History of communication
148 inventions by year: what each evolved from and what it led to.
How the inventions are connected
- Optical telegraph → Electrical telegraph → Phonograph → Gramophone → Vinyl record → Compact disc
- Television set → Flat-screen TV → Smart TV
- Harp → Guitar → Electric guitar
- Mechanical television → Television → Digital television
| Year | Invention | What it is | Evolved from | Led to |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 40000 BC | Flute | A wind instrument; the oldest ones are made of bone. | ||
| 5500 BC | Drum | A percussion instrument with a membrane. | ||
| 3200 BC | Writing | Recording speech with signs. | Alphabet, Braille | |
| 3200 BC | Cuneiform Sumerians | A script pressed into clay tablets. | ||
| 3000 BC | Harp | A plucked instrument with stretched strings. | Guitar | |
| 2000 BC | Bell | A cast ringing vessel. | ||
| 1800 BC | Alphabet | A script in which each sign stands for a sound. | Writing | |
| 550 BC | Postal service | A letter delivery service (the Yam relay, the Persian post). | ||
| 250 BC | Pipe organ | A wind keyboard instrument; Ctesibius’s hydraulis. | ||
| 1025 | Music notation | The staff (Guido of Arezzo). | ||
| 1400 | Harpsichord | A plucked keyboard instrument. | Piano | |
| 1500 | Guitar | A plucked string instrument. | Harp | Electric guitar |
| 1500 | Xylophone | A percussion instrument with bars. | ||
| 1510 | Carillon | A set of bells with a keyboard. | ||
| 1550 | Violin | A bowed string instrument. | ||
| 1653 | Letter box | A box for letters. | ||
| 1659 | Magic lantern | A projector of images from glass slides (Huygens). | Film projector | |
| 1700 | Piano Bartolomeo Cristofori | A keyboard instrument with a hammer action (Cristofori). | Harpsichord | |
| 1700 | Clarinet Johann Christoph Denner | A woodwind instrument with a reed (Denner). | Saxophone | |
| 1700 | Piano hammer | A wooden hammer with a felt head: when a key is pressed it strikes the string and springs straight back. | ||
| 1792 | Optical telegraph | Chappe’s semaphore line. | Electrical telegraph, Railway semaphore | |
| 1814 | Valve trumpet Tyrrhenus | A brass instrument with valves (Stölzel). | ||
| 1815 | Metronome | A pendulum that beats time (Maelzel). | ||
| 1821 | Harmonica | A free-reed instrument. | ||
| 1829 | Accordion | A hand-held free-reed instrument with bellows. | ||
| 1834 | Zoetrope William George Horner | A spinning drum with pictures that creates the illusion of motion. | Cinema | |
| 1837 | Electrical telegraph | Sending messages as electrical signals over wires (Schilling, Cooke and Wheatstone, Morse). | Optical telegraph | Telephone, Phonograph |
| 1838 | Morse code Samuel Finley Breese Morse, Alfred Vail | Encoding letters with dots and dashes. | ||
| 1840 | Postage stamp | The Penny Black (Hill). | ||
| 1840 | Saxophone Adolphe Sax | Sax’s instrument. | Clarinet | |
| 1843 | Fax | Transmitting images over wires (Bain; telefax in the 1960s). | ||
| 1853 | Pneumatic tube | Delivering capsules through pipes by air pressure. | Hyperloop (concept) | |
| 1858 | Transatlantic cable | An undersea telegraph cable between continents. | ||
| 1868 | Typewriter Christopher Latham Sholes, Frank Haven Hall | Mechanical printing of letters with keys (Sholes and Glidden). | Command line | |
| 1873 | QWERTY layout Christopher Latham Sholes | A keyboard layout created for typewriters. | ||
| 1876 | Microphone | Turns sound vibrations into an electrical signal. | ||
| 1876 | Telephone Johann Philipp Reis, Elisha Gray | Transmitting the voice over wires. | Electrical telegraph | Mobile phone, Video call, Hearing aid, VoIP |
| 1877 | Phonograph Thomas Edison | Recording and playing sound on a cylinder (Edison). | Electrical telegraph | Gramophone |
| 1877 | Horn | A flared mouth that amplifies sound. | ||
| 1878 | Telephone exchange | Switching subscribers; manual, then automatic. | ||
| 1878 | Carbon microphone | The telephone microphone based on carbon granules (Hughes, Edison). | ||
| 1884 | Nipkow disk | A spinning disc with holes for scanning an image. | ||
| 1887 | Gramophone | Sound recording on a flat disc (Berliner). | Phonograph | Vinyl record |
| 1888 | Antenna | Emits and receives radio waves. | ||
| 1888 | Dish antenna | A parabolic reflector that focuses radio waves. | ||
