The amazing history and evolution of human communication methods over the years
The amazing history and evolution of human communication methods over the years – PART 1
You may see smartphones, tablets, and computers as commonplace today, but it has taken ages for us to reach this level of perfection in human communication! Nowadays, conveying a message to someone is as easy as counting 1, 2, 3…
The process of advancement in the science of communication has transcended to such a level where technology and communications now gone hand-in-hand. However, history tells us that our ancestors too made some remarkable technological developments in their day and age which has resulted towards us reaching towards this present age of the Internet and mobile devices. Amazing isn’t it?
Let’s explore how humans initially started communicating with each other since the days of early-man
- Birth of ‘sound’ communication and later on, human speech - Historians and archaeologists point through the study of fossils found across the world that approximately around c. 200,000 BC, humans may have begun communicating with language.
> Before that, they probably used vocal sounds or grunts to enunciate a ‘message’ or emotion. Researchers also believe that Asia and Africa are the two continents where origins of language may have taken place.
- Visual communication through cave paintings – Various radiocarbon dating studies (from the Chauvet cave in the Ardeche valley of southern France) have shown that many cave drawings originated within the cave around 30,000 BC. The images document the earliest form of pictographic communication attempts made by early-man. Moreover, the presence of charcoal, human footprints, and remnants of fire torches confirm that these were indeed human-made drawings.
- Visual communication through cuneiform writing – The Sumerians are credited with the discovery of developing the technique of writing on clay tablets (cuneiforms). These advanced pictographs are considered the most elaborate form of writing of those times.
> It is thought that the Ubaidians (c. 6500 to c. 3800 BC) initially introduced Sumerians (c. 4500 – c. 1900 BC) to the nuances of numerical calculation, which the Sumerians preferred to write down on clay tablets to keep records of supplies, stocks, and goods they bartered. They even wrote down advanced maps of the stars, complex arithmetic calculations based on 10 units (number of fingers on both human hands) and also divided a circle into equal units of sixty sections.
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> Next came the Egyptians who developed hieroglyphs which were pictographic representations of the ‘word of God’ written down by their priests. These elaborate symbols and images (humans, animals, celestial beings, etc. were written in rows and columns that can be read from left to right or from right to left and were used for decorating the walls of Egyptian temples and also for keeping business records as well.
- The invention of the ancient alphabet (approx. 1,050 BC) – The Phoenicians (c. 1400- c. 1250 BC) developed an initial alphabet based on phonetic sounds. To converse with their maritime trading partners and to understand diverse cultures around them, humans in the Mediterranean world, especially Greece, developed the Phoenician alphabet which had 22 letters based on sound and was far easier to understand in comparison to the complex cuneiform and hieroglyphics prevalent at that time.
- The oldest postal services – In Cyrus’ Persian Empire (c. 6 BC), mounted messengers began delivering posts. Historical references point towards the use of postal systems in Egypt around 2000 BC and in China (under the Chou dynasty) around 905 BC where primitive horse-mounted systems were used to relay messages and served by posthouses. The Athenians of Greece Approx. 776 BC to 393 AD also used homing pigeons in and around the city during the Olympic Games to send messages announcing the name of the games’ winners.
> In India, the Mauryan Empire (322–185 BC) developed early Indian mail service in which common chariots called Dagana were sometimes used as mail chariots in ancient India. In South India, the Wodeyar dynasty (1399—1947) of the Kingdom of Mysore used mail service for espionage purposes thereby acquiring knowledge related to matters that took place at great distances.
- The birth of the original printing presses – China is credited with the invention of wooden printing presses approximately around c. 220 AD in which Chinese monks used a method called block printing - symbols carved on a wooden block and pressed onto sheets of paper.
> The government official Wang Zhen (fl. 1290–1333) improved Bi Sheng's clay types by innovation through wood, as his process increased the speed of typesetting as well. Later in China by 1490 bronze movable type was developed by the wealthy printer Hua Sui (1439–1513).
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> One of the earliest surviving books printed in this technique was known as "The Diamond Sutra", an ancient Buddhist text created in 868 AD by the T'ang Dynasty (c. 618 AD – c. 909 AD) in China.
