TIMELINE OF MEDIA

1041: MOVABLE CLAY TYPE PRINTING IN

CHINA
The concept of moveable type was invented by Bi Sheng
in 1041. He relief-cut Chinese symbols into porcelain clay
that was then kiln-fired. The individual symbols could be
arranged to spell out a message that would then be
dipped in ink and printed onto silk.

1440: THE FIRST PRINTING PRESS IN THE

WORLD BY GERMAN GOLDSMITH
JOHANNES GUTENBERG
Goldsmith and inventor Johannes Gutenberg was a political exile
from Mainz, Germany when he began experimenting with printing
in Strasbourg, France in 1440. He returned to Mainz several
years later and by 1450, had a printing machine perfected and
ready to use commercially: The Gutenberg press.

1477: FIRST PRINTED

ADVERTISEMENT IN A BOOK BY
WILLIAM CAXTON
In 1477 William Caxton printed what could be
described as Britain's first advert, for a book called
The Pyes of Salisbury.

1774: INVENTION OF ELECTRIC

TELEGRAPH BY GEORGE LOUIS LESAGE
Swiss physicist and inventor who in 1774 developed one of the
first electronic telegraph machines. Lesage's invention, unlike
modern telegraphs, used a different wire for each letter of the
alphabet. This device, although capable of sending a message
for short distances, proved too cumbersome to use on a wide
scale.

1829: INVENTION OF TYPEWRITER BY

W.S. BURT

July 23, 1829 — Today, William Austin Burt patented the first
typographer (typewriter). An American legislator, surveyor,
craftsman and inventor created a rectangular wooden box that
depressed a rotating lever, causing ink to be released onto a sheet
of paper.

1876: INVENTION OF TELEPHONE BY

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

On March 7, 1876, 29-year-old Alexander Graham Bell receives a

patent for his revolutionary new invention: the telephone. The
Scottish-born Bell worked in London with his father, Melville Bell,
who developed Visible Speech, a written system used to teach
speaking to the deaf.
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1877: INVENTION OF THE PHONOGRAPH
BY THOMAS ALVA EDISON

Thomas Edison created many inventions, but his favorite was the
phonograph. While working on improvements to the telegraph and
the telephone, Edison figured out a way to record sound on tinfoil-
coated cylinders. In 1877, he created a machine with two needles:
one for recording and one for playback.
1894: INVENTION OF RADIO BY
GUGLIELMO MARCONI

In 1894 Marconi became fascinated with the discovery by

German physicist Heinrich Rudolf Hertz of “invisible
waves” generated by electromagnetic interactions.
Marconi built his own wave-generating equipment at his
family's estate and was soon sending signals to locations
a mile away.

1477: FIRST PRINTED

ADVERTISEMENT IN A BOOK BY
WILLIAM CAXTON
In 1477 William Caxton printed what could be
described as Britain's first advert, for a book called
The Pyes of Salisbury.

THE EARLY 1900’S: STARTING OF THE

GOLDEN AGE FOR TELEVISION, RADIO AND
CINEMA

For the twenty-first century period also known by the same

name, see Golden Age of Television (2000s–present).
The first Golden Age of Television is the era of live television
production in the United States, roughly from the late 1940s
through the late 1950s.

1918: FIRST COLOUR MOVIE SHOT CUPID

ANGLING

Cupid Angling was a 1918 silent film starring Ruth Roland, and was
the only feature film photographed using the Douglass Natural Color
process. The film was produced by Leon F.

1920: INVENTION OF TV BY JOHN LOGIE

BAIRD AND FIRST RADIO COMMERCIAL
BROADCAST BY KDKA RADIO STATION A
DAUGHTER COMPANY OF
WESTINGHOUSE ELECTRIC AND
MANUFACTURING COMPANY
On January 26, 1926, John Logie Baird, a Scottish inventor, gives
the first public demonstration of a true television system in London,
launching a revolution in communication and entertainment.

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1923: THE FIRST NEWS MAGAZINE WAS
LAUNCHED - TIME

For nearly a century, it was published weekly, but starting in March

2020 it transitioned to twice a month. It was first published in New
York City on March 3, 1923, and for many years it was run by its
influential co-founder, Henry Luce

1927: FIRST TV TRANSMISSION BY

PHILO FARNSWORTH
In 1927, Philo and Elma watched as he made the first
transmission: a horizontal line, transmitted to a receiver in the
next room, wrote The New York Times in Elma Farnsworth's
2006 obituary. Two years later, Farnsworth transmitted an
image of Elma and her brother, making her the first woman on
TV.

1940: COMMUNITY ANTENNA

TELEVISION SYSTEM, EARLY CABLE
Cable, at first known as community antenna television or CATV, was
begun in the late 1940s and early 1950s as a means of
redistributing broadcast television signals to small towns that were
either too far from the stations originating those signals to receive
them over the air, using set-top or even rooftop antennas, or were
blocked from receiving the signals by mountains or other
obstructions.

1950: BLACK AND WHITE TV CAME OUT

AND BECAME MAINSTREAM
It is considered an improvement on the earliest television
technology, monochrome or black-and-white television, in which
the image is displayed in shades of gray (grayscale).

1918: FIRST COLOUR MOVIE SHOT CUPID

ANGLING

Cupid Angling was a 1918 silent film starring Ruth Roland, and was
the only feature film photographed using the Douglass Natural Color
process. The film was produced by Leon F.

