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The history of computers goes back over 200 years. At first theorized by mathematicians and entrepreneurs, during the 19th century mechanical calculating machines were designed and built to solve the increasingly complex number-crunching challenges. -
Contents. Developed in the 1830s and 1840s by Samuel Morse and other inventors, the telegraph revolutionized long-distance communication. It worked by transmitting electrical signals over a wire laid between stations -
Antonio Meucci, 1854, constructed telephone-like devices. Alexander Graham Bell was awarded the first U.S. patent for the invention of the telephone in 1876 -
Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi (pictured at right) first developed the idea of a radio, or wireless telegraph, in the 1890s. His ideas took shape in 1895 when he sent a wireless Morse Code message to a source more than a kilometer away. -
Electronic television was first successfully demonstrated in San Francisco on Sept. 7, 1927. The system was designed by Philo Taylor Farnsworth, a 21-year-old inventor who had lived in a house without electricity until he was 14. -
The concept of a tablet computer was first developed by Alan Kay in 1971. While being more like a laptop than a tablet, Kay's Dynabook was a precursor to the tablet computer. The touch screen technology, which would later be used by tablet computers, was patented by four engineers at Hitachi in Japan in 1979. -
Martin Cooper, the engineer from Motorola, developed the first hand-held phone that could connect over Bell's AMPS. Motorola launched the DynaTAC in 1984.