- The first newspapers appear in Europe (Approx. c. 1450 AD) – Handwritten letters began being privately circulated among merchants where economic conditions, social reforms, and wars were being discussed. The first printed newspapers appeared in Germany in the late 1400's where pamphlets or broadsides discussed highly sensationalized content.
- Printing press with metal movable type invented by Johannes Gutenberg – Around 1455 AD, taking inspiration from Bi Sheng (inventor of the world's first movable type technology), Gutenberg cast movable blocks of letters and symbols (upper-case letters, punctuation marks, etc.) out of various metals, including lead, antimony and tin. He created his own ink using linseed oil and soot that led to the discovery of the modern ink you use today. Furthermore, he developed a system that mechanized the transfer of ink from movable type to paper which led to the mass production of books at a fraction of the cost of conventional printing methods.
Printing in India - There is evidence that mass duplication in India dates back to the time of the Indus Valley Civilization when grants of land were recorded as engravings on copper plates and etchings on different surfaces (wood, bone, ivory, and shells).
> The art of printing came to India when a letter (dated 30 April 1556) addressed to St. Ignatius of Loyola was sent to Goa. In the letter, Father Gasper Caleza mentions of a ship carrying a certain printing press for Abyssinia from Portugal for missionary work. However, the printing press could not be sent abroad and instead landed up in India. This is how printing was initiated in the country.
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> The earliest surviving printed book in India is called the ‘Compendio Spiritual Da Vide Christaa’ (Spiritual Compendium of the Christian life) of Gaspar Jorge de Leão Pereira, the Portuguese Archbishop of Goa.
Stay tuned for more on this! We are soon going to be entering the digital age of communication in our next part!
The amazing history and evolution of human communication methods over the years – PART 2
Welcome back from our last post (The amazing evolution of human communicational methods – PART 1) where we have discussed primitive ways in which humans began communicating with each other.
In this post, we will now enter the age of electronics and digital communication.
- Joseph Nicéphore Niépce achieves the first photographic image – Around approximately 1814 AD, Niépce got attracted to the newly invented art of lithography in France. His trials with lithography led to what Niépce discovering heliography from which he produced the earliest known surviving photograph made in a camera in 1826 or 1827 AD
- Alexander Graham Bell patents the electric telephone (approx. 1876 AD) - On March 7th, 1876, Bell patented a telephonic device in which sound waves caused an electric current to vary in intensity and frequency, causing a thin, soft iron plate–called the diaphragm–to vibrate. These vibrations were then transferred magnetically to another wire connected to a diaphragm in another, distant instrument. When that diaphragm vibrated, the original sound would be replicated in the ear of the receiving instrument. This was a significant improvement over the telegraph which needed hand-delivery of messages between telegraph stations and it was a one-way delivery system (only one message could be transmitted at a time).
- Rise of radio and film (1920s – 1930s)
Radio - In 1895, an Italian named Gugliemo Marconi made the first wireless telegraph that used radio waves to send Morse code. The instrument became famous as the radio in the 1920s.
In India, radio broadcast started in 1924 with the setting up of a private radio service in Chennai. Later, the British government gave licenses to the Indian Broadcasting Company to launch more such radio stations in Mumbai and Kolkata. The company got bankrupt soon after and then, the government took possession of the transmitters and began its operations as the ‘Indian State Broadcasting Corporation’ which was later renamed as the ‘All India Radio (AIR)’ in 1936.
After independence, AIR provided massive assistance in enhancing the economic condition of the country. Indian radio was used on a national scale to provide support to the procedure of social improvement, which was also a very vital pre-requisite of India’s economic enhancement at that time.
Later, with the slow modernization of the country, television was also introduced, but since radio had become a veteran medium in India at that time, people used it to listen to diverse programs including entertainment and melodious songs which were transmitted nationwide. All India Radio still stands as one of the biggest radio networks globally. All India Radio, AM and FM channels across the country heralded a new era of entertainment in India much before the advent of television (when its prices became affordable in India) and its influx into each household.
