Messaging Before the Internet - Early Electrical Telegraphs [Historical]

According to some historians, the Internet constitutes the fourth epoch-making phase of the evolution of communication, which started some 60,000 years ago with the development of language; the other two main steps were the development of writing, roughly 5,000 years ago, and printing, 11 and five centuries ago in China and Europe, respectively. In fact, the fourth step of the Internet was anticipated nearly two centuries ago by another system that revolutionized messaging over long distances - the electrical telegraph. A revolutionary development was needed to obtain an electrical telegraph that was competitive with these optical systems, and this was provided by the electrochemical cell invented by Italian physicist Alessandro Volta (1745-1827) in 1799 [4], which could release much more energy and generate electric currents over much longer times than any electrostatic devices.