Timeline of Technology

Note: While many dates could potentially be included in this time line, most of my choices pertain to the ease of distributing mass-media and means of communication.

1453 Printing Press by Gutenberg
-This invention allowed a great deal of information to be printed quickly and massively, allowing information to spread at a relatively high speed.

1844 First telegraph line set by Samuel Morse
-Communication reaches a real-time speed, allowing people to communicate over great distances.

1920s Electricity introduced to consumers
-Allows for electrically-powered appliances, however primitive, in households.

1930s Radio widely used by consumers
-Real time communication on a broad scale, which allows instant relaying of information.

1927 First TV Transmission by Farnsworth
-Television has been the dominant medium for mass information for many decades. TV helped introduce the Internet to the average household, through its ability to reach a global audience instantly.

1960s Internet Research began
-Without the development of the Internet, I could not be writing this blog and posting it worldwide right now.

1970s Email Developed
-Email is one of the staples of the Internet; being able to mail people instantly over a computer was one of the main appeals to consumers.

1980s Users use Hypertext to link web pages together
-This helped to develop the way we browse the internet, with pages leading to further pages, so that users may find information with ease.

1992 Web Browsers open doors
- Web Browsers allow for even the non-computer savvy to browse the Internet relatively easily.

2004 Broadband is widespread
-By reaching 45% of American households, broadband Internet allowed bulky content to be distributed more quickly, making the Internet more effective in some cases than even television.

While telephones also played a part in the development of instant communication, I believe that they seemed to have developed independently until just recently, when text messaging and email were allowed to flourish from mobile devices. By not including them, I hoped to emphasize the mass-communication of our history. I believe that in the future, our technology will only become sleeker and more streamlined, as I am not sure how much easier communication can become. I think that inventions will only build upon what has already been established, rather than create something entirely different. In some ways, I hope to be proven wrong at that point, since new technology is always exciting.