evolution of communication

ASSIGNMENT 1

EVOLUTION OF COMMUNICATION

1.0 Speech

1.1 Evolution of the brain differentiated humans from animals, as among other things it allowed humans to master a very efficient form of communication - speech. A mutation of the FOXP2 gene, which occurred in homo sapiens about 200,000 years ago, was likely responsible for much of this change.
Speech greatly facilitated the transmission of information and knowledge to further generations. Experiences passed on through speech became increasingly rich, and allowed humans to adapt themselves to new environments - or adapt the environments to themselves - much more quickly than was possible before; in effect, biological human evolution was overtaken by technological progress and sociocultural evolution. Speech meant easier coordination and cooperation, technological progress and development of complex, abstract concepts such as religion or science. Speech placed humans at the top of the food chain, and facilitated human colonization of the entire planet.
Speech, however, is not perfect. The human voice carries only so far, and sign language is also rather limited in terms of distance. Further, all such forms of communications relied on human memory, another imperfect tool: memory can become corrupted or lost over time, and there is a limit to how much one can remember. With the accidental death of a 'wise man' or tribal elder, a pre-literate tribe could lose many generations of knowledge.

The imperfection of speech, which nonetheless allowed easier dissemination of ideas and stimulated inventions, eventually resulted in the creation of new forms of communications, improving both the range at which people could communicate and the longevity of the information. All of those inventions were based on the key concept of the symbol: a conventional representation of a concept.

1.2 The next step in the history of communications is petroglyphs, carvings into a rock surface. It took about 20,000 years for homo sapiens to move from the first cave paintings to the first petroglyphs, which are dated to around 10,000 BC.
It is possible that the humans of that time used some other forms of communication, often for mnemonic purposes - specially arranged stones, symbols carved in wood or earth, quipu-like ropes, tattoos, but little other than the most durable carved stones has survived to modern times and we can only speculate about their existence based on our observation of still existing 'hunter-gatherer' cultures such as those of Africa or Oceania.[4]

1.3 A pictogram (pictograph) is a symbol representing a concept, object, activity, place or event by illustration. Pictography is a form of proto-writing whereby ideas are transmitted through drawing. Pictographs were the next step in the evolution of communication: the most important difference between petroglyphs and pictograms is that petroglyphs are simply showing an event, but pictograms are telling a story about the event, thus they can for example be ordered in chronological order.
Pictograms were used by various ancient cultures all over the world since around 9000 BC, when tokens marked with simple pictures began to be used to label basic farm produce, and become increasingly popular around 6000-5000 BC.
Pictograms, in turn, evolved into ideograms, graphical symbols that represent an idea. Their ancestors, the pictograms, could represent only something resembling their form: therefore a pictogram of a circle could represent a sun, but not concepts like 'heat', 'light', 'day' or 'Great God of the Sun'. Ideograms, on the other hand, could convey more abstract concepts, so that for example an ideogram of two sticks can mean not only 'legs' but also a verb 'to walk'.
Because some ideas are universal, many different cultures developed similar ideograms. For example an eye with a tear means 'sadness' in Native American ideograms in California, as it does for the Aztecs, the early Chinese and the Egyptians.
Ideograms were precursors of logographic writing systems such as Egyptian hieroglyphs and Chinese characters.
Examples of ideographical proto-writing systems, thought not to contain language-specific information, include the Vinca script (see also Tărtăria tablets) and the early Indus script. In both cases there are claims of decipherment of linguistic content, without wide acceptance.
The oldest-known forms of writing were primarily logographic in nature, based on pictographic and ideographic elements. Most writing systems can be broadly divided into three categories: logographic, syllabic and alphabetic (or segmental); however, all three may be found in any given writing system in varying proportions, often making it difficult to categorise a system uniquely.
The invention of the first writing systems is roughly contemporary with the beginning of the Bronze Age in the late Neolithic of the late 4th millennium BC. The first writing system is generally believed to have been invented in pre-historic Sumer and developed by the late 3rd millennium into cuneiform. Egyptian hieroglyphs, and the undeciphered Proto-Elamite writing system and Indus Valley script also date to this era, though a few scholars have questioned the Indus Valley script's status as a writing system.
The original Sumerian writing system was derived from a system of clay tokens used to represent commodities. By the end of the 4th millennium BC, this had evolved into a method of keeping accounts, using a round-shaped stylus impressed into soft clay at different angles for recording numbers. This was gradually augmented with pictographic writing using a sharp stylus to indicate what was being counted. Round-stylus and sharp-stylus writing was gradually replaced about 2700-2000 BC by writing using a wedge-shaped stylus (hence the term cuneiform), at first only for logograms, but developed to include phonetic elements by the 2800 BC. About 2600 BC cuneiform began to represent syllables of spoken Sumerian language. Finally, cuneiform writing became a general purpose writing system for logograms, syllables, and numbers. By the 26th century BC, this script had been adapted to another Mesopotamian language, Akkadian, and from there to others such as Hurrian, and Hittite. Scripts similar in appearance to this writing system include those for Ugaritic and Old Persian.
The Chinese script may have originated independently of the Middle Eastern scripts, around the 16th century BC (early Shang Dynasty), out of a late neolithic Chinese system of proto-writing dating back to c. 6000 BC. The pre-Columbian writing systems of the Americas (including among others Olmec and Mayan) are also generally believed to have had independent origins, although some experts have noticed similarities between Olmec writing and Shang writing that seem to suggest that Mesoamerican writing was imported from China.

