Malte Lenz

Back in the days, some 200 thousand years ago, some guys probably figured they were pretty ineffective at working together. So they invented this thing called speech. Instead of going "Ugh, Ugh" and pointing to a mammoth, they could just go "Hey, check this mammoth out, let's go huntin'!".

After this early development, it took quite a while before something happened with our communication. We learned painting around 30 thousand years ago ("Daddy, Check out this painting of you hunting that mammoth!"). Around five thousand years ago, people started using signal drums, so now they could say "Hey, Check out the mammoth coming your way!" to the people in the next valley.

Six hundred years later, people started sending stuff by mail and couriers. Now you could actually send a paper that read "Hey, Check this out, I killed an elk this big!", and draw an elk beneath, to your friend living somewhere else, without having to actually go there. Mammoths went extinct a hundred years earlier.

A little later (1794) the Swedish inventor Abraham Edelcrantz built an optical telegraph between a church in Stockholm and Drottningholm where the Swedish king lived. He then used it to send a Happy Birthday poem to the king. It worked by putting multiple iron shutters in different positions to symbolize a letter or word. If the poem featured an elk is unknown.

These optical telegraphs had some limitations, for example darkness or fog, so Samuel Morse, among others, invented the telegraph in 1837. It worked by sending electrical impulses in special combinations of long and short signals along a wire. Soon thereafter, in 1876, Alexander Bell invented the telephone, so actual sound could be electronically transmitted over telephone wires. Now we arrived at being able to, in real time, say "Hey, Mr. Watson, Check out this cool telephone!".

The next big innovation in telecommunication history is the Internet. What started in a project that connected a few university computers in 1969 soon grew to what it is today, a global network for everyone. To make this wonderful communication tool even easier to use, Opera Software has recently released Opera Unite. With it, you can now with just a few clicks share your photos, music or other files, right in your browser. If you want to, you can even share a picture of a mammoth.

So, I say, "Check this out!".


Image by photobunny on flickr.