From wires to global networks
Wires, waves, and protocols: how signals at a distance became planetary infrastructure.
Suggested order
The telegraph and the telephone build physical networks of wires and exchanges. Radio opens wireless transmission. The first computer networks bring the idea of dividing data into packets. The Web builds a service of linked documents on top of the network, and mobile phones join the cellular network with data.
The Telegraph and the Beginning of Electrical Communication
Developed by many inventors in the 1830s and 1840s, the electric telegraph made information travel faster than trains and ships and reshaped railways, the press, and markets.
6 min read · Communication
The Evolution of the Telephone
The telephone grew out of collective and contested research on sending the voice over wires, and evolved from manual switchboards to global digital networks.
6 min read · Communication
Radio and Wireless Transmission
How the theory of electromagnetic waves became ship-to-shore wireless telegraphy and then broadcasting, with patent disputes, the vacuum tube, FM, and spectrum regulation.
7 min read · Communication
The Formation of the First Computer Networks
From packet switching to ARPANET, Ethernet and TCP/IP, how isolated computers began exchanging data between the 1960s and the 1980s.
6 min read · Digital networks
The Creation and Expansion of the Web
The Web began as a proposal to organize documents at CERN in 1989 and grew into a public system of linked pages, distinct from the Internet that carries it.
7 min read · Digital networks
The Evolution of Mobile Phones
The mobile phone grew from three ideas: divide territory into cells, reuse frequencies, and shrink the handset, a path that ran from car radios to smartphones.
6 min read · Communication