Media Technology - The Tellies and the Internet

Mass communication is considered as a “form of communication through which institutional sources (often referred to as "the media") address large, diverse audience whose members are physically separated from one another” (Trenholm, 2011, p. 283). These institutional sources use many forms of media technology like e-books, newspapers and magazines, radio, television, or film to deliver information, messages, and even entertainment to their respective audience. Today’s spectators have grown and evolved into a vast global community with a thirst for immediate information.  Institutional sources are more than happy to quench that thirst by developing new and exciting innovative ways of media technology for delivery of desired information.  Before we dive into examining the ultimate technological media tool of all times – Internet - how about we take a little trip into our past and take a glimpse at the evolution of some of the precursor media technologies like the Telley, Telley, and Telley that have painstakingly brought us into this “Information Age” (The Independence Hall Association, 2014) of the Internet.

Telley #1 - The Telegraph

      History tells about four primary types of telegraph technologies: the optical, electrical, Morse, and the wireless telegraphs (ShoreTel, 2016).  The optical telegraph or towers were built three to six miles apart that dispatched information throughout a region in minutes.  These towers used the semaphore system developed by a French engineer, Claude Chappe (Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc, 2016).  The semaphore system was “a system used for sending signals by using two flags that are held in your hands” or in this case “an apparatus for visual signaling (as by the position of one or more movable arms)” (Merriam Webster, 2016).  A wooden semaphore with two movable signaling arms along with two telescopes was attached to each tower.  The telegrapher could manipulated the arms into seven different positions as well as the wooden post itself could be twisted in four varies positions, allowing for 196 different possible outcomes.  Each of these arrangements coordinated with “a code for a letter, a number, a word or (a part of) a sentence” (Cellania, 2012). Each telegrapher duplicated the given arrangements from the previous telegrapher in order to deliver an accurate message to the intended receiver.

Next was the electrical telegraph.  There were two types of telegraph that used electricity: the electromagnetic telegraph which transmitted signals and data between two people and the electrical telegraph which used electrical pulses to transmit information over radio and/or line; which happen to be the first type of “electric based telecommunication invented” (Wozniaki, 2016).  Next, was the Morse telegraph that is named after its claimed inventor, Samuel Morse (and colleagues) who also developed the Morse code system. The catalyst to the rise of Morse’s invention is, while away on a painting contract commissioned by the city of New York City, Morse received a message by horseback that his wife was very ill.  By the time he obtained the message and traveled back home, his wife had died.  This compelled Morse to discover a far better, faster, and more efficient way to receive long distance communication.  Morse along with the help of his friends and colleagues Joseph Henry and Alfred Vail developed and improved the electrical telegraph or the Morse telegraph which used electric current that left imprints (dashes and dots) on paper. Together, these men invented the Morse code that translated those dashes and dots into a readable message for its intended receiver.  No longer would it take days, weeks, or even months to receive vital information.

Lastly, the wireless telegraph which gave way to the radio was reinforced and established by Guglielmo Marconi.  Utilizing the already founded Morse code system within his wireless telegraph, Marconi was able to send out a wireless signal that range about a mile and half.  In 1986, Marconi received a patent in England on his wireless telegraph where he further developed the broadcast.  By 1901, he was able to send wireless messages across the Atlantic Ocean.  The success of Marconi’s wireless telegraphs allowed him to establish the Marconi Telegraph Company both in the United States and Europe and was credited for the SOS call that informed other ships of the Titanic’s iceberg collision (Creative Commons, 2012). Now let us look at the second Telley.

Telley #2 – Telephone

Just like the telegraph, the telephone had many claimed inventors, but in 1876, Alexander Graham Bell was the first to win a U.S. patent for the device (Elon University School of Communication, 2016) after bellowing out those famous words on the instrument to his assistant Thomas A. Watson, “Mr. Watson -- come here -- I want to see you” (Library of Congress , 2016).  This was the beginning of a wonderful new technology for faster communication.

In 1877, the Bell Telephone Company was founded by Gardiner Hubbard and along with Charles Williams and Watson as the Research and Development team; they managed to have three thousand telephone services established by year’s end.  Hubbard employed a fellow by the name of Theodore Vail (recall that name), the son of Alfred Vail, colleague of Samuel Morse (telegraph and Morse code) as the general manager of the Bell Telephone Company.  Vail is credited as the driving force behind the success of the company.  Vail expanded the telephone business throughout the United States west of the New England area.  Because of this expansion of business, exchange facilities were built to handle the long distance connective between the cities and towns. 1878 introduced the manual switching board that allowed multiple phones to connect to one telephone exchange system. Exchange facilities opened up all over the nation because of the demand for switchboards.

