Important Innovations

People have been delivering messages to one another for thousands of years, and there have been many advancements in message delivery over the years. The oldest example that I can think of would be a messenger service that is often thought of when thinking about message delivery between monarchies. But since there are so many things innovations and inventions that I could talk about (papyrus, paper, the printing press, ect…) I am instead going to focus on just America, and how communication evolved.



The oldest form of message delivery would be a system or network of carriers riding stagecoaches led by horses. They would deliver the same things that are delivered now like letters and packages. A famous network would be the Pony Express. This network consisted of around 400 horses, 120 riders, and 184 stations and connected St. Joseph, Missouri to Sacramento, California, a distance of about 1,900 miles. The cost of delivering anything was $5 per half-ounce, but the letter would get there in an astounding 10 days.

The next great innovation was the telegraph, which was invented by Samuel F. B. Morse in 1837, but it wasn’t put to widespread use until after 1844 when he completed a successfully telegraph line between Baltimore and Washington D.C. Many of you are probably wondering how a telegraph works, and here’s how: there is a constant flow of electricity flowing through the wires, and each key stroke interrupts the current for a specific period of time and can be interpreted on the receiving end.

My guess is that about half of you are familiar with Alexander Graham Bell, and for those of you who aren’t, he’s the inventor of the telephone. It’s easy enough to see how the telephone revolutionized communication. Exchanges that use to take days could now be done in minutes because people to talk directly to one another. The number of phones in service skyrocketed over the years. Just two years after its invention, there were 10,000 phones in service. In 1948 there were 30,000,000 and in 1971 there were 100,000,000.

The last major innovation in communication was email. People can share files that they would not have been able to over the phone, and as a result, businesses began to function much more efficiently and cheaply because email is free and companies don’t have to pay for international mail or phone calls. The inventor of email is considered to be Ray Tomlinson in 1972 because he denoted the @ symbol as a way for a computer to recognize to send that information to another computer. Now there are over 600 million email users world-wide. As a result, fewer and fewer people are using the postal service and if the trend continues, mail may become obsolete.