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discovered in the ancient Sumerian city of Kish, has inscriptions considered by some experts to be the oldest form of known writing.
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With the phonic system, symbols refer to spoken sounds. If this sounds familiar, it’s because the modern alphabets that many people in the world use today is a phonetic form of communication.
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the Phoenician symbols reached Greece, where it was altered and adapted to the Greek oral language. The biggest alterations were the addition of vowel sounds and having the letters read from left to right.
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Around that time, long-distance communication had its humble beginnings as the Greeks, for the first time in recorded history, had a messenger pigeon deliver results of the first Olympiad in the year 776 BC.
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Another important communication milestone to come from the Greeks was the establishment of the first library in 530 BC.
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In the year 14 AD, the Romans established the first postal service in the western world. While it’s considered to be the first well-documented mail delivery system, others in India, China had already long been in place.
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With a well-developed writing system and messenger services, the Chinese would be the first to invent paper and papermaking when in 105 AD an official named Cai Lung submitted a proposal to the emperor in which he, according to a biographical account, suggested using “the bark of trees, remnants of hemp, rags of cloth, and fishing nets” instead of the heavier bamboo or costlier silk material.
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Han Chinese inventor Bi Sheng was credited with developing the porcelain device, which was described in statesman Shen Kuo’s book “Dream Pool Essays.” He wrote:
“…he took sticky clay and cut in it characters as thin as the edge of a coin. Each character formed, as it were, a single type. He baked them in the fire to make them hard. He had previously prepared an iron plate and he had covered his plate with a mixture of pine resin, wax, and paper ashes. -
The Chinese followed that up sometime between 1041 and 1048 with the invention of the first moveable type for printing paper books.
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People wanted photographs, except they didn’t know it yet. That was until French inventor Joseph Nicephore Niepce captured the world’s first photographic image in 1822. The early process he pioneered, called heliography, used a combination of various substances and their reactions to sunlight to copy the image from an engraving.
