Time Line of Communication By Jordan Rhodes

Pony Express The Pony Express was founded by William H. Russell, William B. Waddell, and Alexander Majors. Plans for the Pony Express were spurred by the threat of the Civil War and the need for faster communication with the West. The Pony Express consisted of relays of men riding horses carrying saddlebags of mail across a 2000-mile trail. The service opened officially on April 3, 1860, when riders left simultaneously from St. Joseph, Missouri, and Sacramento, California. The first westbound trip was made in 9 days and 23 hours and the eastbound journey in 11 days and 12 hours. The pony riders covered 250 miles in a 24-hour day. Eventually, the Pony Express had more than 100 stations, 80 riders, and between 400 and 500 horses. The express route was extremely hazardous, but only one mail delivery was ever lost. The service lasted only 19 months until October 24, 1861, when the completion of the Pacific Telegraph line ended the need for its existence. Although California relied upon news from the Pony Express during the early days of the Civil War, the horse line was never a financial success, leading its founders to bankruptcy.

Telegraph At the height of it use, telegraph technology involved a worldwide system of wires with stations and operators and messengers, that carried messages and news by electricity faster than any other invention before it. The electrical telegraph is one of America's gifts to the world. The honor for this invention falls to Samuel Finley Breese Morse. Other inventors had discovered the principles of the telegraph, but Samuel Morse was the first to perceive the practical significance of those facts; and was the first to take steps to make a practical invention; which took him twelve long years of work.

Telephone n the 1870s, two inventors Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell both independently designed devices that could transmit speech electrically (the telephone). Both men rushed their respective designs to the patent office within hours of each other, Alexander Graham Bell patented his telephone first. Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell entered into a famous legal battle over the invention of the telephone, which Bell won. The telegraph and telephone are both wire-based electrical systems, and Alexander Graham Bell's success with the telephone came as a direct result of his attempts to improve the telegraph. Alexander Graham Bell's notebook entry of 10 March 1876 describes his successful experiment with the telephone. Speaking through the instrument to his assistant, Thomas A. Watson, in the next room, Bell utters these famous first words, "Mr. Watson -- come here -- I want to see you."

Fax The use of the fax machine to transmit images via telephone lines did not become common in American businesses until the late 1980s, but the technology dates back to the nineteenth century. For many years, facsimile machines remained cumbersome, expensive and difficult to operate, but in 1966 Xerox introduced the Magnafax Telecopier, a smaller, 46-pound facsimile machine that was easier to use and could be connected to any telephone line. Using this machine, a letter-sized document took about six minutes to transmit. The process was slow, but it represented a major technological step. In the late 1970s, Japanese companies entered the market, and soon a new generation of faster, smaller and more efficient fax machines became available.

A method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the same time, in common with instant messaging. Today's systems are based on a store-and-forward model. servers accept, forward, deliver and store messages. Neither the users nor their computers are required to be online simultaneously; they need connect only briefly, typically to an server, for as long as it takes to send or receive messages. An message consists of three components, the message envelope, the message header, and the message body. The message header contains control information, including, minimally, an originator's address and one or more recipient addresses. Usually descriptive information is also added, such as a subject header field and a message submission date/time stamp.

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