ICS Courier history

At 12:30 am on April 4th, 1841 President William Henry Harrison died of pneumonia just a month after taking office.

The first long-distance telegraph message ever sent was a melodramatic “WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT!”. It was sent in 1844 from the Supreme Court Chamber in Washington DC to a train station in Baltimore by Samuel Morse himself.

1867: Signal lamps: In 1867, the first dots and dashes were flashed by signal lamps at sea.

The first popular code was published by Émile Baudot in 1870.

However in 1876, one man, Alexander Graham Bell, did succeed legally by securing a patent for his version of the telephone, and so he is remembered best in association with this invention.

1877: Acoustic phonograph: Inventor Thomas Alva Edison made incredible strides in sound recording and transmission when he completed the first acoustic phonograph in August of 1877.

1893: Wireless telegraphy: Nikolai Tesla was the first to successfully transmit radio waves wirelessly through a transmitter in 1893.

Then came the radio (1896), which marked the beginning of broadcast media and allowed keynote speakers to reach mass audiences.

In 1897, he got a patent for his invention and explored ways to use radios for communication.

1915: First North American transcontinental telephone calling: Alexander Graham Bell is back in the history books again after he made the first coast-to-coast call by phone in January of 1915 to his assistant.

The first long radio broadcast only came in 1916, from Tufts University.

The first TV images were halftones, and then black and white, before color was finally introduced in 1953. It was a Scottish man named John Logie Baird who was successful in showing moving images on a screen in 1925.

In 1927 came the first television.

1930: First experimental videophones: In 1930, AT&T had decided to create a two-way experimental videophone they called the Iconophone.

1934: First commercial radio-telephone service, United States-Japan: The first radio telephone calls from the United States to Japan were first made in 1934.

1936: World's first public videophone network: The world, now in the throes of World War II, sees the first public videophone network installed in Nazi Germany in March of 1936 during a trade fair.

1946: Limited-capacity mobile telephone service for automobiles: In June of 1946, the first telephone call was made from an automobile phone.

The first TV images were halftones, and then black and white, before color was finally introduced in 1953.

In 1956, phone conferencing was invented, allowing boardrooms everywhere to connect to branches and clients across the world.

1962: Commercial telecommunications satellite: The Communications Satellite Act was officially passed in 1962, allowing telecommunications to finally go into space.

1964: Fiber-optic telecommunications: In 1964, Charles Kao and George Hockham published a paper that proved that fiber-optic communication could be possible as long as the fibers used to transmit the information were free of impurities.

In 1965, online written communication expanded into email, completely changing the game.

1969: Computer networking: In October of 1969, the first data traveled between nodes of the ARPANET, a predecessor of the Internet.

In 1971, the first email was sent by Ray Tomlinson, an American programmer.

In 1973, he developed a type of mobile phone.

The network was originally launched only in Tokyo in 1979 and then was expanded.

1981: First mobile phone network: The first commercially automated cellular network was launched in Japan in 1981.

In 1985 the FCC had released the now famous 900 MHz, 2.4 GHz and 5.8 GHz frequency bands for use without a government licence. (The actual reason they were released was because those frequencies were used for industrial and scientific purposes like microwave ovens.

1998: Mobile satellite hand-held phones: The first canopy of 64 satellites was put into place by a company called Iridium in 1998.

At the beginning of the century, smartphones came on the scene (2001). These devices gave almost instant access to the internet, email and more.