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?

It went from the Capitol to the Mount Clare depot; the first commercial needle telegraph, by Cooke and Wheatstone in Britain, was already seven years old.

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

The system is still named for Morse alone, though he was one of several developers.

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

Charles Bourseul, Antonio Meucci, Johann Philipp Reis 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?

Before the telephone, greetings usually named a time of day; connecting people across time zones made those awkward.

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

He picked the @ sign to separate the user's name from the machine's, and the first message was a test between two computers sitting side by side.

What did the very first SMS text message, sent over the Vodafone network on 3 December 1992, say?

Engineer Neil Papworth sent it from a computer to Richard Jarvis's phone at a party in Newbury, and later said 'it didn't feel momentous at all'.

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

He wanted a way to store, find and share documents across a large, constantly changing lab; the Web opened to the public in 1993.

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

It went bankrupt as soon as the transcontinental telegraph opened in October 1861, then 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?

It carried a profile of the 21-year-old Queen Victoria 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?

He coined both 'télégraphe', the origin of the English word, and in 1801 the word 'semaphore'.

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

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?

The school mixed Old French Sign Language with several indigenous sign languages, including the one used on Martha's Vineyard.

When SOS was agreed as the international distress signal in 1906, what did the letters stand for?

It is really an unbroken three dots, three dashes, three dots; phrases like 'save our souls' were backronyms invented later.

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

Its resemblance to 'emotion' and 'emoticon' is pure coincidence; the first emoji 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?

Vladimir Nabokov had mused in the 1960s 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?

Oxford and SwiftKey found it was the most-used emoji in the world that year.

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

The five-digit codes arrived on 1 July 1963; 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?

The cable, built by Cyrus Field's company, failed within a month when Wildman Whitehouse applied too much voltage trying to speed it up.

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

It also carried the first telephone calls and telegraph images through space, and gave its name to a chart-topping instrumental by the Tornados.

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

UCLA student Charley Kline and SRI's Bill Duvall made the link at 10:30 pm; Telnet and FTP followed once a control program was written in 1970.

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

He rang his rival at Bell Labs from a Manhattan sidewalk; 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'.

Twitter's original character limit per post was raised to 280 in 2017. What was it before?

The service launched in July 2006 as 'twttr'; the limit fitted an SMS message with room left for a username.

In 1887 Zamenhof published his constructed language under which pseudonym, later the language's name?

The name means 'one who hopes'; Zamenhof was a Jewish ophthalmologist from Białystok, then in the Russian Empire.

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

It was found in July 1799 by a French officer during Napoleon's invasion of Egypt and has been the British Museum's most visited object since 1802.

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

Its name comes from the Latin cuneus, wedge, for the shape of the impressions pressed into clay in southern Mesopotamia.

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

Earlier forms of paper existed from the 3rd century BCE; his innovation was adding pulp from tree bark and hemp ends, which made large-scale manufacture possible.

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

It caught on with the Remington No. 2 of 1878 and remains the de facto standard on computers a century and a half later.

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

Its official name is the International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet, and it covers the ten Arabic digits as well as the 26 letters.

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

He also coined 'global village'; The Gutenberg Galaxy was the earlier book he called a footnote to Harold Innis.

Claude Shannon's 1948 paper founding information theory was 'A Mathematical Theory of' what?

It has been called a 'blueprint for the digital era'; Shannon is known as the father of information theory.

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

Speaker of the Alabama House Rankin Fite placed it; the UK's 999 service had been running since 1937.

Which Scottish inventor demonstrated the world's first mechanical television system on 26 January 1926?

His company achieved the first transatlantic television transmission just two years later, in 1928.

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

It still operates on 1020 kHz as a clear-channel AM station.

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

Intel's Jim Kardach proposed the name in 1997 after hearing about Harald Bluetooth via the Viking novel The Long Ships.

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

The pattern of its position markers was chosen as the least-used black-white sequence in printed matter, and the design was influenced by Go boards.

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

On La Gomera it carried messages up to five kilometres.

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

Frederick Mockford chose it as the phonetic equivalent of the French m'aider, since most of his traffic was flights to Paris.

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

The aim was to cut down speech on crowded radio channels; APCO expanded the codes in 1974.

AT&T's Mod I Picturephone videophone was shown to the public in 1964 at Disneyland and which other event?

Western Electric built it for the Bell System, but the service never caught on commercially.

In 1860 Paul Reuter used more than 45 pigeons to carry news and stock prices between Aachen and which city?

Aachen was the end of the early telegraph lines; Reuter had founded his London agency in 1851.

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

It came from Poldhu in Cornwall, about 2,200 miles away, and was picked up on an antenna hung from a kite.

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?

The remaining 7% is words and 38% tone of voice; the rule came from narrow 1960s experiments about feelings and is 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?

Launched on 4 October 1957, it was the first artificial satellite, and its 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?

It is headquartered in Bern, Switzerland, and has 192 member states.

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

The two identical 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?

Canada adopted 911 in 1972; its first call came after a 1974 rollout in London, Ontario.

A heliograph sends messages using flashes of what?

Standard issue in the British and Australian armies into the 1960s, it was still used by Pakistan's army as late as 1975.

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

Skilled players could send news of ceremonies and commands four to five miles; the hourglass drum dates from the 18th century.

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; the 1858 cable died within three weeks after Wildman Whitehouse applied excessive voltage.

Which famous ship laid the improved second transatlantic cable in 1865?

Built by John Scott Russell and Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the giant vessel finally found a purpose in cable-laying.

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

Created by Niklas Zennström, Janus Friis and four Estonian developers, Skype launched in August 2003; eBay sold most of it again in 2009.

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

Most are found in rugged terrain or dense forest where whistling carries farther than shouting; modern roads threaten the practice.

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

Any number of radios can listen on a channel, but only one can transmit at once; its wartime invention is credited variously to Donald Hings, Alfred Gross and Motorola engineers.

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

Since the 1980s most machines send a compressed digital encoding of the page, skipping over areas that are all white or all black.

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

The top paid tier stretched to 1,000 participants in meetings of up to 30 hours.