Forty thousand years ago, some human ancestors painted on the walls of a cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi (below). They left stencils of their hands and other markings.
Cave paintings in France and Spain have been dated to a couple of thousand years later. Experts don’t know exactly what purpose the artwork had, but some suggest they might be the first examples of communicating through a medium. The “audience” for such paintings was very small.
-The so-called “mass media” had to wait for the creation of new technologies before coming to life. The first of these was paper, invented in China in about 100 BCE. However, another 1,500 years had to pass before Johannes Gutenberg built the first printing press. This meant that books could be mass produced whereas before each one had to be handwritten.
-Samuel Morse invented his code in 1835. A series of dots and dashes could be sent down a telegraph wire and received at the other end. Messages could be sent over long distances at almost instantaneous speed. Until then, the fastest speed at which information could travel was about 55 km/h via railways.
- On November 2, 1920, radio station KDKA in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania went on the air to report the results of that year’s presidential election. Eight years later, pictures were added to sound. W3XK was located in a Washington suburb and it broadcast television, mostly to hobbyists, for four years.
- The most recent media jolt came in 1965, but hardly anybody knew about it. Two computers communicated with each other in a lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The technology broke a message down into individual packages which were then reassembled at the receiving computer.
- Charles Francis Jenkins aired the first television commercial in the late 1920s. The U.S. government fined him for doing so. Today, the average person in North America sees 20,000 television commercials a year.
