110 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.

Unwanted bulk email is called 'spam' after a 1970 television sketch by which British comedy troupe?

Monty Python set the sketch in a cafe where nearly every dish contains the tinned meat, while Vikings drown out the talk by singing its name. Early chat-room users flooded screens with lines from it.

Despite its 'red telephone' image, the Moscow–Washington hotline of 1963 first carried messages by what means?

Teletype equipment carried the first hotline messages as printed text, and fax links took over in the 1980s. The line has never been a telephone, and no red phone was ever used.

Which Hollywood star co-patented a frequency-hopping radio guidance system for torpedoes with composer George Antheil?

Hedy Lamarr wanted Allied torpedoes to shrug off radio jamming, so she and Antheil made the control signal skip between frequencies. Frequency hopping is now a foundation of spread-spectrum wireless links.

At a papal conclave, what colour of smoke from the Sistine Chapel chimney announces that a new pope is chosen?

White smoke, the fumata bianca, means the cardinals have elected a pope, while black smoke means the ballot failed. Since 2005 the bells of Saint Peter's Basilica ring as well.

Which Native American language did US Marines use as a spoken battlefield code in the Pacific during World War II?

Navajo had no word for a submarine, so its code talkers called one an 'iron fish'. A Marine signal officer said that without them the Corps would never have taken Iwo Jima.

Which insects tell nestmates the direction and distance of food with a 'waggle dance' decoded by Karl von Frisch?

Honeybees angle each waggle run to match the food's bearing from the sun and dance longer for more distant flowers. Dancers even shift the angle as the sun moves across the sky.

The Zimmermann Telegram, intercepted by British codebreakers in 1917, offered a German alliance to which country?

Mexico was promised help to recover Texas, Arizona and New Mexico if it fought the United States. Publication of the decoded note enraged Americans and built support for declaring war on Germany.

Which nursery rhyme was the first verse ever recorded on the newly invented tinfoil phonograph in 1877?

Mary Had a Little Lamb was what the inventor recited to test his first machine. That tinfoil recording was not preserved, but a re-enactment he made 50 years later still survives.

In radio voice procedure, which word adopted during World War II confirms that a message has been received?

Roger was the spelling-alphabet word for R, the letter telegraphers tapped out to mean 'received'. It is no promise to act: Wilco is the word that adds 'I will comply'.

Which assistant heard his own name in the first words Alexander Graham Bell spoke over the telephone in 1876?

Thomas Watson was in the next room when Bell said, 'Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you.' In 1915 he was in San Francisco to take Bell's first coast-to-coast call from New York.

Which word stands for the letter Q in the NATO phonetic alphabet used by pilots and radio operators?

Quebec sits between Papa and Romeo in the 26-word list, which was built from words that speakers of English, French and Spanish could all pronounce.

Which homing pigeon is said to have saved the US Army's trapped 'Lost Battalion' in 1918 despite being shot?

Cher Ami, by popular legend, flew on after being shot in the breast and losing a leg, carrying a message that gave the unit's position. Only 194 of its men walked out of the forest.

Which science-fiction author proposed in 1945 that geostationary satellites could relay signals around the world?

Arthur C. Clarke set out the idea in the magazine Wireless World, asking whether 'rocket stations' could give worldwide radio coverage. The geostationary orbit is sometimes called the Clarke orbit in his honour.

Which American company launched the singing telegram in 1933 to cheer up a service linked with bad news?

Western Union wanted telegrams, long associated with deaths and tragic news, to feel fun, so an operator sang the first one over the telephone. The firm suspended the service in 1974.

Which rotor cipher machine, used by Nazi Germany's military, was first broken by Polish mathematician Marian Rejewski?

Enigma rewired itself with every keypress, so each letter was scrambled with a different key. Rejewski cracked it around 1932 using permutation theory and flaws in German operating procedure.

Which Twitter co-founder posted the platform's first message, 'just setting up my twttr', in March 2006?

Jack Dorsey typed it while the service still used its vowel-free code name, inspired by Flickr and five-character text short codes. The team bought the twitter.com domain six months after launch.

Which messaging app, founded by two former Yahoo employees, did Facebook agree to buy for about $19 billion in 2014?

