More than 550,000 miles of undersea fiber-optic cable wrap around the globe to deliver e-mails, Web pages, other electronic communications and phone calls from one continent to another at the speed of light. As cables make landfall, they connect to landing stations that route the voice, data and Internet traffic to domestic networks or forward the signal to another undersea network that carries the data onto their final international destination.
On March 8, 1931, media theorist, author, and cultural critic Neil Postman was born. He is best known for his works criticizing the increase of the role of technology in every human's life not seeing the dangerous side effects.
Today 96 years ago, Claude E. Shannon was born, the "father of information theory", whose groundbreaking work ushered in the Digital Revolution. Of course Shannon is famous for having founded information theory with one landmark paper published in 1948.
On May 24th 1844 the very first Morse telegram went over the line. Samuel Morse and his colleague Alfred Vail knew that the very first phrase to be sent with the new telecommunication medium was to be remembered. So what should they transmit? Morse came up with a quote from the bible, certainly well chosen for an historic occasion like this:
"What God had wrought"
sent by Morse in Washington to Alfred Vail at the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad "outer depot" in Baltimore.
On December 12, 1901, Italian born engineer Guglielmo Marconi succeeded with the very first radio transmission across the Atlantic, by receiving the first transatlantic radio signal at Signal Hill in St John's, Newfoundland transmitted by the Marconi company's new high-power station at Poldhu, Cornwall. The distance between sender and receiver was about 3,500 kilometres (2,200 mi) and with this groundbreaking long distance record the era of wireless telecommunication started.
On November 9, 1913, Hollywood movie star Hedy Lamar was born, co-inventor of an early form of the spread spectrum communications and frequency hopping, necessary for wireless communication from the pre-computer age to the present day.
On February 3, 1468, German blacksmith, goldsmith, printer, and publisher Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg - or simply Johannes Gutenberg - passed away. His invention of mechanical movable type printing started the Printing Revolution and is widely regarded as the most important event of the modern period.
On this day in 1877 Thomas A. Edison conceived the first idea for his phonograph, the very first mechanical tool for recording and reproducing (replaying) sound. The phonograph also was the invention that first gained him public notice.
Today 199 years ago, the first (modern) optical telegraph line following the mechanical telegraphy system of the French inventor Claude Chappe was established between Metz and Mainz was established. No, this wasn't the first of its kind, but it was the first to connect the former already in France established telegraphy system with a (now) German city.
On July 21, 1911, Canadian philosopher of communication theory Herbert Marshal McLuhan was born. His groundbreaking work is considered to be the cornerstone of media and communication theory. McLuhan is known for coining the expressions the medium is the message and the global village, and for predicting the World Wide Web almost thirty years before it was invented.
On November 13, 1990, one day after Tim Berners-Lee's and Robert Cailliau's publication of the concept of a world wide hypertext system [2], the first web page was published. Today, living without the World Wide Web, or simply the Web, has become almost impossible. Our daily live depends on news spread over the web and ecommerce hase become a convenient commodity. Nobody wants to live without it. Incredible, but only 20 years ago, most people lived in the stoneage compared to today's virtual online worlds.
On September 21, 1847, the famous Mauritius "Post Office" stamps were issued by the British Colony Mauritius. They are among the rarest postage stamps in the world and a letter with both stamps on its cover is estimated to be worth more than 4 Million US$.
On July 4, 1840, the RMS Britannia started her maiden voyage to Halifax, Nova Scotia from Liverpool, England. With the ocean liner of the British and North American Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, later known as Cunard Steamship Company, the first regularly operating transatlantic postal service between Europe and America was established.