Communication Innovations: Telegraph, Telephone, and Radio

The development of new communication technologies was one of the most important features of the Second Industrial Revolution. The telegraph, developed in the 1830s and 1840s, was the first major electrical communication technology, and it was followed in the late nineteenth century by the telephone, the wireless telegraph, and the radio.

The Telegraph

The telegraph was the first major electrical communication technology. It used electrical signals to transmit messages over wires, with the messages encoded in a system of dots and dashes known as Morse code. The article on the telegraph describes the development of the telegraph in more detail. The article on Samuel Morse and the telegraph covers the inventor of the Morse telegraph. The article on Morse code covers the encoding system.

The telegraph was the first technology to use electricity for practical purposes, and it paved the way for the later development of the telephone, the radio, and the modern electronic communications industry.

The Telephone

The telephone, developed by Alexander Graham Bell and others in the 1870s, was the first major technology to allow the transmission of the human voice over long distances. The article on Alexander Graham Bell and the telephone describes the development of the telephone in more detail.

The telephone spread rapidly in the 1880s and 1890s, and by 1900 there were more than 600,000 telephones in the United States. The development of the automatic telephone exchange, the rotary dial, and the long-distance telephone system made the telephone available to ordinary people.

The Wireless Telegraph

The wireless telegraph, developed by Guglielmo Marconi and others in the 1890s, was the first major communication technology that did not require wires. The wireless telegraph used radio waves to transmit messages, and it allowed communication between ships at sea, between remote outposts, and across oceans without the need for submarine cables.

The Radio

The radio, developed in the early twentieth century, was a development of the wireless telegraph that allowed the transmission of voice and music, not merely coded messages. The first commercial radio stations were established in the early 1920s, and radio broadcasting rapidly became a major form of mass communication. The radio transformed daily life, providing news, music, drama, and entertainment to millions of people around the world.

The Effects of the New Communication Technologies

The new communication technologies had a transformative effect on the modern world. The telegraph, the telephone, the wireless telegraph, and the radio all contributed to the development of a global communication network, and they made possible a wide range of new businesses and industries.

The telegraph was particularly important for the development of the modern financial system. The stock ticker, a telegraph device that transmitted stock prices from the exchanges to brokerage offices, made possible the modern stock market, and the transatlantic telegraph cables allowed the rapid transmission of financial information between New York and London.

The telephone had important effects on business and on social life. The telephone made possible the modern office, and it allowed businesses to communicate with customers, suppliers, and employees in real time. The radio transformed the cultural and political life of the twentieth century.

Marconi, the Wireless Telegraph, and the Politics of the Airwaves

The development of the wireless telegraph by Guglielmo Marconi and others in the 1890s is the first step in the history of broadcasting. Marconi’s key innovation was the use of the Hertzian antenna (developed by Heinrich Hertz in 1888) to transmit and receive signals, and his 1895 patent on the device was the basis of the Marconi Company, founded in London in 1897. The first transatlantic radio transmission, from Poldhu, Cornwall, to Signal Hill, Newfoundland, on December 12, 1901, was the technical equivalent of the 1866 transatlantic cable. The Titanic disaster of 1912, in which 710 survivors were rescued after the ship’s radio operators sent out distress signals, demonstrated the practical value of the technology and led to the Radio Act of 1912 in the United States, which required all ships carrying more than 50 passengers to be equipped with radio. The British Marconi Company and the American Radio Corporation of America (founded 1919) were the two largest wireless companies in the world, and their patent and licensing disputes shaped the early development of the industry.

The Telephone and the Long-Distance Line

The development of the long-distance telephone was the work of several engineers and inventors, of whom the most important were Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, and Michael Pupin. The first transcontinental telephone call, between New York and San Francisco, was made on January 25, 1915, and it depended on the loading coil developed by Pupin at Columbia University and patented in 1900, and on the vacuum tube amplifier developed by Lee de Forest in 1906. The American telephone system, dominated by AT&T and the Bell System, was the largest in the world. AT&T’s 1913 agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice, the Kingsbury Commitment, was the basis for the American system of regulated monopoly that lasted until the breakup of AT&T in 1984. The European telephone systems, by contrast, were generally state-owned, and the British General Post Office administered the British system until the privatization of BT in 1984.

The Broadcasting Era: KDKA and the BBC

The first commercial radio broadcast is generally dated to November 2, 1920, when KDKA in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, transmitted the returns of the Harding-Cox presidential election. By 1922 there were 30 licensed broadcasting stations in the United States, and by 1930 there were 600. The Radio Act of 1927 and the Federal Radio Commission established the American system of regulated commercial broadcasting, and the Federal Communications Commission of 1934 replaced the FRC. The British Broadcasting Corporation, founded as a private company in 1922 and chartered as a public corporation in 1927 by Royal Charter, established the British system of public service broadcasting, with a license fee funded by listeners and a charter obligation to inform, educate, and entertain. The BBC’s Reithian model, named for the founding Director-General John Reith, was widely imitated in Europe, Canada, Australia, and Japan.

