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A Short History of Media

RUPERT TAYLOR • JUL 9, 2021

I've spent half a century writing for radio and print—mostly print. I hope to be still tapping
the keys as I take my last breath.

Forty thousand years ago, some human ancestors painted on the walls of a cave on the
Indonesian island of Sulawesi (see above). They left stencils of their hands and other
markings.

Cave paintings in France and Spain have been dated to a couple of thousand years later.
Experts don’t know exactly what purpose the artwork had, but some suggest they might
be the first examples of communicating through a medium. The “audience” for such
paintings was very small.

Wider Audience

The so-called “mass media” had to wait for the creation of new technologies before
coming to life. The first of these was paper, invented in China in about 100 BCE. However,
another 1,500 years had to pass before Johannes Gutenberg built the first printing press.
This meant that books could be mass produced whereas before each one had to be
handwritten.

By early in the 17th century, the first newspapers appeared but, because few people were
literate, readership was limited. As more people learned to read and write the reach of
mass media grew. By the early 1800s, high circulation newspapers such as The Times of
London were developing huge readerships. High-speed rotary printing presses churned
out large volumes and the development of railways made for wide distribution.

The arrival of photography changed the media scene. In 1862, Matthew Brady held an
exhibition of photographs he had taken of the U.S. Civil War. Shocked Americans stood
and stared at Brady’s images of the dead at the Battle of Antietam. The New York Times
noted that Brady brought “home to us the terrible reality of war.” (A similar impact was
observed when Americans saw film of the war in Vietnam being beamed into their living-
room televisions).

By late in the 19th century, new technology allowed newspapers to print photographs.

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In 1895, the Lumière brothers gave the first public demonstration of moving pictures in
Paris. Some members of the audience were frightened.

Instant Telegraphic Contact

Samuel Morse invented his code in 1835. A series of dots and dashes could be sent down a
telegraph wire and received at the other end. Messages could be sent over long distances
at almost instantaneous speed. Until then, the fastest speed at which information could
travel was about 55 km/h via railways.

(Telegraph messages were still in use in the 21st century; the last one being sent in India in
July 2013.)

In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. Now, instant two-way voice
communication was possible.

In December 1901, the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi raised a radio antenna attached
to a kite on Signal Hill, St. John’s, Newfoundland. He received a radio signal from Cornwall,
England, 3,400 km away. Instant communication without wires or cables was now
possible.

Five years later, the Canadian inventor Reginald Fessenden transmitted speech across the
Atlantic.

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On November 2, 1920, radio station KDKA in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania went on the air to
report the results of that year’s presidential election. Eight years later, pictures were added
to sound. W3XK was located in a Washington suburb and it broadcast television, mostly to
hobbyists, for four years.

However, the widespread installation of television sets in people’s homes did not happen
until the late 1940s. The technology of television kept improving over the years.

Timeline of Television Technology

!"1948: First cable delivery system

!"1952: Canada got its first TV service

!"1953: First colour broadcast but nobody had a colour receiver

!"1962: First satellite broadcast

!"1965: Colour technology improvements encourage widespread use

!"1976: Beta home video recorders introduced

!"1983: High-definition television demonstrated

!"1998: First digital broadcasts

!"2005: Flat screens

!"2010: Three-dimensional television

!"2017: Organic Light Emitting Diode TVs as thin as credit cards

The Internet

The most recent media jolt came in 1965, but hardly anybody knew about it. Two
computers communicated with each other in a lab at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. The technology broke a message down into individual packages which were
then reassembled at the receiving computer.

With many refinements, this became The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network
(ARPANET). This was adopted as a communication system by the U.S. military in 1969. It
allowed packages of information to be routed across networks using different paths. The
idea was, and still is, that if one line of communication is knocked out by hostile action the

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system will switch to an undamaged route.

In 1974, ARPANET was adapted for use commercially. LiveScience reports that in 1976
Queen Elizabeth II hit the “send button” on her first e-mail. Then, in 1990, along came Tim
Berners-Lee and his development of Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML), a technology
that allows people to navigate the internet. The following year, the World Wide Web went
into action and, by 1993, there were 600 websites and two million computers connected to
the internet.

In 1998, the Google search engine was born and the way people use the internet was
changed forever. In 2004, Facebook went online and the whole social networking
phenomenon began.

As of January 2020, there were more than 1.7 billion websites with about 140,000 new
ones created daily. SmartInsights gives us a glimpse of what happens every 60 seconds on
the internet:

!"500 hours of YouTube videos are uploaded;

!"149,513 emails are sent;

!"3.3 million Facebook posts are made;

!"3.8 million Google searches are started; and

!"448,800 Tweets are sent on Twitter.

The internet has become a mammoth information delivery system. It seems inevitable that
sometime in the future a different technology will come along and make the internet
obsolete.

Bonus Factoids

!"Charles Francis Jenkins aired the first television commercial in the late 1920s. The U.S.
government fined him for doing so. Today, the average person in North America sees
20,000 television commercials a year.

!"According to the BBC’s Quite Interesting program, “Only 35 percent of the average
person’s Twitter followers are actual people.”

!"In 1981, there were 1,730 daily newspapers published in the United States. The Editor &
Publisher Magazine database of newspapers publishing daily weekday editions in
October 2017 listed 1,173.

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Sources

!"“Internet History Timeline: ARPANET to the World Wide Web.” Kim Ann Zimmermann &
Jesse Emspak, Live Science, June 27, 2017.

!"“Media History Timeline.” Prof. Jim McPherson, Whitworth College, 2002

!"“What Happens Online in 60 Seconds?” Robert Allen, Smart Insights, February 2, 2017.

This content is accurate and true to the best of the author’s knowledge and is not meant
to substitute for formal and individualized advice from a qualified professional.

© 2017 Rupert Taylor

Comments

Nancy on July 14, 2020:

Amazing and very relevant information. Good job. Thanks very much

Rupert Taylor (author) from Waterloo, Ontario, Canada on February 22, 2020:

Dhirt

The reason there is "no mention of scriptural text or translations" is that this is an article
about the media and not an article about religion.

Dhirt on February 22, 2020:

This is a great article. I wonder why there was no mention of scriptural text or translations?
The Bible is has been and still is the largest selling book of all time.

simon on February 12, 2020:

absolutely worth, all the answers to my course work here

soban on September 07, 2019:

very useful poora chaapliya project tha karun.....

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sabuzir056@gmail.com on July 07, 2019:

This article is veru much important for me.Thank you very much(SABUZ FROM
BANGLADESH)

Rupert Taylor (author) from Waterloo, Ontario, Canada on April 10, 2019:

Seema - If I knew what "principles and management in media industry post liberalisation"
meant I would give it a go.

Seema on April 10, 2019:

Please update on principles and management in media industry post liberalisation

Ku.Reenu on March 30, 2019:

Really helpful

Billy Phrotop on January 22, 2019:

Good job mate loved to teach my class this stuff!

Louise Powles from Norfolk, England on October 16, 2017:

I love reading your article, it was so interesting reading about the history of media. I
particularly enjoyed watching the Lumière Brothers video. How interesting!

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