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'Timeline of communication technology'

★ 3500s BC - The Sumerians develop cuneiform writing and the Egyptians develop hieroglyphic writing

★ 1500s BC - The Phoenicians develop an alphabet

★ 26-37 - Roman Emperor Tiberius rules the empire from island of Capri by signaling messages with metal mirrors to reflect the sun

★ 105 - Tsai Lun invents paper

★ 600s - Hindu-Malayan empires write legal documents on copper plate scrolls, and write other documents on more perishable media

★ 1450 - The Chinese develop wooden block movable type printing

★ 1450 - Johannes Gutenberg finishes a printing press with metal movable type

★ 1520 - Ships on Ferdinand Magellan's voyage signal to each other by firing cannon and raising flags.

★ 1793 - Claude Chappe establishes the first long-distance semaphore telegraph line

★ 1831 - Joseph Henry proposes and builds an electric telegraph

★ 1835 - Samuel Morse develops the Morse code

★ 1843 - Samuel Morse builds the first long distance electric telegraph line

★ 1844 - Charles Fenerty produces paper from a wood pulp, eliminating rag paper which was in limited supply

★ 1849 - Associated Press organizes Nova Scotia pony express to carry latest European news for New York newspapers

★ 1876 - Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas A. Watson exhibit an electric telephone in Boston

★ 1877 - Thomas Edison patents the phonograph

★ 1889 - Almon Strowger patents the direct dial telephone

★ 1901 - Guglielmo Marconi transmits radio signals from Cornwall to Newfoundland

★ 1925 - John Logie Baird transmits the first television signal

★ 1942 - Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil invent frequency hopping spread spectrum communication technique

★ 1947 - Douglas H. Ring and W. Rae Young of Bell Labs proposed a cell-based approach which lead to "cellular phones"

★ 1949 - Claude Elwood Shannon, the "father of information theory", mathematically proves the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem

★ 1958 - Chester Carlson presents the first photocopier suitable for office use

★ 1963 - First geosynchronous communications satellite is launched, 17 years after Arthur C. Clarke's article

★ 1966 - Charles Kao realizes that silica-based optical waveguides offer a practical way to transmit light via total internal reflection

★ 1969 - The first hosts of ARPANET, Internet's ancestor, are connected.

★ 1971 - Erna Schneider Hoover invented a computerized switching system for telephone traffic.

★ 1977 - Donald Knuth begins work on TeX

★ 1989 - Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau built the prototype system which became the World Wide Web at CERN

★ 1991 - Anders Olsson transmits solitary waves through an optical fiber with a data rate of 32 billion bits per second

★ 1996 - Internet2 organization created