The Telegraph, the News, and the Modern Information Economy

The combination of the telegraph, the submarine cable, the telephone, and the radio produced the first global information economy. The Associated Press, Reuters, and Agence France-Presse — the three major news agencies of the period — were joined in the 1920s and 1930s by the wire services of the BBC and by the German Wolff Telegraphisches Bureau, and these agencies supplied the news for the newspapers of the world. The 1920s saw the development of the radio network in the United States: NBC was formed in 1926 by the merger of WEAF and WJZ, and CBS in 1927 by the resignation of the Paley group from the United Independent Broadcasters. The combination of the radio, the telephone, and the telegraph produced the first modern system of mass communication, with the political and economic consequences that have been central to twentieth-century history.

Historiography: The Communications Revolution

The interpretation of the communications revolution has been a topic of scholarly debate. The “revolution” framing, associated with Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan in the 1950s and 1960s, treated the new communications technologies as a fundamental break with the older print and oral cultures. The institutionalist approach, associated with Alfred Chandler in The Visible Hand (1977) and Richard John in Network Nation (2010), has emphasized the business strategies and political coalitions that shaped the new industries. The most recent literature, including Tim Wu’s The Master Switch (2010) and Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It (2008), has emphasized the recurring cycle of openness and control in the communications industry — the “master switch” that the incumbent firms tend to use to close down the open networks they once built. The debate matters because the same questions of monopoly, regulation, and public interest that arose in the 1880s, 1920s, and 1930s are still being asked in the 2020s, in the context of the internet and the platform firms.

The Telegraph, the Telephone, and the Public Utilities

The communications industries of the late 19th and early 20th centuries established the model of the public utility that has shaped the modern world. The 1870 acquisition of the British telegraph system by the General Post Office, the 1889 Massachusetts Board of Gas and Electric Light Commissioners, and the 1913 Kingsbury Commitment that regulated AT&T were the prototypes of the modern public-utility regulatory system. The Federal Radio Commission of 1927, the Federal Communications Commission of 1934, and the Office of Communications (Ofcom, 2003) in the United Kingdom extended the model to broadcasting and telecommunications. The communications industries raised the central question of how to regulate industries that exhibit the “natural monopoly” characteristics of large fixed costs, increasing returns to scale, and universal service obligations. The history of the regulatory response, which is the subject of Alfred E. Kahn’s The Economics of Regulation (1970) and of Stephen Breyer’s Regulation and Its Reform (1982), remains central to the contemporary debate about the regulation of the internet, the platform firms, and the social media.

The Continuing Relevance of the Communications Revolutions

The development of the telegraph, the telephone, and the radio in the 19th and early 20th centuries established the technical, institutional, and regulatory foundations of the modern communications industry. The 21st-century debate about the regulation of the internet, the platform firms, and the social networks is a direct descendant of the older debates about the regulation of the telegraph, the telephone, and the radio. The contemporary question about whether the internet should be regulated as a common carrier — a public utility like the old telephone system — or as a publisher — an unregulated media platform like the old radio — is the 21st-century form of the question that was first posed about the telegraph in the 1860s. The question of whether the platform firms — Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple, Microsoft — should be broken up under the antitrust laws is the modern form of the question that was first posed about Standard Oil and the railroads in the 1890s. The history of the communications revolutions is, in this sense, the prehistory of the modern debates about the digital economy, and the 19th- and 20th-century examples are the precedents that the modern courts and regulators still draw on. The current state of the debate is the subject of Tim Wu’s The Curse of Bigness (2018) and of Jonathan Tepperman’s The Fix (2016), which draw the connection between the 19th-century precedents and the 21st-century policy questions.

Key Dates in Communications

A short chronology of the principal dates in the history of communications:

1837 — Cooke and Wheatstone telegraph patented
1840 — Morse telegraph patented
1844 — First telegraph message from Washington to Baltimore
1846 — Associated Press founded
1858 — First transatlantic cable laid (fails after 3 weeks)
1866 — First successful transatlantic cable
1876 — Bell’s telephone patent
1882 — First commercial central power station (Pearl Street)
1895 — Marconi’s first radio transmission
1901 — First transatlantic radio signal
1906 — Lee de Forest’s triode vacuum tube
1920 — KDKA begins commercial radio broadcasting
1927 — Federal Radio Commission
1934 — Federal Communications Commission
1947 — Transistor invented at Bell Labs
1962 — Telstar, the first communications satellite
1991 — World Wide Web invented at CERN