCSA) releases the first browser to offer easy, point-and-click access to the World Wide Web. Called Mosaic, it makes use of the graphical interface concept familiar to Macintosh and Windows users and is heralded as the “killer application” the Internet is waiting for. It is also free and can be downloaded from sites across the world. In the first year, NCSA estimates more than one million copies of Mosaic have been downloaded from their site alone.

1994: Berners-Lee establishes the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), based in Europe and the US. Berners-Lee is concerned that, without an organization like W3C to develop common software standards and protocols, the Web will disintegrate into a number of proprietary and conflicting systems. 

1994: The National Telecom Policy announced in India. It opens the local telecom services for competition.

1994: Commercial radio paging services introduced in India.

1994: The FCC in the US begins RF spectrum auctions.

1995: Bell Labs develops Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM), which tremendously increases the capacity of optic fibre as a carrier of data.

1995: Internet services launched in India.

1995: First cellular service launched in India at Calcutta by Modi
Telstra.

1996: The cable modem introduced as the number of US cellular subscribers reaches 40 million. 

1996: AT&T announces its second major divestiture by spinning off NCR and its equipment business (including Bell Labs) under the Lucent Technologies name. 

1996: The Telecommunications Act of 1996 in the US heralds a new era in telecom competition.

1997: On 8 October, Nortel and Norweb Communications announce a new technology which allows data to be transferred over power lines. 

1997: Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) set up for regulation of commercial communication services in India. It delivers its first judgment against the incumbent operator DoT. 

1998: Iridium, a global consortium led by Motorola starts Global Mobile Personal
Communication (GMPCS) via satellite but runs into bad times.

1999: India announces its new Telecom Policy in March 1999 which opens domestic long distance telephony and changes the licence fee regime.