Historical Background

“To understand a science it is necessary to know its history”

Auguste Comte (1798–1857)

Telegraph

The telegraph was perfected by Samuel Morse, a painter. With the words “What hath God
wrought,” transmitted by Morse’s electric telegraph between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore,
Maryland, in 1844, a completely revolutionary means of real-time, long-distance communications
was triggered. The telegraph, ideally suited for manual keying, is the forerunner of digital
communications. Specifically, the Morse code is a variable-length code using an alphabet of four
symbols: a dot, a dash, a letter space, and a word space; short sequences represent frequent letters,
whereas long sequences represent infrequent letters.

Radio

In 1864, James Clerk Maxwell formulated the electromagnetic theory of light and predicted the
existence of radio waves; the underlying set of equations bears his name. The existence of radio
waves was confirmed experimentally by Heinrich Hertz in 1887. In 1894, Oliver Lodge demonstrated
wireless communication over a relatively short distance (150 yards). Then, on December 12, 1901,
Guglielmo Marconi received a radio signal at Signal Hill in Newfoundland; the radio signal had
originated in Cornwall, England, 1700 miles away across the Atlantic. The way was thereby opened
toward a tremendous broadening of the scope of communications. In 1906, Reginald Fessenden, a
self-educated academic, made history by conducting the first radio broadcast. In 1918, Edwin H.
Armstrong invented the superheterodyne radio receiver; to this day, almost all radio receivers are of
this type. In 1933, Armstrong demonstrated another revolutionary concept—namely, a modulation
scheme that he called frequency modulation (FM).

Telephone

In 1875, the telephone was invented by Alexander Graham Bell, a teacher of the deaf. The
telephone made real-time transmission of speech by electrical encoding and replication of sound a
practical reality. The first version of the telephone was crude and weak, enabling people to talk over
short distances only. When telephone service was only a few years old, interest developed in
automating it. Notably, in 1897, A. B. Strowger, an undertaker from Kansas City, Missouri, devised
the automatic step-by-step switch that bears his name. Of all the electromechanical switches
devised over the years, the Strowger switch was the most popular and widely used.

Electronics

In 1904, John Ambrose Fleming invented the vacuum-tube diode, which paved the way for the
invention of the vacuum-tube triode by Lee de Forest in 1906. The discovery of the triode was
instrumental in the development of transcontinental telephony in 1913 and signaled the dawn of
wireless voice communications. Indeed, until the invention and perfection of the transistor, the
triode was the supreme device for the design of electronic amplifiers. The transistor was invented in
1948 by Walter H. Brattain, John Bardeen, and William Shockley at Bell Laboratories. The first silicon
integrated circuit (IC) was produced by Robert Noyce in 1958. These landmark innovations in solid-
state devices and integrated circuits led to the development of very-large-scale integrated (VLSI)
circuits and single chip microprocessors, and with them the nature of signal processing and the
telecommunications industry changed forever.

Television

The first all-electronic television system was demonstrated by Philo T. Farnsworth in 1928, and then
by Vladimir K. Zworykin in 1929. By 1939, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) was
broadcasting television on a commercial basis.

Digital Communications

In 1928, Harry Nyquist published a classic paper on the theory of signal transmission in telegraphy.
In particular, Nyquist developed criteria for the correct reception of telegraph signals transmitted
over dispersive channels in the absence of noise. Much of Nyquist’s early work was applied later to
the transmission of digital data over dispersive channels.

In 1937, Alex Reeves invented pulse-code modulation (PCM) for the digital encoding of speech
signals. The technique was developed during World War II to enable the encryption of speech
signals; indeed, a full-scale, 24-channel system was used in the field by the United States military at
the end of the war. However, PCM had to await the discovery of the transistor and the subsequent
development of large-scale integration of circuits for its commercial exploitation. The invention of
the transistor in 1948 spurred the application of electronics to switching and digital communications.
The motivation was to improve reliability, increase capacity, and reduce cost. The first call through a
stored-program system was placed in March 1958 at Bell Laboratories, and the first commercial
telephone service with digital switching began in Morris, Illinois, in June 1960. The first T-1 carrier
system transmission was installed in 1962 by Bell Laboratories. In 1943, D. O. North devised the
matched filter for the optimum detection of a known signal in additive white noise. A similar result
was obtained in 1946 independently by J. H. Van Vleck and D. Middleton, who coined the term
matched filter. In 1948, the theoretical foundations of digital communications were laid by Claude
Shannon in a paper entitled “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.” Shannon’s paper was
received with immediate and enthusiastic acclaim. It was perhaps this response that emboldened
Shannon to amend the title of his paper to “The Mathematical Theory of Communications” when it
was reprinted a year later in a book co-authored with Warren Weaver. It is noteworthy that prior to
the publication of Shannon’s 1948 classic paper, it was believed that increasing the rate of
information transmission over a channel would increase the probability of error. The communication
theory community was taken by surprise when Shannon proved that this was not true, provided the
transmission rate was below the channel capacity.

