Timeline of Media History

For our timeline of media history my group chose to include cinema, the radio, the telegraph and the printing press. The following is some of the information that we found.

Cinema: "The Frenchman Louis Lumiere is often credited as inventing the first motion picture camera in 1895. But in truth, several others had made similar inventions around the same time as Lumiere. What Lumiere invented was a portable motion-picture camera, film processing unit and projector called the Cinematographe, three functions covered in one invention.
The Cinematographe made motion pictures very popular, and it could be better be said that Lumiere's invention began the motion picture era. In 1895, Lumiere and his brother were the first to present projected, moving, photographic, pictures to a paying audience of more that one person" (About.Com*)

Radio:

• it is closely related to the telegraph and telephone
• began as "wireless telegraphy"
• started with the discovery of "radio waves"
• Many devices work by using electromagnetic waves including: radio, microwaves, cordless phones, remote control toys, television broadcasts
• Radio-telegraphy is the sending by radio-waves the same dot-dash message used in a telegraph
• Was developed at the time mainly for ship-shore communication
• Wireless signals proved effective in communication for rescue work when a sea disaster occurred
• 1899, the U.S. army established wireless system
• 1901, radio telegraph service was instituted between 5 Hawaiian Islands
• By 1903, a Marconi station located in Wellfleet Massachusetts carried an exchange or greeting between President Theodore Roosevelt and King Edward VΙΙ
• 1905, the naval battle of Port Arthur in the Russo- Japanese was reported by wireless
• 1906, the US weather Bureau experimented with radio telegraphy to speed notice of weather conditions
• 1909, Robert E. Peary, artic explorer, radio telegraphed “I found the pole”
• 1910, Marconi opened regular American – European radio telegraph

Telegraph: "Together with his partner Alfred Vail, Morse developed in 1838 the simple operator key, which when depressed completed an electric circuit and sent a signal to a distant receiver which was an electromagnet that moved a marker that embossed a series of dots and dashes (the morse code) on a paper roll. About 1856 a sounding key was developed that enabled operators to hear the message clicks and write or type it directly down in plain language. Telegraph systems quickly spread across Europe and the United States. With the growing telegraph traffic many improvements followed. Like the duplex circuit, in Germany, that made it possible for messages to travel simultaneously in opposite directions on the same line. Thomas Edison devised a quadruplex in 1874 that enabled four messages to travel at once. The most revolutionary invention was that of Jean-Maurice-Emile Baudot, his time division multiplex invented in 1872" (Rubin, Julian).

Printing Press: "The impact of printing in Europe was comparable to the development of writing and the invention of the alphabet or the internet as far as its effects on the society. Just as writing did not replace speaking, printing did not achieve a position of total dominance. The different graphic modes of communication continued to influence each other. Because of the printing press, authorship became more meaningful and profitable. It was suddenly important who had said or written what, and what the precise formulation and time of composition was. This allowed the exact citing of references, producing the rule, "One Author, one work (title), one piece of information" (Giesecke, 1989; 325). Before, the author was less important, since a copy of Artisole made in Paris would not be exactly identical to one made in Bologna. For many works prior to the printing press, the name of the author was entirely lost"(Wikipedia).

For the collabortive process each of us chose one of the inventions and researched it and the fourth one we all researched. Then we got together and shared our research with each other and chose which stuff to keep and which stuff to get rid of. Then we put our findings in a timeline on a poster.
From this assignment I learnt about the inventions and the impact that the cinema, radio, telegraph and printing press had on our society. They were all big inventions and without them the world would be completely different. Without the cinema and radio we couldn't watch TV and movies or listen to music. Without the Printing press we wouldn't have the Toronto Star. This world as it is now, would not be the same without these four inventions.
Marshal McLuhan said that media ecology "means arranging various media to help each other so they won't cancel each other out, to buttress one medium with another. You might say, for example, that radio is a bigger help to literacy than television, but television might be a very wonderful aid to teaching languages. And so you can do some things on some media that you cannot do on others. And, therefore, if you watch the whole field, you can prevent this waste that comes by one canceling the other out" (Wikipedia*).

Sources:
Wikipedia. Printing Press. November 13, 2007. November 16, 2007.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press>

About.Com. The Invention of radio. 2007. November 16, 2007.
<http://inventors.about.com/od/rstartinventions/a/radio.htm>

About.Com*. The History of the Motion Picture. 2007. November 16, 2007.
<http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blmotionpictures.htm>

Rubin, Julian. Samuel Morse: The Invention of the Telegraph. September 2007. November 16, 2007
<http://www.juliantrubin.com/bigten/morsetelegraph.html>

Wikipedia*. Media Ecology. November 16, 2007. November 16, 2007.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_ecology>