From the printing press to the internet

17 steps · 3200 BCE – 2007

Five thousand years of making ideas travel further and faster: from marks in clay to the phone in your pocket, by way of paper, movable type, wires and waves.

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1
c. 3200 BCE · Uruk (Warka), Sumer, Iraq · Invention or technique
Cuneiform writing
In Uruk, Sumerian accountants move from drawing tokens to pressing signs into clay tablets. For the first time, information outlives whoever spoke it.
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2
c. 1850 BCE · Wadi el-Hol (Egypt) and Serabit el-Khadim (Sinai), Egypt · Invention or technique
Proto-Sinaitic alphabet
Semitic workers in Egypt take a handful of hieroglyphs and use them for their sounds. Two dozen signs can write anything: the alphabet is born.
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3
105 CE · Luoyang, Henan, China · Invention or technique
Paper (Cai Lun's process)
At the Han court, Cai Lun perfects paper made from bark, rags and old nets: cheap, light and easy to make. It will take a thousand years to reach Europe.
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4
c. 1044 · Hangzhou / Kaifeng, Song China · Invention or technique
Ceramic movable type
Bi Sheng makes one character per piece of fired clay and combines them to set pages. Movable type is a Chinese idea, four centuries before Gutenberg.
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5
c. 1450 · Mainz, Germany · Invention or technique
Movable-type printing press
In Mainz, Gutenberg brings together mass-cast metal type, oil-based ink and a screw press. Within fifty years Europe turns out millions of books.
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6
1605 · Strasbourg, then part of the Holy Roman Empire (now France) · Invention or technique
Printed newspaper
In Strasbourg, Johann Carolus prints each week the news he used to copy by hand for his clients. Information becomes regular and public.
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7
1837 · London (Euston-Camden), England, United Kingdom · Invention or technique
Electric telegraph
Cooke and Wheatstone in London, and Morse in America, send messages down a wire. For the first time information travels faster than a horse or a ship.
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8
1876 · Boston, Massachusetts, United States · Invention or technique
Telephone
Bell patents a device that turns the voice into current and back into voice. No telegraphist needed: anyone can talk at a distance.
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9
1895–1901 · Villa Griffone, Pontecchio, Bologna, Italy · Invention or technique
Wireless telegraphy (radio)
Marconi does away with the wire: Hertz's waves cross the Atlantic in 1901. Ships, armies and later every home receive messages through the air.
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10
1927–1936 · San Francisco, California, United States · Invention or technique
Electronic television
Farnsworth transmits an image scanned by an electron beam. Moving pictures reach the living room and change politics, advertising and leisure.
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11
1945 · Moore School, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, United States · Invention or technique
ENIAC
ENIAC computes artillery trajectories with 18,000 valves. The electronic computer makes information something to be processed, not just sent.
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12
1964-1965 · RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, United States, and NPL, Teddington, United Kingdom · Invention or technique
Packet switching
Baran in the US and Davies in the UK propose chopping messages into packets that travel by different routes. Such a network survives even if nodes fail.
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13
1969 · UCLA, Los Angeles, California, United States (first node); BBN, Cambridge, Massachusetts · Invention or technique
ARPANET
Two computers, at UCLA and Stanford, exchange the first message: «LO» (the system crashed before finishing «LOGIN»). It is the embryo of the internet.
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14
1974 · Stanford, California, and DARPA, Arlington, United States · Invention or technique
TCP/IP protocol suite
Cerf and Kahn design a common language so that any network can talk to any other. The internet is, literally, the network of networks.
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15
1989-1991 · CERN, Geneva, Switzerland · Invention or technique
World Wide Web
At CERN, Berners-Lee joins hypertext and the internet: linked pages that anyone can publish and read with a browser. The network leaves the laboratories.
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16
1998 · Stanford University and a garage in Menlo Park, California, United States · Invention or technique
PageRank and Google
Page and Brin rank the web by the links each page receives. Finding becomes as important as publishing.
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17
2007 · Apple, Cupertino, California, United States · Invention or technique
Modern smartphone (iPhone)
The iPhone puts the internet, camera, map and phone onto a touchscreen. From the Uruk tablet to the glass one: information fits in the hand of billions of people.
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