Evolution of Communications Systems

Course: History of Engineering Sciences

Lecturer: Dr. Mohamed A. El-Shimy
Department: Electrical Engineering Department,
Affiliation: Alexandria University, Egypt.

1. Introduction
 Communication is the process of exchanging words and signs with others that
enables us to pass information.
 The evolution of communication is an ongoing process. Beginning from
prehistoric era and with the advancements of technology, humans have
developed different methods to communicate.
 Examples of communication systems are:
o Telegraph and Telephone Systems
o Radio and Television Broadcasting
o Cellular Mobile Network
o Wireless Networks
o Satellite Communications Systems
o …. Etc.

2. Ancient Systems
2.1. Cave Paintings

 The oldest methods of communicating where

signs and symbols were used to recode events
and stories on the walls and ceiling of caves.
 One of the most significant cave painting is
Chauvet Cave in France which was made around
30,000 B,C.

2.2. Smoke and Drum Signals

 Prehistoric man relied on fire, smoke, and drum signals to

encode information over a limited geographic area.
 These signals have very simple meanings like "safe" or
"danger" or could be used as a form of alarm system.

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2.3. Postal System

 In the 6th century BCE, a Persian emperor named Cyrus the Great established
the first postal system in the history to communicate from one end of his vast
empire to the other.
 Later on, other ancient like Egypt, Rome, and China built their own postal
systems.

2.4. Pigeon Post

 It has been discovered that the pigeons have the ability to find their way back to
their nests regardless of the distance.
 Travelers brought pigeons along with them, attach messages
to them and release them to fly back home.
 The first pigeon messaging system was established by Persia
and Syria around the 5th century BCE.

2.5. Flag Semaphore

 A special code involving the positions of two hand-held flags.

 Each position and motion represented a letter or number.
 It was introduced at the 15th century and used to communicate between ships.

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3. Telegraph Systems
3.1. Optical Telegraph

 It is a system of pendulums that set up somewhere high like on a tower or the

top of a town clock. One of its names is the semaphore visual telegraph.
 It is considered as the first telecommunications system in Europe where it was
created by two French inventors (the Chappe brothers) in 1790.
 The system was then implemented all throughout France and it was widely
used in military at the time of French revolution and Napolean period.
 The optical telegraph system had been in use for about 60 years till the
invention of the electrical telegraph.

Operation

 The optical telegraph stations are equipped with mechanical rotating arms.
 The telegraph would swing its arms around to encode messages into symbols.
 Stations were built 10 to 15 km apart which relaying the symbols from one
tower to another till it reaches the receiving station.
 Messages are received by human eyes, aided by telescope, and the symbols are
then decoded by a code book to extract the sending message.

3.2. Electrical Telegraph

 In 1838, Samuel Morse and his friends Alfred Vail and Leonard Gale
connecting two model telegraphs together with an electric wire.
 They discovered that messages can be sent by holding or releasing the buttons
in a series of intervals. The letters are represented by combinations of long and
short pulse known as Morse code.
 Morse was not the first one to think of the idea of sending electric signals across
wires, but he was the first to get political support for making it work.
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 After that, Britain and United States had established telegraph stations
within their own countries.
 In 1858, the first transatlantic cable was installed to connect England and
the United States by telegraph.
 In the late 19th century, electric telegraphy signals using Morse code could be
successfully transmitted wirelessly by radio waves knowing
as radio telegraphy systems.
 At the turn of the 2oth century, all long-distance communications depended
heavily on the telegraph. By the time, radio and telephone had diminished the
impact of the telegraph.

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4. Landline Telephone Services
4.1.Basic Principles

 Telephone is a personal type of communication that offers a transmission of

sound, typically human voices, over a distance by converting acoustic vibrations
to electrical signals.
 The word telephone, from the Greek roots, is composed of ‘tele’ means ‘far’ and
‘phone’ means ‘sound’.

4.2. Telephone Device

 The main functional components of the telephone instrument are the power
source, the switch hook, the dialer, the ringer, the transmitter, the receiver, …
etc...

Acoustic Telephone

 Early history of telephone started when Robert Hooke created an acoustic

telephone in 1672 where he discovered that sound could be sent over wire into
an attached earpiece or mouthpiece.

Electric Telephone

 Beginning in the early 19th, several inventors made several attempts to transmit
sound by electric means. The first inventor suggest that was a Frenchman,
Charles Bourseul.

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 In 1849, an italian innovator Antonio Meucci began developing the design of a
talking telegraph or telephone. He had electrical devices in his home to
communicate between rooms.
 By 1861, Johann Philipp Reis of Germany had designed several instruments for
the transmission of sound.
 Later in 1870s, two American inventors, Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham
Bell, each independently, designed devices that could transmit speech
electrically.
 In 1876, Bell won the first U.S patent for his design of the electric telephone
device that can transmit speech electronically.
 At first, Bell telephone was operated by batteries located inside the telephone
device. Then, since the 1890s, the telephone supplied current has been
generated at the local switching office with standard 48 volts.

Photophone

 In 1880, Alexander Graham Bell made a photophone device which was

capable of transmitting sound in a beam of light. This can be considered as the
first wireless communication device in the history preceding the radio invention
by nearly 20 years.
 The photophone functioned similarly to the telephone, except the
photophone used light as a means of projecting the information, while the
telephone relied on electricity.
 Due to practical limitations in the technology, the photophone was not
recognized in its time till the invention of fiber optics in 1970s.

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4.3. Telephone Network System

 Telephones are directly wired to a local exchange (central switching office).