1.4 The first pure alphabets (properly, "abjads", mapping single symbols to single phonemes, but not necessarily each phoneme to a symbol) emerged around 2000 BC in Ancient Egypt, but by then alphabetic principles had already been incorporated into Egyptian hieroglyphs for a millennium (see Middle Bronze Age alphabets).
By 2700 BC Egyptian writing had a set of some 22 hieroglyphs to represent syllables that begin with a single consonant of their language, plus a vowel (or no vowel) to be supplied by the native speaker. These glyphs were used as pronunciation guides for logograms, to write grammatical inflections, and, later, to transcribe loan words and foreign names.
However, although seemingly alphabetic in nature, the original Egyptian uniliterals were not a system and were never used by themselves to encode Egyptian speech. In the Middle Bronze Age an apparently "alphabetic" system is thought by some to have been developed in central Egypt around 1700 BC for or by Semitic workers, but we cannot read these early writings and their exact nature remain open to interpretation.
Over the next five centuries this Semitic "alphabet" (really a syllabary like Phoenician writing) seems to have spread north. All subsequent alphabets around the world with the sole exception of Korean Hangul have either descended from it, or been inspired by one of its descendants.

2.0 History of the telephone

2.1 There is probably no single inventor of the telephone, although Alexander Graham Bell has certainly been widely credited with its invention. Like many other inventions such as the television, its creation was a culmination of other technologies. One key technology was the telegraph.
The telephone (tele = distance, phone = sound/voice)
It has been argued that the telephone was originally invented by an Italian inventor named Antonio Meucci. He demonstrated the principles of telephony in 1849 by sending electrical impulses through a wire to communicate sounds.
In 1860 Meucci demonstrated his telephone publicly in New York. However, partially due to his poor English and lack of business experience, he was not successful in commercialising his invention.
Similar devices were also invented and demonstrated by Johann Philipp Reis from Germany in 1860, and Innocenzo Manzetti in Italy in 1864. Others between 1840 and 1875 also wrote papers and took out patents on various telephone-like devices.
However, it wasn't until Alexander Graham Bell invented and demonstrated his telephone in 1875 that the invention took off. In fact for many years, Bell was acknowledged as the inventor of the telephone and legal cases by Meucci and others were unsuccessful in gaining recognition for their achievements. This changed in 2002 when the US Congress formally recognised Meucci as the inventor of the telephone, 106 years after his death.
Bell's first telephone was one-way. Using two receivers, a wire and a battery, he was able to convey voice between rooms in June 1875. His first two-directional phone call was made in March 1876, and the first 'long-distance' call was made in August of the same year when Bell called from his family homestead in Ohio to his assistant, Mr Watson, in a town 16 kilometres away.
Bell patented his telephone invention in February 1876, and only just in time. His competitor, Elisha Gray, missed out on owning the patent on the telephone by two hours!

