Reflection on EOTC #1

I loved listening to my classmates teach the class about groundbreaking technologies. Learning about technologies I know were essential to me yet had such a complex history was fascinating. Learning about these critical technologies gave me a broad overview of the greatest inventions. Some of my favorite ones I knew about were emojis, the radio, and the telephone. I use these three things every day without hesitation, and I have no idea what it is like to live without these inventions. 

Ben was the first presenter in the class, and he, by far, had one of the best presentations. You could see he had a lot of knowledge and passion for this topic, which is one reason why I was so interested in it. Emojis were first used in 1862 by President Lincoln when he was giving a speech. He used the emotion “;),” yet it is still heavily debated if he meant to put that in his speech transcript. 

Later in 1999, a Japanese artist named Shigetaka Kurita created the first one hundred seventy-six emojis as an easy way to communicate emotions. After Kurita, many companies tried to copy them, the most famous in the United States being Google and Apple. Emojis have forever changed communication because of how much an emoji can say without words. A fun fact is that a whole book was written in emojis by Moby Dick!

The radio, known as “wireless telegraphy,” was invented by Guglielmo Marconi in 1895. It changed the way communication and entertainment would be in America forever. The radio allowed for the transmissions of news, media, politics, etc., to be committed over long distances, letting people get the latest news in real time. It allowed people to listen to music anytime they wanted to and could travel with music. Without the radio, the public was never in the know until days later, when it would appear in the newspaper. If the radio was never invented it would have taken much longer for the television, mobile phones, internet, social media etc. to be invented, if at all. The radio impacted American society in every way it could and transformed how people communicate. 

Lastly, I enjoyed the presentation on the first-ever telephone. Alexander Graham Bell made the first telephone call on March 10, 1876. Before the first phone call, Bell got the patent for the telephone on March 7,1876. He then went on to created the Bell Telephone Company, which is now known as AT&T. I learned that Bell was heavily involved in the deaf community, which was one of the main reasons he created the telephone while getting his ideas from Samuel Morse’s telegraph. At first, Bell tried improving the telegraph with his knowledgeable background in sound and music. He was able to create “multiple telegraphs.” Which could send multiple signal and sounds at the same time over the same wire. It changed America for the better and revolutionized communication. It opened up a whole new world of communication. It had a significant impact on the way the world lived every day and most people in the world reply on telephones for their jobs, communication, news, politics, business opportunities and much more.