1960: RISE OF FM RADIO

In the early 1960s, FM began to benefit from increased investment,
as broadcasters looked to it to expand their markets; television had
been built out by this point, and the shift to music as the dominant
format of AM in the wake of television and the rise of rock 'n' roll
had led to an AM band so crowded that the FCC

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1963: INTRODUCTION OF AUDIO
CASSETTES
The Cassette Tape, or Compact Cassette, was first developed by
the Philips company in 1962 in Belgium. Philips released the
invention to Europe at the Berlin Radio Show on August 30, 1963;
the invention was released in the United States in November of
next year.

1972: EMAIL WAS DEVELOPED BY

RAY TOMLINSON
In 1972, Tomlinson was one of the participants in a meeting to
enhance FTP to support email, which was used until 1982
when it was replaced by SMTP. In addition, Tomlinson was a
co-author of RFC-561 (September 1973), the first standard
for Internet email message formats.

1973: FIRST HANDHELD MOBILE PHONE

BY JOHN MITCHEL, AND MARTIN COOPER
In 1973, while working together, Cooper and Mitchell conceived the
idea of the first hand-held cell phone using a handset. Eleven years
later, in 1983 they launched in the market Motorola DynaTAC
8000x, the world's first commercial cell phone.

1975: INTRODUCTION OF VCRS

The first commercially successful VCR, which used a Betamax
format, was introduced in 1975. A competitive format, VHS
(Video Home System), was introduced in the same year and
became the dominant system. Although both systems use 0.5-
in.

1980: COLOR TELEVISION BECAME

MAINSTREAM AND FIRST ONLINE
NEWSPAPER - COLUMBUS DISPATCH
July 1, 1980: The Dispatch publishes the first "online" newspaper
when it begins beaming news stories through the CompuServe dial-
up service. It is the first daily newspaper in the country to test a new
technology that enables the day's news to flow into home
computers

1981: IBM PERSONAL COMPUTER

IS INTRODUCED
IBM's own Personal Computer (IBM 5150) was
introduced in August 1981, only a year after corporate
executives gave the go-ahead to Bill Lowe, the lab
director in the company's Boca Raton, Fla., facilities.

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1985: MICROSOFT WINDOWS IS
LAUNCHED
This is where it all started for Windows. The original Windows 1 was
released in November 1985 and was Microsoft's first true attempt
at a graphical user interface in 16-bit. Development was
spearheaded by Microsoft founder Bill Gates and ran on top of MS-
DOS, which relied on command-line input.

1986: MCI MAIL - FIRST

COMMERCIAL EMAIL SERVICE
History. The MCI Mail service was launched on September 23,
1983, in Washington, D.C., during a press conference that was
hosted by MCI's founder and Chairman, William G. McGowan.
MCI Mail was the first commercial email service to use the
internet.

THE 1990S TO 2000S: INVENTION OF THE

INTERNET, BIRTH OF SOCIAL
NETWORKING SITES, AND EMERGENCE
OF SOCIAL MEDIA.

1991: WORLD WIDE WEB CAME INTO

BEING BY SIR TIMOTHY JOHN-BERNERS
LEE

1995: MICROSOFT INTERNET EXPLORER

WAS LAUNCHED
Internet Explorer made its debut on August 16, 1995, just one
month after Microsoft released Windows 95. The browser was part
of something called the Internet Jumpstart Kit that was part of the
Microsoft Plus add-on to Windows 95.

1997: DVDS REPLACED VCR

The DVD format changed the game for prerecorded
movies in March 1997 and ended up entirely replacing
VHS. Hollywood studios stopped offering movies on
VHS. The VCR, though, refused to die quickly. As of
2005, some 94.5 million Americans still owned VHS-
format VCRs.

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2001: INSTANT MESSAGING SERVICES

2002: SATELLITE RADIO IS

LAUNCHED
Sirius launched the initial phase of its service in four cities on
February 14, 2002, expanding to the rest of the contiguous
United States on July 1, 2002. The two companies spent over
$3 billion combined to develop satellite radio technology, build
and launch the satellites, and for various other business
expenses.

2004: FACEBOOK
On February 4, 2004, a Harvard sophomore named Mark Zuckerberg
launches The Facebook, a social media website he had built in order
to connect Harvard students with one another. By the next day,
over a thousand people had registered, and that was only the
beginning.

2005: YOUTUBE
YouTube 2005. In February 2005 three former PayPal
employees, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, launched
the YouTube website for publishing and sharing video files. The
first video called "Me at the zoo" was uploaded to YouTube on 23
April, 2005 by one of the co-founders, Jawed Karim.

2006: TWITTER
Glass proposed the name Twttr. Dorsey sent the first tweet (“just
setting up my twttr”) on March 21, 2006, and the completed version
of Twitter debuted in July 2006. Seeing a future for the product, in
October 2006 Williams, Stone, and Dorsey bought out Odeo and
started Obvious Corp. to further develop it

2007: TUMBLR
Today in Media History: David Karp and Marco Arment
launched Tumblr in 2007. On February 19, 2007, the
first version of the Tumblr microblogging service was
founded by David Karp and Marco Arment. They
launched a more complete version in April 2007.

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2001: 2010: INSTAGRAM

The Instagram app was launched on Oct. 6, 2010, and racked up
25,000 users in one day. 6 At the end of the first week, Instagram
had been downloaded 100,000 times, and by mid-December, the
number of users had reached one million.

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