2.2 The first phones did not support the use of phone numbers to call people, so as more were sold it became necessary to establish manual switchboards where a human operator could connect people. The first was opened in 1878 and could handle two simultaneous conversations.
By the start of the new century, the first voice transmission was made across the Atlantic Ocean via radio, opening the possibility of making telephone calls to places around the world. By 1935, that too became a reality.
The telephone and related technologies continued improving in quality and distance. Touch-tone dialling, using keypads like those we see on phones today, was introduced in 1941. A national numbering plan with area codes was introduced in America in 1946 and Caller ID, which allows the person receiving the call to see who made it, was patented in1982.
Telephony today has gone beyond the handset and touch-tone keypad. We now have wireless phone systems that have given rise to the semi-cordless and the cordless telephone, the satellite phone and the .
In the twenty-first century, we have managed to combine the Internet with the telephone; Voice over IP, or internet telephony, looks set to replace traditional telephone networks with its low cost and ease of use. Like the telegraph, the telephone may one day drop off the world's technology scale but its history has been instrumental in the development of modern communications.

2.2.1 Alexander Graham Bell's first attempt at a speaking telephone, known as a Gallows Receiver because if you turned it on its side, it eerily resembles a hangman's scaffold (June 1875)

2.2.2 The Butterstamp telephone combined the receiver and transmitter into one handheld unit. To use it, you had to use a crank to signal the operator, and then talk into one end, turn the instrument around and listen to the other end. Needless to say, it confused a lot of people! (1878)

2.2.3 A Strowger dial telephone, built by Auto Electric Company. They manufactured the first commercial dial telephone; a devise that would route calls directly to individuals using an automated switchboard without needing to speak to a human operator. (1891)

2.2.4 Videophones were first used in France and Germany in the 1930s. They were not popular as the phones were cumbersome and expensive. However, videophones picked up in popularity in the 1990s, giving rise to videoconferencing as a business practice.

2.2.5 AT & T Touch-Tone Telephone. Early Touch-Tone sets had only 10 buttons. AT & T added the * and # keys in 1968 for use in advanced services. (1963)

2.2.6 Cordless handsets were first developed by Teri Pall in 1965. The base unit of the phone can be connected to the land-line system while the handset functions remotely through low power radio.

2.2.7 DynaTAC 8000X, the world's first mobile phone which was created by Motorola in 1983.

2.2.8 VocalTec Internet Phone, the first Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) application to be released. (February 1995)

3.0 Radio waves

3.1 Radio waves travel (propagate) through the air and the vacuum of space equally well, not requiring a medium of transport.
A radio wave is created whenever a charged object accelerates with a frequency that lies in the radio frequency (RF) portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. By contrast, other types of emissions which fall outside the RF range are gamma rays, X-rays, infrared & ultraviolet light, and light visible to humans.
When a radio wave passes a wire, it induces a moving electric charge (voltage) that can be transformed into audio or other signals that carry information. Although the word 'radio' is used to describe this phenomenon, the transmissions which we know as television, radio, radar, and cell phone are all in the class of radio frequency emissions.

3.2 Discovery
The theoretical basis of the propagation of electromagnetic waves was first described in 1873 by James Clerk Maxwell in his paper to the Royal Society A dynamical theory of the electromagnetic field, which followed his work between 1861 and 1865.
It was Heinrich Rudolf Hertz who, between 1886 and 1888, first validated Maxwell's theory through experiment, demonstrating that radio radiation had all the properties of waves (now called Hertzian waves), and discovering that the electromagnetic equations could be reformulated into a partial differential equation called the wave equation.

4.0 Signal lamp

4.1 A signal lamp (also called an Aldis lamp) is a visual signaling device for optical communication (typically using Morse code) – essentially a focused lamp which can produce a pulse of light. It is named after its inventor Authur C W Aldis. This pulse is achieved by opening and closing shutters mounted in front of the lamp, either via a manually-operated pressure switch or, in later versions, automatically. The lamps were usually equipped with some form of optical sight, and were most commonly used on naval vessels and in airport control towers (using color signals for stop or clearance).