| 1888 | Animation Émile Reynaud | The illusion of motion from drawn frames (Reynaud’s Théâtre Optique, 1888). | ||
| 1891 | Strowger switch | Strowger’s automatic switch. | ||
| 1895 | Radio | Transmitting signals with electromagnetic waves (Popov, Marconi). | Mobile phone | |
| 1895 | Film projector | Projects film frames onto a screen. | Magic lantern | Digital projector |
| 1895 | Player piano | A piano that plays from a perforated roll. | Barrel organ | |
| 1895 | Cinématographe | The Lumières’ camera-projector. | Sewing machine | |
| 1895 | Cinema | Showing moving images (the Lumière brothers). | Zoetrope | |
| 1904 | Rotary dial | A dial that sends number pulses. | ||
| 1904 | Crystal radio | The simplest receiver, with a crystal detector. | ||
| 1910 | Headphones Ernest Mercadier | Miniature loudspeakers at the ears. | Wireless earbuds | |
| 1915 | Public address system | Loudspeakers for an audience. | ||
| 1916 | Condenser microphone | A microphone based on changing capacitance (Wente). | ||
| 1920 | Theremin Leon Theremin | An electronic instrument played without touching it (Theremin). | Synthesizer | |
| 1920 | Radio broadcasting | Transmitting programmes to a mass audience. | Podcast | |
| 1925 | Loudspeaker Edward Washburn Kellogg, Chester Williams Rice | Turns an electrical signal into sound: a coil in a magnetic field moves a diaphragm. | ||
| 1926 | Mechanical television John Logie Baird | Baird’s television using a Nipkow disk. | Television | |
| 1927 | Television Charles Francis Jenkins, Philo Farnsworth | Transmitting moving images over a distance (Farnsworth, Zworykin). | Mechanical television | Digital television |
| 1927 | Sound film | Cinema with a synchronized soundtrack (The Jazz Singer). | ||
| 1928 | Television set | A receiver of the television signal. | Flat-screen TV | |
| 1930 | Car radio | A radio receiver in a car (Motorola). | ||
| 1931 | Iconoscope Vladimir K. Zworykin | A television camera tube (Zworykin). | ||
| 1931 | Electric guitar George Beauchamp | A guitar with electromagnetic pickups. | Guitar | |
| 1931 | Pickup | A magnet with a coil that turns string vibrations into a signal. | ||
| 1931 | Dynamic microphone | A microphone with a coil in a magnetic field. | ||
| 1935 | Tape recorder | Recording sound on magnetic tape (AEG Magnetophon). | Sampler | |
| 1937 | Walkie-talkie | A portable transceiver. | Mobile phone | |
| 1945 | Memex | Vannevar Bush’s hypothetical machine of linked documents. | Hypertext | |
| 1948 | Vinyl record Emile Berliner | A long-playing record made of PVC. | Gramophone | Compact disc |
| 1950 | Hi-fi amplifier | A high-fidelity amplifier. | ||
| 1950 | Pager | A receiver of short messages. | ||
| 1950 | Mixing console | Mixing audio signals. | ||
| 1953 | Colour television | The NTSC, SECAM and PAL standards. | ||
| 1954 | Transistor radio | A pocket receiver (Regency TR-1). | ||
| 1956 | Video recorder | Recording video on tape (Ampex; VHS in 1976). | DVD | |
| 1958 | Modem | Transmits data over a telephone line by modulating a signal. | ||
| 1962 | Satellite television | Broadcasting through relay satellites (Telstar). | ||
| 1963 | Compact cassette Lou Ottens | The Philips cassette. | ||
| 1964 | Packet switching | Data is split into packets that travel across the network independently. | ||
| 1964 | Synthesizer Robert Moog | An electronic instrument that generates sound (Moog). | Theremin | |
| 1964 | Subwoofer | A loudspeaker for low frequencies. | ||
| 1965 | Hypertext | Text with links to other texts (Nelson). | Memex | |
| 1969 | Router | Forwards packets between networks; the IMP in ARPANET. | ||
| 1969 | ARPANET | The first large packet-switched network, linking university computers in the US. | Internet | |
| 1970 | Optical fibre | A glass fibre that carries light (Kao). | ||
| 1971 | Karaoke Shigeichi Negishi | A machine for singing along to a backing track (Inoue). | ||
| 1971 | Email Raymond Tomlinson | Exchanging messages over a network (Tomlinson). | Postal service | |
| 1971 | FTP | The file transfer protocol (Bhushan). | ||
| 1973 | Radio module and antenna | The unit that sends and receives cellular, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth data. | ||
| 1973 | Mobile phone Martin Cooper | A telephone that connects to the network by radio. | Telephone, Radio, Walkie-talkie | |
