60 Fun Facts About Communication

Around which year did Johannes Gutenberg invent a method for mass-producing movable type in Europe?

His hand mould let metal type be cast quickly and in quantity; Korean metal movable type already existed but produced only about 40 sheets a day.

What first message did Samuel Morse telegraph from Washington to Baltimore on 24 May 1844?

'What hath God wrought', a Bible verse chosen by Annie Ellsworth, went from the Capitol to Baltimore's Mount Clare depot; Cooke and Wheatstone's needle telegraph had been running commercially in Britain since 1839.

Which engineer working with Morse developed the alphabet-based code that replaced his original?

Alfred Vail, Morse's assistant and financial backer, is credited with the dot-dash alphabet that replaced Morse's original numeric code, though the system bears only Morse's name.

On what date was Alexander Graham Bell awarded the first US patent for the telephone?

US Patent 174,465 was issued on 7 March 1876, a few days before Bell's famous 'Mr Watson, come here' call; Meucci, Reis, Bourseul and Elisha Gray have all also been credited with inventing the device.

Which inventor is credited with popularising 'hello' (or 'hullo') as the standard telephone greeting?

Thomas Edison suggested 'Hello' in an 1877 letter about how to open a telephone call, while Bell favoured 'Ahoy'; the word spread through early exchange operators, nicknamed 'hello girls'.

In which year did Ray Tomlinson send the first email between users on different ARPANET hosts?

In late 1971 Ray Tomlinson, at BBN, sent a test message between two side-by-side PDP-10 computers, picking the @ sign to separate the user's name from the machine's.

What did the very first SMS text message, sent over the Vodafone network in 1992, say?

Engineer Neil Papworth typed 'Merry Christmas' on a computer and sent it to Vodafone director Richard Jarvis's Orbitel phone at a party in Newbury on 3 December 1992; he later said 'it didn't feel momentous at all'.

Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 while working at which organisation?

At CERN, the particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Berners-Lee wanted a way to share documents across a large, constantly changing lab; CERN put the Web software in the public domain in 1993.

The Pony Express cut coast-to-coast message time to about ten days, but operated for only how long?

The Pony Express ran about 18 months, from April 1860 to October 1861, closing two days after the transcontinental telegraph was completed; it was quickly romanticised into Old West legend.

The Penny Black, the world's first adhesive postage stamp, was issued in the UK in which year?

Issued on 1 May 1840, the Penny Black carried a profile of Queen Victoria based on a portrait made when she was 15, and was Sir Rowland Hill's idea for showing that postage had been prepaid.

Who invented the most widely used optical telegraph, a chain of towers with pivoting arms, in France in 1792?

Claude Chappe's system of pivoting arms on tower tops first linked Paris and Lille in 1794; the word 'telegraph' itself was suggested for it by the statesman Miot de Mélito.

How old was Louis Braille when he developed his tactile writing code in 1824?

Braille was fifteen, a pupil at the Paris institute for blind youth, when he improved on Charles Barbier's 'night writing', which used 12-dot cells for 36 sounds; Braille cut the cell to six dots.

American Sign Language emerged at an 1817 Hartford school co-founded by Thomas Gallaudet and which French teacher?

Laurent Clerc, a deaf teacher from the Paris institute, sailed to America with Gallaudet in 1816; the school blended French Sign Language with local sign systems such as the one used on Martha's Vineyard.

Why was SOS adopted as the international distress signal in 1906?

SOS stands for nothing at all; it was chosen at the 1906 Berlin convention for the simplicity of its Morse pattern, an unbroken three dots, three dashes, three dots, replacing Marconi's CQD.

The word 'emoji' comes from Japanese words meaning what?

Emoji means 'picture and character', from e (picture) plus moji (character); its resemblance to 'emotion' and 'emoticon' is pure coincidence, and the first sets came from Japanese device makers in the late 1980s and 1990s.

Which computer scientist proposed the :-) and :-( smileys on a Carnegie Mellon bulletin board in 1982?

Scott Fahlman posted the proposal on 19 September 1982 to mark jokes; Vladimir Nabokov had mused in a 1969 interview that there ought to be a typographical sign for a smile, 'some sort of concave mark'.

Which emoji was chosen as Oxford Dictionaries' Word of the Year in 2015?

Face with Tears of Joy was the first pictograph chosen; Oxford and SwiftKey found it made up about 20 per cent of all emoji used in the UK in 2015.

In the US postal system, what does ZIP stand for?

ZIP stands for Zone Improvement Plan; the five-digit codes arrived on 1 July 1963, promoted by the cartoon Mr ZIP, and ZIP+4 added a hyphen and four more digits in 1983.

Which Scottish inventor patented an 'Electric Printing Telegraph', ancestor of the fax, in 1843?

Bain reproduced graphic signs in the lab by 1846; the telephone was still three decades away.

Queen Victoria's 1858 telegram, the first official one across the Atlantic cable, went to which US president?

