The Telecommunication Portal
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Telecommunication, often used in its plural form or abbreviated as telecom, is the transmission of information with an immediacy comparable to face-to-face communication. As such, slow communications technologies like postal mail and pneumatic tubes are excluded from the definition. Many transmission media have been used for telecommunications throughout history, from smoke signals, beacons, semaphore telegraphs, signal flags, and optical heliographs to wires and empty space made to carry electromagnetic signals. These paths of transmission may be divided into communication channels for multiplexing, allowing for a single medium to transmit several concurrent communication sessions. Several methods of long-distance communication before the modern era used sounds like coded drumbeats, the blowing of horns, and whistles. Long-distance technologies invented during the 20th and 21st centuries generally use electric power, and include the telegraph, telephone, television, and radio.
Early telecommunication networks used metal wires as the medium for transmitting signals. These networks were used for telegraphy and telephony for many decades. In the first decade of the 20th century, a revolution in wireless communication began with breakthroughs including those made in radio communications by Guglielmo Marconi, who won the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics. Other early pioneers in electrical and electronic telecommunications include co-inventors of the telegraph Charles Wheatstone and Samuel Morse, numerous inventors and developers of the telephone including Antonio Meucci and Alexander Graham Bell, inventors of radio Edwin Armstrong and Lee de Forest, as well as inventors of television like Vladimir K. Zworykin, John Logie Baird and Philo Farnsworth.
Since the 1960s, the proliferation of digital technologies has meant that voice communications have gradually been supplemented by data. The physical limitations of metallic media prompted the development of optical fibre. The Internet, a technology independent of any given medium, has provided global access to services for individual users and further reduced location and time limitations on communications. (Full article...)
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Radar, Airborne Interception, Mark IV (AI Mk. IV), produced by USA as SCR-540, was the world's first operational air-to-air radar system. Early Mk. III units appeared in July 1940 on converted Bristol Blenheim light bombers, while the definitive Mk. IV reached widespread availability on the Bristol Beaufighter heavy fighter by early 1941. On the Beaufighter, the Mk. IV arguably played a role in ending the Blitz, the Luftwaffe's night bombing campaign of late 1940 and early 1941.
Early development was prompted by a 1936 memo from Henry Tizard on the topic of night fighting. The memo was sent to Robert Watt, director of the radar research efforts, who agreed to allow physicist Edward George "Taffy" Bowen to form a team to study the problem of air interception. The team had a test bed system in flights later that year, but progress was delayed for four years by emergency relocations, three abandoned production designs, and Bowen's increasingly adversarial relationship with Watt's replacement, Albert Percival Rowe. Ultimately, Bowen was forced from the team just as the system was finally maturing. (Full article...)General images
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Antonio Santi Giuseppe Meucci (/meɪˈuːtʃi/ may-OO-chee, Italian: [anˈtɔːnjo meˈuttʃi]; 13 April 1808 – 18 October 1889) was an Italian inventor and an associate of Giuseppe Garibaldi, a major political figure in the history of Italy. Meucci is best known for developing a voice-communication apparatus that several sources credit as the first telephone.
Meucci set up a form of voice-communication link in his Staten Island, New York, home that connected the second-floor bedroom to his laboratory. He submitted a patent caveat for his telephonic device to the U.S. Patent Office in 1871, but there was no mention of electromagnetic transmission of vocal sound in his caveat. In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell was granted a patent for the electromagnetic transmission of vocal sound by undulatory electric current. Despite the longstanding general crediting of Bell with the accomplishment, the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities supported celebrations of Meucci's 200th birthday in 2008 using the title "Inventore del telefono" (Inventor of the telephone). The U.S. House of Representatives in a resolution in 2002 also acknowledged Meucci's work in the invention of the telephone, although the U.S. Senate did not join the resolution and the interpretation of the resolution is disputed. (Full article...)Did you know (auto-generated) -
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- ... that Arnold Blackner was said to be the first person to sing over 3,000 miles (4,800 km) on the telephone?
- ... that Pierre Kaufmann helped install the first radio telescope in Brazil, which was later destroyed by cows?
- ... that Black Sheep Radio dedicated its first day of programming to a fallen pirate?
- ... that although the Germans boasted that they captured British radio traffic with ease, the Wireless Set Number 10 was so secure that they never even knew of its existence?
- ... that Svalbard Minute by Minute, a 221-hour-long television broadcast, is credited with increasing tourism in Svalbard by 25 percent?
- ... that a would-be buyer of San Angelo, Texas, radio station KBIL-FM had no knowledge of the transaction?
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