Computer Networks

During the period 1943 to 1946, the first electronic digital computer, called the ENIAC, was built at
the Moore School of Electrical Engineering of the University of Pennsylvania under the technical
direction of J. Presper Eckert, Jr., and John W. Mauchly. However, John von Neumann’s contributions
were among the earliest and most fundamental to the theory, design, and application of digital
computers, which go back to the first draft of a report written in 1945. Computers and terminals
started communicating with each other over long distances in the early 1950s. The links used were
initially voice-grade telephone channels operating at low speeds (300 to 1200 b/s). Various factors
have contributed to a dramatic increase in data transmission rates; notable among them are the
idea of adaptive equalization, pioneered by Robert Lucky in 1965, and efficient modulation
techniques, pioneered by G. Ungerboeck in 1982. Another idea widely employed in computer
communications is that of automatic repeat-request (ARQ). The ARQ method was originally devised
by H. C. A. van Duuren during World War II and published in 1946. It was used to improve radio-
telephony for telex transmission over long distances From 1950 to 1970, various studies were made
on computer networks. However, the most significant of them in terms of impact on computer
communications was the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), first put into
service in 1971.The development of ARPANET was sponsored by the Advanced Research Projects
Agency of the U. S. Department of Defense. The pioneering work in packet switching was done on
ARPANET. In 1985, ARPANET was renamed the Internet. The turning point in the evolution of the
Internet occurred in 1990 when Tim Berners-Lee proposed a hypermedia software interface to the
Internet, which he named the World Wide Web. In the space of only about two years, the Web went
from nonexistence to worldwide popularity, culminating in its commercialization in 1994. We may
explain the explosive growth of the Internet by offering these reasons:

Satellite Communications

In 1955, John R. Pierce proposed the use of satellites for communications. This proposal was
preceded, however, by an earlier paper by Arthur C. Clark that was published in 1945, also proposing
the idea of using an Earth-orbiting satellite as a relay point for communication between two Earth
stations. In 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I, which transmitted telemetry signals for 21
days. This was followed shortly by the launching of Explorer I by the United States in 1958, which
transmitted telemetry signals for about five months. A major experimental step in communications
satellite technology was taken with the launching of Telstar I from Cape Canaveral on July 10, 1962.
The Telstar satellite was built by Bell Laboratories, which had acquired considerable knowledge from
pioneering work by Pierce. The satellite was capable of relaying TV programs across the Atlantic; this
was made possible only through the use of maser receivers and large antennas.

Optical Communications

The use of optical means (e.g., smoke and fire signals) for the transmission of information dates
back to prehistoric times. However, no major breakthrough in optical communications was made
until 1966, when K. C. Kao and G. A. Hockham of Standard Telephone Laboratories, U. K., proposed
the use of a clad glass fiber as a dielectric waveguide. The laser (an acronym for light amplification by
stimulated emission of radiation) had been invented and developed in 1959 and 1960. Kao and
Hockham pointed out that (1) the attenuation in an optical fiber was due to impurities in the glass,
and (2) the intrinsic loss, determined by Rayleigh scattering, is very low. Indeed, they predicted that
a loss of 20 dB/km should be attainable. This remarkable prediction, made at a time when the power
loss in a glass fiber was about 1000 dB/km, was to be demonstrated later. Nowadays, transmission
losses as low as 0.1 dB/km are achievable. The spectacular advances in microelectronics, digital
computers, and lightwave systems that we have witnessed to date, and that will continue into the
future, are all responsible for dramatic changes in the telecommunications environment. Many of
these changes are already in place, and more changes will occur over time