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From Gutenberg to the Internet Timeline An Annotated Chronology of the History of Information from about 30,000 B.C.E. to the present, by Jeremy M. Norman. |
| 1920194019501960 |
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1900 |
David Hilbert publishes in Mathematische Probleme a list of twenty- three problems that he predicts will be of central importance to the advance of mathematics in the twentieth century. In the second of these problems he calls for a mathematical proof of the consistency of the arithmetic axioms--a question that will influence both the development of mathematical logic and computing. |
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In this year 652,000 tons of paper are produced in the United Kingdom, roughly a sixfold increase since 1860. By this time 99% of the paper is produced by machine. |
December 23 |
Canadian-American physicist Reginald A. Fessenden is the first to transmit human speech over radio waves using a spark-gap transmitter. He says, “One, two, three, four, is it snowing where you are Mr. Thiessen? If it is, would you telegraph back to me?” Mr. Thiessen, one mile way, hears the transmission. Fessenden’s voice is the first ever to be transmitted by radio waves and heard by another person. |
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Herman Hollerith introduces the automatic card feed into his tabulating machine to improve the data processing of the 1900 census. |
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The telegraph now connects most of the civilized world. |
| 1901 | Halsey William Wilson publishes the first issue of the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature. |
December 12 |
Guglielmo Marconi believes that he hears the letter “S” transmitted by Morse Code from Poldhu to Signal Hill, St. Johns Newfoundland. For many years this feat is considered the first transatlantic radio transmission but later researchers will conclude that the reception may not have been possible, and that Marconi may have heard static caused by lightning instead of transmitted information. |
1902 |
Arthur Korn invents an effective system of telephotography. |
1904 |
Ira Rubel develops the first commercial lithographic offset system for printing on paper. |
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John Ambrose Fleming invents the two-element vacuum tube, or diode, an essential step in the development of radio, and later for electronic computing. |
| 1905 | The final "Report of the Committee of the Society of Arts on Leather for Bookbinding" published in London confirms the view that bookbinding leathers being used are inferior to those used 50 years earlier. It attributes degradation to changes in methods of manufacture and tanning, and also to the "injurious effect of light and gas fumes" which are common in many libraries. |
1906 |
Lee de Forest introduces a third electrode called the grid into the vacuum tube. The resulting triode can be used both as an amplifier and a switch. |
1907 July 17 |
Newspaper publisher E. W. Scripps combines three regional news services into the United Press Associations, the forerunner of UPI. |
| 1908 | Percy Ludgate designs a new version of Babbage’s mechanical analytical engine, of which he publishes a brief description in 1909, and creates engineering drawings. The machine is never constructed, and the drawings are lost. (See Reading 6.3.) |
June 18 |
In a letter written to the journal Nature, A.A. Campbell-Swinton describes his concept of electronic television using the cathode ray tube which had been invented in 1897 by the German physicist and Nobel Prize winner Karl Ferninand Braun. " He proposed using an electron beam in both the camera and the receiver, which could be steered electronically to produce moving pictures. He lectured on the subject in 1911 and displayed circuit diagrams, but no one, including Swinton, knew how to realize the design. Although his system was never built, the cathode ray tube did come to be used to display images in almost all television sets and computer monitors until the invention of the LCD panel." |
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| 1920194019501960 |
(This page was last revised on
February 3, 2008
. Please report errors
and broken links to jnorman@jnorman.com.) |
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