It's been like a wild ride on a runaway train. Ten dizzying decades that revolutionized business, communications, entertainment and the way we live.
Just how we got here so fast--from Marconi's first tentative radio transmission to live photos of Mars broadcast over the Internet--is a story experts are still struggling to make sense of. In hindsight, what appears to have happened is that several diverse forms of communications and information processing, each following its own technological track, emerged from stuttering starts, built up speed and then converged suddenly into a kind of Grand Central Terminal known as the World Wide Web.
Along the way, vital components began to shrink: the vacuum tube became the transistor; the transistor led to the microchip; the microchip married the phone and gave birth to the modem. Soon enough, sounds, photos, movies and conversations would be ground down into the smallest components of all: 1s and 0s. Was the digital revolution inevitable? In our brave new wired world, it certainly seems that way.
--By Chris Taylor and Unmesh Kher
TELEVISION
THE DAWN OF TV
1922: Philo Farnsworth describes electronic television
1923: Vladimir Zworykin patents design for iconoscope, a television transmission tube
1925: Using a mechanical system, John Logie Baird transmits first still picture
1927: Farnsworth creates first all-electronic television system
In 1927 Bell Labs makes the first live cable-TV transmission
1928: Baird constructs first mechanical color television
RCA broadcasts from 1939 World's Fair
NBC broadcasts the first TV commercial in 1941
1948 First cable TVs appear in rural areas of U.S.
Golden Age of Television
1951 CBS makes first color broadcast
1953 Standard color-TV system introduced in U.S.
1960 Transistors first used in televisions
1969 First commercially viable VCR sold by Sony
1978 First digitally coded laser videodiscs appear on the market
1988 Japan conducts world's first large scale analog-TV broadcast from the Seoul Olympics
RADIO
1901 Italy's Guglielmo Marconi conducts first transatlantic radio transmission
VACUUM TUBE Developed by Sir John Ambrose Fleming in 1904
1906 Lee De Forest modifies Fleming's vacuum tube to create Audion valve
1912 De Forest reworks his Audion valves into powerful amplifiers
1918 Edwin Armstrong develops superheterodyne circuit, the receiver-amplifier at the heart of radios and televisions today
Golden Age of Radio
1933 Armstrong develops FM (frequency modulation) radio broadcasting
1954 First transistor radio
1961 First stereo radio broadcast
1970 First transmission of data into a computer network by radio waves
1986 European radio stations use the FM carrier wave to transmit data
TELECOMMUNICATIONS
1917 As the U.S. enters World War I, 1 of every 10 Americans has a telephone
1927 Bell Labs invents the negative feedback amplifier, significantly improving telecom quality
1929 AT&T patents coaxial cable