Page 49 - Encyclopedia Of World History

communication—overview 399

Don’t pay any attention to what they write about you.
Just measure it in inches. • Andy Warhol (1928–1987)

1830s and in the United States in the early 1840s. The ever larger transmitters to communicate over ever longer
American system, using a single wire and the code distances with ships at sea and across continents and
devised by Samuel Morse (1791–1872), was gradually oceans.
adopted worldwide.An electric telegraph line cost less to
build than its optical predecessor, could operate at night Electronic Mass
and in any weather, and sent messages much faster. So Communication
great was its capacity that it was opened to all users: rail- The nature of wireless communication changed radically
roads, governments, the press, and the general public. By when newer equipment began transmitting voices and
the 1850s, telegraph networks covered Europe and the music as well as dots and dashes. Broadcasting began
eastern United States. During the following decades, with station KDKA in Pittsburgh in 1920.Two years later
colonial powers erected telegraph lines in India and the United States had 564 commercial stations sup-
parts of Africa, as did independent nations in Latin ported by advertisements. In most other countries, broad-
America.The Chinese resisted for several decades, seeing casting was monopolized from the start by governments
it as an instrument of western penetration and espionage. that used the new medium for cultural “uplift” and polit-
Meanwhile, engineers and entrepreneurs experimented ical propaganda. By the 1930s, shortwave radio broad-
with submarine telegraph cables to connect islands and cast political messages to foreign countries.
continents into a global network. The first successful Television was technically feasible by the late 1930s,
transatlantic cable began operating in 1866, followed in but its use in mass communication was delayed by World
quick succession by cables to India,Australia, and China War II. It became a common consumer item in the
in the 1870s, and around Africa in the 1880s. On the United States during the 1950s and in Europe and Japan
North Atlantic, competition reigned, but elsewhere, the in the 1960s and 1970s. Though signals could only be
cable business was monopolized by a few British firms. broadcast locally, stations were connected by cables and
International and intercontinental telecommunication the industry was dominated by three networks in the
facilitated the expansion of trade and the flow of infor- United States and one or two national networks in other
mation around the world. It did not, however, lower the countries.To prevent their citizens from watching foreign
desire or reduce the opportunities for war as its pioneers broadcasts, governments imposed mutually incompatible
had expected. technical standards. In the 1970s and after, two new
Unlike telegraphy, which had its greatest impact on technologies—satellites and cables—challenged the
long-distance communications, telephony was largely a entire system of national or commercial centralization,
local matter restricted, until well into the twentieth century, encouraging the proliferation of alternative information
to businesses and wealthy people.The telephone was in- and entertainment media.
vented in 1876 in the United States by Alexander Graham
Bell (1847–1922) and soon installed in all the major Motion Pictures and
cities of North America and Europe. A transcontinental Sound Recording
connection from NewYork to San Francisco was delayed During the nineteenth century, photography developed
for technical reasons until 1915. Only sinceWorldWar II as a new art medium.At the end of the century, inventors
have telephone lines, and more recently cellular phones, in the United States and France found ways of projecting
spread to rural areas and developing countries. images in sequence so rapidly that the eye saw motion.
Guglielmo Marconi (1874–1937) demonstrated the Entrepreneurs soon found ways of presenting entire dra-
first wireless communication system in 1895. For the first mas on film, creating an industry that grew even more
twenty years, its use was restricted to sending telegrams popular with the advent of talking pictures in the late
in Morse code, while engineers concentrated on building 1920s and color films in the late 1930s.