The History Of Communication Communications have always been a part of human existence. Even at the dawn of human existence communications must have played a part. I say this because without it, everyone would have been fighting everyone else. The human race never would have formed into groups and later tribes because they would have been too scared of each other. It also must have played a part in domestication of some animals. Take dogs for existence. They were once wolves and didn’t trust humans but somewhere along the line they became our friends. This must have been with some kind of communication. At first it might not have even been verbal. It could have been by showing the animal you cared by giving it food. That was a form of communication. We don’t know what was the first form of human communication. We do know it couldn’t have been with smoke signals because in the beginning there was no knowledge of fire. Maybe it was by knocking on trees, who knows. There are two kinds of communication I am talking about and they are long distance and also personal. I would tend to think the first communication may have been personal. Two early humans meet on a path, they don’t know each other so they are ready for a fight to the death. One puts down the heavy stick he is carrying to show he is not a threat and the other does the same and then they both pick up their sticks and go on their way. Maybe that is not what happened at all. Perhaps one woman was giving child birth in the woods and another woman came upon her and felt sorry and assisted her. There is so many different ways the first personal communication could have taken place. Over time groups formed and some became friendly to each other and they wanted to figure out a way to communicate while they were apart. They might have used hollow logs to beat on to send short messages. Over time humans found out stretching animal hides over a hollow base made a drum which made even louder sounds when beaten. It is believed drums was invented around 5,500 B.C., making them over 7,700 years old and they are presumed to be the oldest of the musical instruments. Presumably fire was discovered around 700,000 years ago, but we can’t be sure. With fire being this old, smoke signals could have been the first communication between distant groups. When it comes to personal communication, we believed it started with the Neanderthals. The Neanderthals were thought not to be capable of speech, but this changed and today we believe they could talk. Some believe the Neanderthals lived from about 130,000 years ago to about 40,000 years ago. But this idea has been challenged and some scientists believe they date back at least 400,000 years. Evidence of modern humans was found which was about 315,000 years old, but we keep finding older and older evidence so we might even find out our race is even older. We probably communicated not only with each other on a personal basis, but also with Neanderthals. Neanderthal DNA has been found in our DNA so this proves something, but there is no way to know if our relations were ever friendly. Fire remained a way to accomplish long range communication for many centuries. It was used for many communications, but one in particular was a warning of invasion. Someone would light a warning fire and another watching would do the same until the warning reached the intended recipient which was usually an army. When clocks came on the scene it was about 1417 B.C. and was a water clock. People could agree when their clocks reached a certain time, they would do a certain thing. This was also a form of communication. The problem was the water clocks were not all that accurate. One clock might not agree with another. As clocks improved things got much better. In early 1838 Samuel Morse demonstrated his telegraph and it revolutionized long range communication. Now a message could be sent and instantly received as long as wires were run. It wasn’t much after this in 1843 when Alexander Bain invented the fax machine which we still have a use for today. This meant pictures and print could be sent over the wire and received instantly. In 1876 Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone, allowing a person to actually speak to someone else in real time as long as a telephone cable was connected to them. He beat Elisha Gray to the patent office by a couple of hours. Eventually it became possible to talk to anyone in the world who had a phone. After that, radio was invented and at first Marconi got the credit but years later a court reversed this decision and gave the credit to Tesla. Eventually the internet came into being, it had been adapted from a military network named ARPANET and over decades it became easier to communicate with anyone in the world over it. Internet phones became available and cell phones came into use and the dream of seeing the person you were talking to came to reality. This dream had been seen in many a science fiction movie before it became possible. Over the years there have been many odd types of communication used. In the early days one way was using mirror flashes which developed into the light signals used by navy ships. Semaphore is usually a system of flags used to do visual communication. We are exploring new ways to communicate every year and right now there is development being made on laser communication and Quantum communication and maybe other ways I am not aware of. The idea of using laser communication is to be able to send a bigger packet of data that one could with an ordinary radio message. Another hot topic being researched is quantum communication. This holds the communication of the future because it could eliminate the problem with other forms of communication which can not run faster than light. Some day it may be possible to talk with people on other planets the way we now talk with them in other countries. Quantum communication has the ability if perfected to make all this possible.
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