Webupon

If an Internet is defined as almost instantaneous transmission of data over long distances, the first known example is the Greek telegraph, circa 500BC, consisting of trumpets, drums, shouting, beacon fires, smoke signals, and mirrors.

Over two thousand years later, in 1791, the first modern Internet was born, when the French developed an “Optical Telegraph Network”. Cross-arms and pulleys were used to send signals, and the system reached its peak in 1850, when 29 cities, served by 556 stations were “online”. It died in 1881, killed by the new electronic Internet, the telephone system.

Its death knoll had already sounded in 1831, when Joseph Henry demonstrated an electromagnetic telegraph with a one-mile run in Albany, New York. By 1844, Samuel Morse was wiring messages from Washington to Baltimore, and a steady series of developments boosted speed and output several years running. A failed transatlantic cable in 1858 led to a new link in 1866, which was operational for almost 100 years, but the telegraph was to be another victim of the phone system.

In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, and by 1880, there were 50,000 of them in the USA. It took until 1915 for the first transcontinental phone call to happen, fourteen years after Marconi had beamed a radio signal across the Atlantic. By 1930, the phone network had outgrown the telegraph network, and was itself under challenge from the new boy – radio, and the even newer infant, television, while a few scientists were beginning to envisage the computing machines which would eventually be used for the Internet as we know it today.