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1456
The Printing Press
Invented by Johannes Gutenberg between 1453-1456 in Germany, the printing press produced the first modern books. The spread of the printing press and books changed education and the spread of knowledge (Campbell, Martin, & Fabos, 2018). -
First Newspaper
The first newspaper was published weekly in Germany by Johann Carolus. It satisfied the 4 tenets to qualify as a newspaper being published regularly, accessible to the public, with current information that covered a variety of topics (PsPrint, n.d.) -
First Photograph
Joseph Nicéphore Niépce took the first photograph made in a camera from the window of his estate in the Burgundy region of France (Archambault, 2015). Photography would change media in general. Later, in 1862, Matthew Brady exhibited photographs from the battlefield that brought home the realities of war (Taylor, 2020). -
Telegraph
Samuel Morse invented Morse Code in 1835, and had the first telegraph in place between Washington, D.C. and Baltimore Maryland in 1844. By 1861, telegraph lines ran coast-to-coast in the U.S., and five years later, a transatlantic cable was in place between Newfoundland and Ireland, running across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean (Campbell, Martin, & Fabos, 2018). -
Radio
Guglielmo Marconi sent the world's first international wireless communication from Cornwell, England to St. John's Newfoundland, a letter "S" in Morse code. This would open the door for mass media broadcasts, or "one-to-many communication" (Campbell, Martin, & Fabos, 2018). -
Commercial Radio
KDKA, regarded as the first profit-based radio station goes on the air in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to report the results of the election (Campbell, Martin, & Fabos, 2018). -
Television
Charles Francis Jenkins, one of the inventors of the mechanical television, created the first mechanical television station, W3XK, that aired it's first broadcast on this date. This would be the infancy of mass media video broadcast, and lead to several iconic moments in U.S. history like the moon landing and 9/11 (BeBusinessed, n.d.) -
The Internet
The U.S. Defense Department Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) developed, created, and used an interconnected system of computers that enabled military and academic researchers to communicate over the computer network. It was originally called ARPANet, and nicknamed the Net (Campbell, Martin, & Fabos, 2018). Ironically, the first message "LOGIN", sent from UCLA to Stanford crashed the system, as the Stanford computer only received the first two letters (Andrews, 2019). -
World Wide Web
In the late 1980s, Tim Berners-Lee created hypertext markup language (HTML), allowing computer-based information to link to other information on the Internet, no matter the location. This universal language was released to the public in April 1993, leading to today's modern World Wide Web, and ushering in a massive new way to share and retrieve information, news, pictures, audio, and video. It also provided a platform for modern social media (Campbell, Martin, & Fabos, 2018). -
Podcast
Regarded as being developed in 2004, podcasting refers to making audio files available on the Internet, enabling listeners to download them at will, and listen at their convenience. This would later become a streaming service as internet speeds allowed, pushing the files to devices at will, rather than taking up space on a hard drive. Podcasts quickly became mainstream, as they became profitable, and continue to be popular today (Campbell, Martin, & Fabos, 2018). -
Facebook
From his Harvard dorm room, Mark Zuckerberg and friends launched a website for students at the University. It spread across college campuses, and changed the way people interacted on a global scale. Many people use the site to get their news, buy and sell goods, share pictures and videos, and a host of other activities. Facebook paved the way for other social media sites like Twitter and Instagram, and helped turn user information into a commodity ((Campbell, Martin, & Fabos, 2018).