Down through the years of law suits, mergers, and take-overs, in 1915, Vail drove Bell System to accomplish the first coast-to-coast telephone line connecting New York to San Francisco, California.  He also, applied this “wireless” system to overseas ventures; connecting the United States to other countries by cable installation.  The Bell System had some dealings with the advancements in radio (owned some stations) and talking motion picture – television business (notice how all these media technologies and businesses birthed out and overlapped one another).  However, “by the end of the 1930s, AT&T (a result of Bell System and other telephone companies merging) had 15 million phones in service” (Russell, 2012) and by 1971 over 100 million phones were in service.  Around 1946 in St. Louis, Missouri, the first commercial mobile phone was installed and sometime in the 1960s the “first communication satellites [were] launched: Echo 1 and Telestar” (Elon University School of Communication, 2016).  It is very evident the telephone and the science/technology behind it has and still is a very powerful party to our communication infrastructure.  Now, let us look at our final Telley.

Telley #3 – Television

           

      Again, there were many individuals that toyed with their version of a device that could bring moving images on some sort of screen, but an American inventor, Charles Francis Jenkins, devised an instrument he called the “radiovision” (Elon University School of Communications, 2016).  In 1927, AT&T used a 185-line system (phone circuit) developed by Herbert E. Ives to broadcast moving images of Herbert Hoover from Washington to New York. But in 1927, the first fully developed television system or electronic camera tube, which he called the “image dissector” (Elon University School of Communications, 2016) was developed by a young man named Philo Taylor Farnsworth.  Radio Corporation of America (RCA) sent an engineer to study Farnsworth work only to turn around and develop a similar version of the image dissector.  Needless to say, there was a legal battle where Farnsworth won royalty payments from RCA.

            World War II slowed the development of the television (TV) system, but by the 1950s TV had replaced radio as the dominating source of mass communication and entertainment.  By the 1960s, 45.7 million Americans had at least one TV set in their home; and by the late 1990s almost every American home had a television set.  Interesting enough, these numbers proved film tycoon Darryl F. Zanuck of 20^th Century Fox wrong regarding a comment he made back in 1946 about the television, “Television won't be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night (Elon University School of Communications, 2016) – Umm. Now onto the great media technology of our time: the Internet.

The Internet

            According to Creative Commons (2012) the Internet is “a decentralized communications and information network that relies on the transmission of digital signals through cables, phone lines, and satellites, which are then relayed through network servers, modems, and computer processors.”  The Internet is the ultimate gateway of media technology for all predecessors of media technology. The Internet’s first appeared in 1965 as ARPANET, the Advanced Research Project Agency Network (TheFreeDictionary.com, 2016). Its purpose was to share sensitive information between government officials, researchers, and educators.  The Cold War broke the safety shield of the Internet, but remained somewhat protected because it was not yet available for the common person. Tim Berners-Lee is the one who is responsible for introducing the Internet to the masses.  In 1989, he created a common computer language or code that allowed computers to connect and communicate with one another; Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) which is a common language the user uses to create and design content online.  Berners-Lee did not stop there, he created the first browser – the World Wide Web (Creative Commons, 2012). By providing a few fixes and advancements, the Internet has become the greatest media technology for the masses.  You can talk, send messages, read news updates, view a program or movie, and listen to the radio or a podcast all through the Internet.  As stated before, one can see how the innovation of the telegraph, telephone, and the television all had an intricate part in birthing, developing, and enhancing our current system of mass communication and the Internet. 

References

ARPANET. (n.d.) TheFreeDictionary.com. (2016). Retrieved April 9 2016 from http://

acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/ARPANET

Cellania, M. (2012, March 25). The Optical Telegraph. Retrieved from Neatorama:

http://www.neatorama.com/2012/03/25/the-optical-telegraph/

Creative Commons. (2012, December 29). Media, Technology, and Communication. Retrieved from 2012books.lardbucket.org: http://2012books.lardbucket.org/books/a-primer-on-communication-studies/s15-media-technology-and-communica.html

Elon University School of Communication. (2016, April 11). 1870s-1940s - Telephone. Retrieved from elon.edu: http://www.elon.edu/e-web/predictions/150/1870.xhtml

Elon University School of Communications. (2016, April 9). 1920s-1960s - Television. Retrieved from elon.edu: http://www.elon.edu/e-web/predictions/150/1930.xhtml

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. (2016, April 8). Claude Chappe. Retrieved from Encyclopaedia Britannica: http://www.britannica.com/biography/Claude-Chappe/images-videos

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Merriam Webster. (2016, April 8). Semaphore. Retrieved from Merriam Webster: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/semaphore

Russell, G. R. (2012). Telephone History The Early Years -- 1876-1900. Retrieved from telephonymuseum.coim: http://www.telephonymuseum.com/telephone%20history.htm

ShoreTel. (2016, April 8). History of the Telegraph in Communications. Retrieved from shoretel.com: https://www.shoretel.com/history-telegraph-communications

The Independence Hall Association. (2014). Living in the Information Age. Retrieved from U.S. History.org: http://www.ushistory.org/us/60d.asp

Wozniaki, T. (2016, April 8). The history of the telegraphy - Communication at its best! Retrieved from nearfieldcommunicationnfc.net: http://www.nearfieldcommunicationnfc.net/nfc-telegraph-history.html