Films - In 1889, William Kennedy Dickson filmed a scene on his experimental Kinetoscope which is the first motion picture ever produced on photographic film! In India, Professor Stevenson featured a stage show at Calcutta's Star Theatre in 1897 after which Hiralal Sen, an Indian photographer, made a film of scenes from that show called ‘The Flower of Persia’ in 1898.
The first full-length motion picture in India was produced by Dadasaheb Phalke called ‘Raja Harishchandra’ (1913), a silent film in Marathi. Since then, film-makers used basic editing techniques and film narrative to let motion pictures enjoy the success they currently do! Currently, the Indian film industry is the largest in the world!
Rise of Television (1880s - 1950s)
In the 1880s, a German inventor called Paul Julius Gottlieb Nipkow created a very simplistic spinning disk with a spiral pattern of holes in it, so each hole scanned a line of the image, thus laying the foundations for the modern television.
During the 1920s, various scientists began experimenting with still images and using radio waves to send them remotely. In 1928, General Electric made a device that could show moving images with the technology to wirelessly broadcast them.
During the 30s and 40s, the first regular broadcasts of television began in 1939 and became very popular during the Second World War. By then, the television became a standard home appliance in every American household and television sales in America skyrocketed during 1945. The first color broadcast was achieved in 1954.
By the 1970s, television had become the dominant media force that it is today, with 24X7 programming, mass-advertising, and telecast of syndicated shows.
Daily terrestrial television in India started in 1965 as a part of All India Radio (AIR). Up until 1975, only seven Indian cities had television services. The national telecast was introduced in 1982. In the same year, color television was introduced in the Indian market.
The programs were mainly produced by Doordarshan (DD) like The Ramayana and Mahabharata (1989-90), Hum Log (1984), Wagle Ki Duniya (1988), Buniyaad (1986–87) and comedy shows like Yeh Jo Hai Zindagi (1984), etc.
Birth of the Internet
The internet is the brain-child of British computer scientist, Sir Tim Berners-Lee. After graduating from Oxford University, Berners-Lee became a software engineer at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. At CERN, scientists from all over the world conduct physical experiments in the LHC (Large Hadron Collider), but Tim noticed that they were having difficulty in sharing vast volumes of data with each other. To solve this problem, Tim realized that they could share information by exploiting an emerging technology called hypertext which worked by connecting millions of computers together in a daisy chain. This is when the boost of the digital age began!
In March 1989, Tim laid out his vision for what would become the Web in a document called “Information Management: A Proposal”. The World Wide Web (WWW) was born when Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1994 with support from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the European Commission. The W3C decided that the web’s standards must be on royalty-free technology, so they can be easily adopted by anyone.
The advent of social media
About thirty years ago, ‘social media’ as a term didn’t exist, but now it’s on everyone’s lips! Thanks to the millennials and burgeoning hunger for app usage, social media is the perfect outlet for sharing photos, thoughts and anything of public interest.
In 1978, the first social media emerged when the Bulletin Board System (BBS) was created by Ward Christensen and Randy Suess, It was used to announce meetings and sharing information by posting it on the BBS. It was the first ever of virtual community and the first dial-up system in history.
In 1995, with the entry of internet into the lives of the common public, Geocities (a service for web hosting) was launched which allowed internet users to create simple websites for themselves. In 1997, SixDegrees was launched to let people create profiles and add lists of friends. In 1999, Blogger and Livejournal were launched to help people write blogs on what they like and share it with their friends. In 2002, Friendster was launched which helped people create social networking groups and connect with people around the world.
In 2003, popular social media, web service and content management sites launched like MySpace, LinkedIn, and WordPress. In 2004, Mark Zuckerberg launched The Facebook which was initially launched for college students as a social networking site. YouTube was launched in 2005 and helped people to freely upload and share a video. In 2006, Twitter was launched as a microblogging site where members could share ‘tweets’ in 140 character messages. In 2011, Google+ was launched which helped people to video chat and share information similar to Facebook. In 2012, Pinterest was launched as the first social scrapbooking website.
Currently, the world of apps in on the rise! You can find an app for anything and everything. With the introduction of Internet of Things, we can now use our handheld devices to communicate with appliances around us! How cool is that? God knows what the future of communication may be!