| 1973 | Ethernet Robert Metcalfe, David Boggs | A local area network technology (Metcalfe). | ||
| 1974 | TCP/IP | A suite of protocols for joining different networks into one. | ||
| 1978 | Active noise cancelling | Cancelling noise with anti-phase sound (Bose). | ||
| 1978 | BBS | Electronic bulletin boards accessed by modem. | ||
| 1979 | Base station | A cellular tower. | ||
| 1979 | Cellular network | Covering an area with cells served by base stations. | ||
| 1979 | Walkman | Sony’s portable cassette player. | MP3 player | |
| 1979 | Sampler | An instrument that plays back recorded sounds (Fairlight). | Tape recorder | |
| 1980 | Set-top box | A digital television decoder. | ||
| 1980 | Drum machine | An electronic rhythm instrument (Roland TR-808). | ||
| 1980 | Usenet | Distributed newsgroups — the ancestor of forums. | ||
| 1981 | IP address | The numerical address of a network node. | ||
| 1982 | Compact disc Sony Group, Koninklijke Philips NV | Digital sound recording on an optical disc. | Vinyl record | |
| 1982 | SMTP | The mail transfer protocol. | ||
| 1983 | Internet Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn | A global network of networks joined by the TCP/IP protocols. | ARPANET | |
| 1983 | MIDI | A standard for connecting electronic instruments. | ||
| 1983 | DNS | The Domain Name System (Mockapetris). | ||
| 1988 | IRC | A chat protocol (Oikarinen). | Instant messenger | |
| 1989 | World Wide Web Tim Berners-Lee, Robert Cailliau | A system of linked hypertext documents on top of the Internet. | Particle accelerator | |
| 1990 | Web browser Tim Berners-Lee | A program for viewing web pages. | ||
| 1991 | HTML Tim Berners-Lee | The markup language of web pages (Berners-Lee). | ||
| 1991 | HTTP Tim Berners-Lee | The Hypertext Transfer Protocol. | ||
| 1992 | SMS | Short text messages. | Instant messenger | |
| 1994 | Smartphone | A mobile phone with the functions of a computer. This is a typical modern smartphone as a class, not a specific model. | Computer, Car navigator, Alarm clock | Tablet computer |
| 1994 | URL | The address of a resource on the network. | ||
| 1994 | Search engine | Indexes the web and searches it by query. | ||
| 1994 | E-commerce | Shopping over the Internet. | ||
| 1995 | DVD | An optical disc for video. | Video recorder | |
| 1995 | TLS/HTTPS | Encryption of web traffic (SSL from Netscape). | ||
| 1995 | Wiki Уорд Каннингем | A website edited by its own readers (Cunningham). | ||
| 1995 | VoIP | Transmitting voice over the Internet (Skype, 2003). | Telephone | |
| 1995 | CGI in cinema | A feature-length CGI film (Toy Story). | ||
| 1996 | Instant messenger | Exchanging messages in real time (ICQ). | IRC, SMS | |
| 1996 | CSS | The styling language of web pages (Lie). | ||
| 1997 | Wi-Fi | The IEEE 802.11 wireless local network. | ||
| 1997 | Flat-screen TV | A plasma or LCD television. | Television set | Smart TV |
| 1997 | Blog | An online diary. | Newspaper | |
| 1998 | Bluetooth Jaap Haartsen | Short-range wireless communication. | ||
| 1998 | MP3 player | A digital player built on flash memory or a disk. | Walkman | |
| 1998 | Digital television | Transmitting TV in compressed digital form (DVB). | Television | |
| 1999 | RSS | A format for subscribing to website updates. | ||
| 2001 | Wikipedia | A free encyclopedia running on a wiki engine. | Encyclopedia | |
| 2003 | Video call | Video communication over the Internet. | Telephone | |
| 2004 | NFC | Near-field communication for contactless payment. | ||
| 2004 | Podcast | Audio shows by subscription (RSS). | Radio broadcasting | |
| 2004 | Social network | An online platform for communication. | ||
| 2005 | Streaming | Transmitting audio and video over a network in real time. | ||
| 2005 | Video hosting | Publishing videos (YouTube). | ||
| 2008 | Smart TV | A television with Internet access. | Flat-screen TV | |
| 2010 | Portable speaker Edward Washburn Kellogg, Chester Williams Rice | A speaker with Bluetooth and a battery. | ||
| 2012 | Online courses | Massive open online courses (MOOCs). | ||
| 2016 | Wireless earbuds | In-ear headphones with Bluetooth. | Headphones | |
| 2019 | Satellite Internet | Constellations of low-orbit satellites. | ||
| Diaphragm | A thin plate that vibrates with a sound wave. |