James Buchanan replied to Victoria's greeting, which had taken about 16 hours to transmit; the cable, laid by Cyrus Field's Atlantic Telegraph Company, soon failed after Wildman Whitehouse applied far too much voltage.

Which satellite, launched in July 1962, relayed the first live transatlantic television feed?

Telstar 1, built by Bell Labs and launched on 10 July 1962, also carried the first telephone calls and fax images through space, and gave its name to the Tornados' chart-topping instrumental.

The first ARPANET host-to-host connection, on 29 October 1969, linked UCLA with which institution?

UCLA student Charley Kline typed 'LO' to Bill Duvall at the Stanford Research Institute at 10:30 pm before the system crashed; Telnet and FTP followed once the Network Control Program was written in 1970.

Martin Cooper made the first handheld cellphone call in 1973 while working for which company?

Motorola's Martin Cooper rang his rival Joel Engel at Bell Labs from a Manhattan sidewalk on 3 April 1973 using a DynaTAC prototype; the phone did not reach the market until 1983.

Who first proposed using hashtags on Twitter, in a 2007 tweet?

He never tried to patent the idea, saying hashtags 'were born of the internet, and owned by no one'.

What was Twitter's original character limit per post, in force until 2017?

The limit was 140 characters, chosen so a post plus username fitted inside the 160-character SMS limit; the service had launched in July 2006 as 'twttr'.

In which city, then in the Russian Empire, was Ludwik Zamenhof born?

Zamenhof was born in Białystok in 1859, a town of Poles, Jews, Russians and Germans whose mutual incomprehension, he said, inspired his language; he published it in 1887 as Doktoro Esperanto.

The Rosetta Stone carries the same decree in hieroglyphic, Demotic and which third script?

Ancient Greek, which scholars could already read, gave Champollion and Young their key; the stone was found in July 1799 by a French officer during Napoleon's invasion of Egypt and has been displayed at the British Museum since 1802.

Cuneiform, the earliest known writing system, was developed to write which language?

Sumerian scribes in southern Mesopotamia pressed reed styluses into clay from about 3200 BCE; the name comes from the Latin cuneus, wedge, and the script was later adapted for Akkadian and other languages.

Cai Lun, traditionally credited with inventing paper, was a court official of which Chinese dynasty?

Cai Lun, a eunuch at the Eastern Han court, reported his process to Emperor He in 105 CE; paper fragments from the 2nd century BCE exist, but his bark-and-hemp pulp made large-scale manufacture possible.

E. Remington and Sons began selling the typewriter behind the QWERTY layout in which year?

The Sholes and Glidden machine went on sale in 1874 and caught on with the Remington No. 2 of 1878, which added a shift key for lower-case letters; the layout carried over to computer keyboards.

The NATO phonetic alphabet (Alfa, Bravo, Charlie...) was defined in 1955-56 by which organisation?

The International Civil Aviation Organization finalised the alphabet in 1956 after intelligibility tests; it is officially the International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet, covering the ten digits as well as the 26 letters.

Marshall McLuhan coined 'the medium is the message' in the first chapter of which 1964 book?

Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man opens with that chapter; McLuhan also coined 'global village', and called his earlier book The Gutenberg Galaxy a footnote to Harold Innis.

Which unit, whose name he credited to John Tukey, did Shannon's 1948 paper introduce?

Shannon's 'A Mathematical Theory of Communication' was the first published use of the bit, a contraction of 'binary digit' that he credited to John Tukey of Bell Labs.

In which Alabama town was the first 911 emergency call in the United States made, in 1968?

Rankin Fite, Speaker of the Alabama House, placed the call in Haleyville on 16 February 1968, answered by Congressman Tom Bevill; AT&T had announced 911 as the national number a month earlier.

Who demonstrated the first working television system to Royal Institution members on 26 January 1926?

John Logie Baird showed moving images to Royal Institution members in his Soho laboratory that day; his company achieved the first transatlantic television transmission two years later, in 1928.

KDKA, considered by many the first commercially licensed radio station, is based in which city?

KDKA, owned by Westinghouse, began broadcasting from Pittsburgh with the Harding–Cox election returns on 2 November 1920, and was later assigned 1020 kHz as a clear-channel AM station.

Bluetooth is named after a 10th-century king of which country?

Harald Bluetooth, who united Denmark and converted it to Christianity in the 10th century, inspired Intel's Jim Kardach to propose the name in 1997 after reading the Viking novel The Long Ships.

The QR code was invented in 1994 by Masahiro Hara at Denso Wave to label what?

Denso, a Toyota supplier, needed to track automobile parts through its factories; the position markers' 1:1:3:1:1 pattern was chosen as the least common black-white ratio in printed matter, and Go boards inspired the grid.

Silbo Gomero, a whistled form of Spanish used to talk across deep ravines, comes from which island group?

La Gomera, in the Canary Islands, is the home of Silbo; the whistled speech carries up to about five kilometres across the island's ravines and was added to UNESCO's intangible heritage list in 2009.

The distress call 'Mayday' was coined in the early 1920s by a radio officer at which airport?