WhatsApp got its name because co-founder Jan Koum wanted it to sound like 'what's up'. He and Brian Acton began building it in 2009, a month after Koum bought an iPhone.

A toy whistle given away in boxes of which cereal let early 'phone phreaks' make free long-distance calls?

Cap'n Crunch whistles happened to sound at 2600 Hz, a control tone that made AT&T's switches open a long-distance line. Phreak John Draper took the nickname Captain Crunch from the trick.

Almon Strowger, who patented an automatic telephone exchange in 1891, earned his living in which trade?

Undertaker Strowger, in a commonly told story, believed a rival's wife on the local switchboard was steering callers away from his funeral business. His switch cut out the human operator.

Which of Aristotle's three modes of persuasion appeals to an audience's emotions instead of to logic or credibility?

Pathos works through an audience's identities, emotions and values to create a sense of shared feeling. Its partners in Aristotle's Rhetoric are ethos, the speaker's credibility, and logos, reasoning.

In the Shannon–Weaver model, what is anything unintended that distorts a signal between transmitter and receiver called?

Noise covers everything from crackling on a phone line to 'snow' on a television screen. The model's cure is redundancy: repeat or pad a message and the receiver can still rebuild what was meant.

Which phrase did media theorist Marshall McLuhan coin in the 1960s for a world drawn together by electronic media?

Global village was McLuhan's image for people everywhere moving toward personal, worldwide interaction. Later writers have applied it to social networks such as Facebook.

Which term did Yale psychologist Irving Janis apply to teams whose desire for harmony produces irrational decisions?

Groupthink was modelled on 'doublethink' from George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Janis built his theory on case studies such as the Bay of Pigs invasion and the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Psychologists Carl Rogers and Richard Farson coined which term for intentionally engaging with what a speaker is saying?

Active listening aims to remove misunderstandings: the speaker gets confirmation that the point has landed, and the listener takes in more. Rogers and Farson called it an important way to bring about changes in people.

Anthropologist Edward T. Hall used which term for cultures such as Japan's, where much of a message is left implicit?

High-context cultures, in Hall's scheme, rely on shared background and non-verbal cues to carry meaning. He placed Germans, Scandinavians and Americans at the opposite, spell-it-out end.

Which American political scientist framed communication as 'Who says what, in which channel, to whom, with what effect'?

Harold Lasswell published the five-question formula in a 1948 essay on the structure and function of messages in society. It became a checklist for studying sender, content, medium, audience and impact.

Which MIT linguist argued that children are born with a 'universal grammar', so that part of language is inborn?

Noam Chomsky held that syntactic knowledge is partly inborn, leaving children to learn only the features particular to their native tongue. His 1957 book Syntactic Structures remade the study of language.

Which principle, often called the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, holds that a person's language shapes that person's thinking?

Linguistic relativity is its formal name. The popular label is sometimes called a misnomer: Sapir and Whorf never framed their ideas as a hypothesis, and Sapir wrote more often against linguistic determinism than for it.

Which country, where Tok Pisin serves as a common tongue, has more languages than any other, around 840?

Papua New Guinea's languages are mostly tiny, the majority spoken by fewer than a thousand people. Along its old trading chains, some villagers also knew the languages of the villages next door.

Which language usually ranks first in the world by number of native speakers, with nearly one billion?

Mandarin's home region has held China's capitals for most of the last two millennia, which made its dialects prestigious. Most of its varieties use four tones plus a neutral one.

Four developers from which northern European country wrote the original Skype software, first released in 2003?

Estonia's Ahti Heinla, Priit Kasesalu, Jaan Tallinn and Toivo Annus built it for founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis. They borrowed the peer-to-peer design of the file-sharing program Kazaa.

Which country is home to Nokia, founded as a pulp mill and later the world's largest vendor of mobile phones?

Finland's Nokia was long associated with rubber and cables before it turned to phones. From 1998 it sold more mobile handsets than any other company on Earth for more than a decade.

Which country was home to Research In Motion, which introduced a two-way pager in 1996 before developing the BlackBerry?

Canada's Research In Motion was founded in Waterloo, Ontario, and later renamed itself BlackBerry Limited after its best-known product. It stopped designing its own handsets in 2016.