5.0 Television sets

5.1 In television's electromechanical era, commercially made television sets were sold from 1928 to 1934 in the United Kingdom, United States, and Russia. The earliest commercially made sets sold by Baird in the UK in 1928 were radios with the addition of a television device consisting of a neon tube behind a mechanically spinning disk (the Nipkow disk) with a spiral of apertures that produced a red postage-stamp size image, enlarged to twice that size by a magnifying glass. The Baird "Televisor" was also available without the radio. The Televisor sold in 1930–1933 is considered the first mass-produced set, selling about a thousand units.
The first commercially made electronic television sets with cathode ray tubes were manufactured by Telefunken in Germany in 1934, followed by other makers in France (1936), Britain (1936), and America (1938). The cheapest of the pre-World War II factory-made American sets, a 1938 image-only model with a 3-inch (8 cm) screen, cost US$125, the equivalent of US$1,863 in 2007. The cheapest model with a 12-inch (30 cm) screen was $445 ($6,633).
An estimated 19,000 electronic television sets were manufactured in Britain, and about 1,600 in Germany, before World War II. About 7,000–8,000 electronic sets were made in the U.S. before the War Production Board halted manufacture in April 1942, production resuming in August 1945.
Television usage in the United States skyrocketed after World War II with the lifting of the manufacturing freeze, war-related technological advances, the gradual expansion of the television networks westward, the drop in set prices caused by mass production, increased leisure time, and additional disposable income. In 1947, Motorola introduced the VT-71 television for $189.95, the first television set to be sold for under $200, finally making television affordable for millions of Americans. While only 0.5% of U.S. households had a television set in 1946, 55.7% had one in 1954, and 90% by 1962. In Britain, there were 15,000 television households in 1947, 1.4 million in 1952, and 15.1 million by 1968.
For many years different countries used different technical standards. France initially adopted the German 441-line standard but later upgraded to 819 lines, which gave the highest picture definition of any analogue TV system, approximately double the resolution of the British 405-line system. However this is not without a cost, in that the cameras need to produce four times the pixel rate (thus quadrupling the bandwidth), from pixels one-quarter the size, reducing the sensitivity by an equal amount. In practice the 819-line cameras never achieved anything like the resolution that could theoretically be transmitted by the 819 line system, and for color, France reverted to the same 625 lines as the European CCIR system.
Eventually most of Europe switched to the 625-line PAL standard, once more following Germany's example, with France adopting SECAM. Meanwhile in North America the original NTSC 525-line standard from 1941 was retained, although analog television broadcasting in the United States ended on June 12, 2009 in favor of digital-only broadcasting.

6.0 Photophones

6.1 The photophone, also known as a radiophone, was invented jointly by Alexander Graham Bell and his then-assistant Charles Sumner Tainter on February 19, 1880, at Bell's 1325 'L' Street laboratory in Washington, D.C. Both were later to become full associates in the Volta Laboratory Association, created and financed by Bell.
Bell believed the photophone was his most important invention. The device allowed for the transmission of sound on a beam of light. On April 1, 1880, and also described by plaque as occurring on June 3, Bell transmitted the world's first wireless telephone message on his newly invented form of telecommunication, the far advanced precursor to fiber-optic communications. The wireless call was sent from the Franklin School to the window of Bell's laboratory, some 213 meters away.

7.0 Samaphore lines

7.1 A semaphore telegraph, optical telegraph, shutter telegraph chain, Chappe telegraph, or Napoleonic semaphore is a system of conveying information by means of visual signals, using towers with pivoting shutters, also known as blades or paddles. Information is encoded by the position of the mechanical elements; it is read when the shutter is in a fixed position. These systems were popular in the late 18th - early 19th century. In modern usage, "semaphore line" and "optical telegraph" may refer to a relay system using flag semaphore.
Semaphore lines were a precursor of the electrical telegraph. They were far faster than post riders for bringing a message over long distances, but far more expensive and less private than the electrical telegraph lines which would replace them. The distance that an optical telegraph can bridge is limited by geography and weather, thus in practical use, most optical telegraphs used lines of relay stations to bridge longer distances.