Frederick Mockford, senior radio officer at Croydon Airport, chose it in 1923 as the phonetic equivalent of the French m'aider, since most of his traffic was flights to and from Le Bourget in Paris.

The police ten-codes such as '10-4' were devised from 1937 by Charles Hopper of which state's police?

Charles Hopper, communications director of the Illinois State Police, devised the codes to cut speech on crowded radio channels; APCO expanded them in 1974.

AT&T's Mod I Picturephone was shown to the public at Disneyland and which other event?

AT&T unveiled it at the New York World's Fair in Queens in 1964, with a companion booth at Disneyland; Western Electric built it for the Bell System, but the service never caught on commercially.

In 1850 Paul Reuter's pigeons carried stock prices between Aachen and which city?

Brussels was the end of the Belgian telegraph and Aachen the end of the Prussian line, so Reuter's birds closed the gap in about two hours; he founded his London agency in 1851.

Which Morse letter was Marconi's first transatlantic signal, received in Newfoundland in 1901?

The letter S, three dots, came from Poldhu in Cornwall, about 2,200 miles away, and was picked up at Signal Hill, St John's, on an antenna hung from a kite on 12 December 1901.

Marconi shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics for wireless telegraphy with which German physicist?

Braun's cathode-ray tube would later become the heart of the television set.

Albert Mehrabian's often-quoted '7-38-55 rule' assigns 55% of communication to what?

Facial expressions took 55%, with 38% for tone of voice and 7% for the words; the figures came from narrow 1967 experiments on how listeners judged feelings about single words, and are widely over-applied.

The Relation, often called the world's first newspaper, was printed from 1605 in which city?

Its full title ran to Relation aller Fürnemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien; Strasbourg was then in the Holy Roman Empire.

Sputnik 1 sent a radio signal back to Earth for how long before its batteries died?

Its transmitters ran for three weeks, falling silent on 26 October 1957, 22 days after the 4 October launch of the first artificial satellite; the beeps could be picked up by amateur radio operators.

Under what name was the UPU, the Bern-based body coordinating the world's mail, founded in 1874?

The General Postal Union was created by the Treaty of Bern on 9 October 1874 and took the name Universal Postal Union in 1878; it became a UN specialised agency in 1948.

Who created the Voyager Golden Records, calling them a 'bottle' launched into the 'cosmic ocean'?

Carl Sagan chaired the committee that chose the contents; the two identical gold-plated copper records rode out on the Voyager probes in 1977 as a time capsule for any spacefaring civilisation that finds them.

Which country was the first to introduce a national emergency telephone number, 999, in 1937?

The United Kingdom launched 999 in London on 30 June 1937 after a 1935 house fire in which callers could not reach the exchange; Canada's first 911 service came in London, Ontario, in 1974.

A heliograph sends messages using flashes of what?

A heliograph flashes sunlight reflected by a mirror, keyed in Morse by tilting the mirror or a shutter; it was standard issue in the British and Australian armies into the 1960s and used by Pakistan's army as late as 1975.

West Africa's talking drum mimics speech by changing pitch through what means?

Tightening leather cords under the arm stretches the drumhead and raises the pitch, letting players copy the tones of languages such as Yoruba; skilled drummers could send news four to five miles.

The first transatlantic telegraph cable ran from Newfoundland to an island off which country?

Cyrus Field's Atlantic Telegraph Company landed it at Valentia Island, off County Kerry in Ireland; the 1858 cable died within a month after Wildman Whitehouse applied excessive voltage.

Which famous ship laid the first lasting transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866?

The SS Great Eastern, built by John Scott Russell and Isambard Kingdom Brunel, completed the 1866 cable and then recovered and finished the one lost in 1865, finally finding a purpose in cable-laying.

How much did eBay pay to acquire Skype in September 2005?

eBay paid about $2.6 billion up front, with up to $1.5 billion more tied to performance targets; Skype, created by Niklas Zennström, Janus Friis and four Estonian developers, had launched in August 2003.

Speakers of roughly how many languages have been found to practise whistled speech?

More than 80 languages have a whistled register, by linguist Julien Meyer's count, most in rugged terrain or dense forest where whistling carries farther than shouting; roads and phones have eroded the practice.

What is the technical term for a walkie-talkie's one-at-a-time transmission mode?

Half duplex means only one radio on a channel can transmit at a time while any number listen; the walkie-talkie's wartime invention is credited variously to Donald Hings and Alfred Gross.

How does a fax machine send a scanned page down a telephone line?

The scanned page is sent as audio-frequency tones, modulated like a voice call; since the 1980s, Group 3 machines have sent a compressed digital encoding that skips runs of all-white or all-black.

As of 2025, how many participants could Zoom's free plan host at once, and for how long?

Zoom's free Basic plan allowed 100 for 40 minutes: up to 100 participants in meetings capped at 40 minutes in 2025, while the top paid tiers stretched to 1,000 participants and 30-hour meetings.