 In 1882, Bell and others have established the Bell Telephone company
which is named later AT&T.
 The central offices were arranged into network hierarchies for telephone calls
between subscribers where it span cities, countries, and all the world.
 Bell Telephone Company was the first company to provide network
hierarchy was in the United States.

 In 1915, Bell made the coast-to-coast call from a land-line phone and it is the
first long-distance call made in the history.
 The first radio-telephone service was established from U.K. to U.S. across the
Atlantic Ocean in 1927 and from U.S to Japan across the Pacific Ocean in 1934.
 In 1956, the first transatlantic telephone cable was installed from
Newfoundland to Scotland.
 In the early of 1960s, the Bell System installed the first communication link for
digital voice transmission where the speech message was digitized into a
stream of 1s and 0s.

4.4. Call Number Dialing

Manual Operator

 In the late of 1800s, the caller and the called phones are connected manually by
an operator at the central office to set the call.

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Pulse Dialing

 A traditional rotary dialer was invented in 1890s where it is rotated against a

tension of a spring and then released to return to its position. This causes a
switch to open and close producing dial pulses.
 It was designed for operation an electromechanically switching system.
 In 1892, Almon B. Strowger combines the new rotary-dialed telephone with
an automated telephone switch.
 Each telephone was assigned a unique number where a series of pulses sent to
the CO switch corresponding to each digit in the telephone number such that
two pulses correspond to the digit 2 and so on.

Tone Dialing

 Later in 1960s, an electronic push-button dialing system was introduced by

AT&T company which generates a “dual-tone” signal that replaced the “dial
pulse” signaling.
 The system is based on the concept of dual-tone multifrequency (DTMF), where
the dialing digits are assigned to specific push buttons which are arranged in
rows and columns that are assigned a tone of frequency.
 By pushing a button, a dual-tone is generating that corresponds to the
intersection of the column and row at that button.
 Each dual tone is composed of a low frequency (697, 770, 852, or 941 Hz)
corresponds to rows and a high frequency (1209, 1336, 1477 Hz) corresponds to
columns that are sensed and decoded at the switching office.
 Notice that Modern push-button telephones can even be able to generate pulse
signals.

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5. Cellular/Mobile Communication Networks
5.1. Network Principles

 A cell phone or mobile phone is a portable telephone that communicate

wirelessly to a cellular/mobile network.
 The network is distributed over land areas called "cells", each served by at least
one fixed-location transceiver which can be used for transmission of voice, data,
and other types of content.
 In the conventional fixed telephone network, each subscriber is identified by
the number of a certain subscriber loop that is connected to a certain fixed
telephone socket. In contrast, in a cellular network, the identification is in the
telephone set itself where it is located in one cell at a time.
 When the cells are joined together, they provide radio coverage over a wide
geographic area. This allows mobile phones to communication with each other
and to be connected to the public switched telephone network (PSTN).
 The mobile switching center (MSC) acts as a local exchange that provides
switching and control functions, and it also keeps track of the subscribers’
locations in order to be able to route a call to the destination.
 The BSs are connected to the MSC by a microwave link or by a cable line
(optical or copper cable) and the MSC is connected to the PSTN.

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5.2. History of Mobile Communications

1940s The first system offering mobile telephone service (car phone) in the US.
1964 Bell Laboratories improved the mobile service by adding full-duplex features.
1968 The Federal Communication Commission (FCC) reallocated the frequency
spectrum (800 to 900 MHz) to the user.
1973 The first cellular mobile call was placed by Martin Cooper. The used phone
was a prototype for Motorola’s first mobile phones.
1981 Japan launched the first commercially automated cellular network.

5.3. Mobile Generations

 The mobile communication systems have been

evolved from the first generation (1G) to
currently the fifth generation (5G).

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6. Radio Broadcasting
6.1.Basic Principles

 It is a unidirectional wireless transmission of an audio signal over radio

waves to reach a wide audience.
 The radio industry is one of the oldest industries in electrical communications.
It offers distinct products in the form of entertainment and information, and
access to audiences for radio advertising.

6.2. History of Radio Broadcasting

 By the end of the nineteenth century, innovators were working in transmitting

Morse code via the wireless radio technology. Over time, the transmission of
dots and dashes gave them a way to broadcast voice and music signals.
 In 1896, an Italian inventor, Marconi, sent his first long-distance wireless
transmission of sound signal over a distance of 2 kilometers.
 In 1900, the Canadian Reginald Fessenden was able to wirelessly transmit a
human voice.
 In 1901, Marconi established the first wireless communication across the
Atlanic Ocean between Britain and Newfoundland, earning him the Nobel
Prize in physics.

 In 1920, KDKA broadcasts the first regular licensed radio broadcast out of
Pittsburgh.
 Britain was the first European country to establish a radio station where it set
up the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in 1924 to broadcast from
London.
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  Starting from 1930s, the radio broadcasting has been used on a large scale such
as by the pilots, police forces and so on.
 The period of 1930s and 1940s, before the television world, was referred as the
golden age of the radio broadcasting

6.3. AM and FM Radio Stations

 The radio stations broadcast with different types of analog modulations:

 In AM stations, the information is carried by amplitude modulation.
 In FM stations, the Information is carried by frequency modulation.
 The FM broadcasting began to emerge as an alternative to the standard AM.
 Programming is dominated by music on the FM band and by talk and
information on the AM band.

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7. Television Broadcasting
7.1. Basic Principles

 A system for transmitting visual images and sound.

7.2. Evolution of Television

 The first working television prototype is made by Phillip T. Farnsworth in

1927. He discovered a method to encode radio wave with an image and then
project them back onto the screen.
 The first television broadcast was in England in 1927.

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