The "Telegraph"was invented in the 1840s by Samuel Morse; an American artist who also developed the first practical system,sending electrical impulses from a transmitter through a cable to a reception point; Using what became known as "the morris code". The morris code is a series of dots and dashes that stood for letters in the alphabet. Telegraph operators would transmitted news and messages simply by interrupting the electrical current along a wire cable. By 1844, Morse had set up the first telegraph line between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, Maryland. By 1861, telegraph lines ran coast to coast. By 1866, the first transatlantic cable. However, along with the major rise in communication, the telegraph also had some disadvantages. For instance, while it dispatched complicated language codes. The telegraph was also unable to transmit the human voice. Also, ships that may have been lost at sea had no contact with the rest of the world. Because of this, the naval ships dependent on this telegraph communication system, could not find out that wars had ceased on land and sometimes continued fighting for months. Commercial shipping interests also lacked an efficient way to coordinate and relay information from land and between ships. A new invention was needed, one that was able to send a message without the wires; one capable of transmitting about six words a minute, that would run between Newfoundland and Ireland along the ocean floor.
11.)What is the significance of the Radio Act of 1927 and the Federal Communications Act of 1934?
(response to question #11)
In order to better restore order to the airwaves, Congress passed the Radio Act of 1927; This act stated as an extremely important principle because the radio stations did not own their channels, but could only license them as long as they operated to serve the “public interest, convenience, or necessity"; to oversee licenses and negotiate channel problems, the 1927 act created the Federal Radio Commission (FRC) whose members were appointed by the president. Although the (FRC) was intended as a temporary committee, it grew into a powerful regulatory agency. In 1934, with passage of the Federal Communications Act of 1934, the FRC became the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Its jurisdiction covered not only radio but also the telephone and the telegraph (and later television, cable, and the Internet). More significantly, by this time Congress and the president had sided with the already-powerful radio networks and acceded to a system of advertising-supported commercial broadcasting as best serving “public interest, convenience or necessity,” overriding the concerns of educational, labor, and citizen broadcasting advocates.
12.)How did radio adapt to the arrival of television?
(response to question #12)
A key development in radio’s adaptation to television occurred with the invention of the transistor by Bell Laboratories in 1947. Transistors were small electrical devices that, like vacuum tubes, could receive and amplify radio signals. However, they used less power and heat than vacuum tubes, and they were more durable and less expensive. Transistors, constituted the first step in replacing bulky and delicate tubes, leading eventually to today’s integrated circuits.By the time the broadcast industry launched commercial television in the 1950s, many people, including David Sarnoff of RCA, were predicting radio’s demise. To fund television’s development and protect his radio holdings, Sarnoff had even delayed a dramatic breakthrough in broadcast sound, what he himself called a “revolution”. This revolution was; FM radio. Edwin Armstrong first discovered and developed FM radio in the 1920s and early 1930s; he is often considered the most "prolific and influential" inventor in the history of radio. He understood the impact of De Forest’s vacuum tube, and he used it to invent an amplifying system that enabled radio receivers to pick up distant signals.
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