The other day I was talking with a friend when all of a sudden the conversation took a tangent down an odd road.  The topic shifted from what it was to “wow, look at how far we have come over the last 250 years” in terms of ease of communication.

Join me on this journey of thought, this initinere if you will.  250 years ago the primary means of long distance communication was by handwritten letter.  The letter left your hands, was entrusted in a messenger service, and was delivered.  The seal you placed on the back was much like a return address of our current system in that it allowed the recipient to know who it was from before actually opening it.  The seal also provided a way to verify that the contents had not been read or altered.  Other than face-to-face communication, the letter was the best form available.

During the early 1800s a new form of long distance communication was introduced – the telegraph.  This allowed connected towns to communicate much faster with one another.  Instead of the letter taking between several days or weeks or even months to reach its destination, this new invention, coupled with transatlantic cabling, allowed the message to be delivered in the matter of hours through use of Morse code.  Soon, through the help of the railroad companies, telegraph lines connected most cities and towns.

The next milestone came in 1876 when Alexander Graham Bell launched the telephone.  Now, instead of reading a message, you could actually hear the other parties voice.  What a marvel this must have been!  Imagine for the first time listening to a relative or friend’s voice who is in California when you are currently in Maine.

Around the same time that the telephone was being implemented as a standard utility in the United States, the next big step was making its presence known – television.  Although out of the cost range for the average user to broadcast themselves, for the select few actors, actresses, and hosts you could not only hear them but see them as well – in real time to boot (more or less).

What else could there be with all of these communication forms?  Ohh… so much more!  Lets fast-forward through the fax machine and the picture phone.

Welcome to the digital age!  With the increased popularity of computers and the decrease in price of internet connections, the world because digitally connected.  The forerunners were email and instant messaging.  Remember those?  With them you had the ability to send letters, documents, and short messages between specific people instantaneously and have conversations with people you have never met.  Then came voice-over-ip, which is a fancy way of saying that you talk into a computer, it converts it to digital data packets, and the receiver’s computer converts those packets back into a signal that is sent to your speakers.  basically, this was the evolution of the telephone.  Finally, with the increasing popularity of webcams being built into most laptops and computer monitors – you can broadcast yourself to the world with full video and audio support, making everyone a TV star!

There was one piece of technology I bet you thought i forgot about – the cellular phone.  I saved it for last at the risk of throwing off the chronological order of history because it is where the next big leap is going to be.  Introduced in the 1980s, cell phones work like landline phones except that they give you the ability to roam freely around town.  With their own unique number, you can be fairly certain that the person you dialed is the one who will answer.  Like all forms of communication, the early versions were very basic. Fast-forward to 2000 – cell phones are starting to take over the market.  They have become smaller, more feature rich, and have a greater networked coverage range.  Many even have small cameras built in.  As with computers, simple instant messages, or text (txt) messages, are becoming popular and allow the phone company to charge for a service that the phone has to do anyways.  Fast-forward again to 2009.  Many cell phones, from the expensive to the cheep, now offer the ability to connect these mini computers to the internet at nearly broadband speeds.  Most are being shipped with better and better cameras and support sending a picture to someone via text message.  They have become an indispensible utility to the <40 crowd.  They connect us to most parts of the world and allow communication, in real time, with people who are 1000’s of miles away, even on different continents.

So what will be the next step in the ever increasing array of communication mediums?  I think it is going to be having a video conversation with someone on a cell phone.  The technology is there but the networks cannot handle the necessary bandwidth required.  Once they can, I think having a video conversation with someone is going to seem as second natured as having a telephone conversation is now.  Then you will be able to see the facial expressions as well as hear the other party.  What is after that?  I do not know.  There have been some major developments with 3D imagining reproduction on computer monitors as well as particle displays.  Maybe someday there will be some optical nerve sensor that can detect and transmit exactly what we see to someone else allowing them to, quite literally, see the world through your eyes.  All of this is speculation, you never know what the future holds.

So, in closing, think about this, in the last 250 years communication technology has gone from handwritten letters to computers and cell phones.  In the 1000’s of years before then there was not such a growth of knowledge or communication.  The rate of increase truly is going at an exponential rate.  So what will the future hold?

Until next time, Ciao! Ciao!