Which company developed the Simon, a 1994 touchscreen handset since described as the first true smartphone?

IBM packed a touchscreen, email and fax into the handset, which BellSouth sold for $899 with a two-year contract. Only about 50,000 were bought in the six months it stayed on sale.

Which California-based non-profit selects new emoji for the world's smartphones from proposals anyone can submit?

Unicode Consortium members aim to make every language's text work on every computer. Its people have noted that emoji get far more attention than the fact that Chinese typed on one phone works on another.

Which name did Bell Labs workers invent for the # symbol when adding two new keys to the telephone keypad?

Octothorpe, also spelled octothorp, was coined by 1968 because the engineers needed proper names for the keypad's eleventh and twelfth keys. The sign also answers to hash, pound sign and number sign.

The word 'modem' is a contraction of which pair of terms describing how the device handles a carrier signal?

Modulator-demodulator names the device's two jobs: it encodes digital data onto a carrier wave for a phone line or radio link, then recovers the data from the wave coming back.

What does SMS, the mobile phone text format developed by Franco-German engineers in 1984, stand for?

Short Message Service texts were capped at 160 characters after engineer Friedhelm Hillebrand studied postcards and Telex messages and judged that length enough for most brief notes.

Optical fibres carry internet data as light, which stays trapped in the glass core through which phenomenon?

Total internal reflection turns the fibre into a waveguide for light. Charles Kao won a Nobel Prize for showing that very pure silica glass could carry such signals far enough to be practical.

Which German physicist first conclusively proved the existence of the electromagnetic waves that make radio possible?

Heinrich Hertz saw no practical value in his discovery and, asked about its applications, replied, 'Nothing, I guess.' Radio waves were known as Hertzian waves until around 1910.

Which American inventor built the first working all-electronic television, transmitting a single straight line in 1927?

Philo Farnsworth broke the stunned silence in his San Francisco lab by saying, 'There you are, electronic television!' He had first sketched the idea across several blackboards for a science teacher.

Which 1938 Orson Welles radio drama convinced some listeners that a Martian invasion was really under way?

The War of the Worlds made the 23-year-old Welles famous, though the scale of the panic is disputed. He apologised at a hastily called news conference the next morning and was never punished.

Which US president explained his policies directly to Americans in evening radio addresses known as fireside chats?

Franklin Roosevelt used the broadcasts to quell rumours and counter hostile newspapers through the Depression and the Second World War. They were among the first 50 recordings in the National Recording Registry.

Which candidate sweated under the studio lights against John F. Kennedy in the first US presidential debates, in 1960?

Richard Nixon and Kennedy met four times, the first at a Chicago television studio. No further presidential debates took place until 1976, after which they became a fixture of every campaign.

Which admiral signalled 'England expects that every man will do his duty' to his fleet by flag code in 1805?

Horatio Nelson accepted changes to the wording from his signal lieutenant, John Pasco, before it was hoisted from HMS Victory in a numeric flag code as the Battle of Trafalgar was about to begin.

Which teacher taught the deafblind Helen Keller language by spelling each word into the palm of her hand?

Anne Sullivan built her lessons around the girl's own interests instead of drills. Within six months Keller had learned 575 words, some multiplication tables and the Braille system.

Which Puerto Rico radio telescope beamed a 1974 message about humanity toward the star cluster M13?

Arecibo sent the message only once, at a ceremony marking the telescope's remodelling. Even at light speed it needs about 25,000 years to arrive, by which time the cluster's core will have moved on.

Which online service provider's team, led by Steve Wilhite, released the GIF image format in 1987?

CompuServe wanted a colour image format for its file download areas. A 1994 licensing dispute over the compression patent inside GIF spurred the creation of the rival PNG format.

Which gorilla, taught by Francine Patterson, used many signs adapted from American Sign Language?

Koko became a celebrity through two National Geographic cover stories and a best-selling 1985 children's book about her kitten. Critics have accused Patterson of misrepresenting the ape's skills.

Which singing technique did herders in the Central Alps use to call their flocks and signal between villages?

Yodelling first appears in a record of 1545 as 'the call of a cowherd from Appenzell'. By the 1830s it had moved from mountain pastures into theatres and music halls as entertainment.