The pioneering messages made possible by technology

12:38 16 October 2008
NewScientist.com news service
Colin Barras


 
First is everything. When Neil Armstrong became the first man to touch the lunar soil on 21 July 1969, he made sure to address the world with somethingsuitably memorable. Yet ever since, debate has raged overwhether or not he fluffed his line.
Armstrong can find solace in the knowledge that he‘s not alone. Others faced with delivering the first messages using potentially world-changing communications methods have come up with less-than-stunning first messages.
New Scientist has decided to round them all up for you anyway, from the first telegram to the first text message and more. Plusclick here to have a shot at composing your own memorable first message in our competition.
First written message
Most "firsts" are constantly under dispute, and there is some debate over exactly when writing emerged.
A set of 8500-year-old tortoise shells recovered from graves at Jiahu in Henan province, China, are thought by some topreserve the earliest writing. Those messages contain icons resembling the modern Chinese symbols for "woman", "eye" and "window"… and not a lot else.
In truth, little more could be expected. The earliest writing was based on pictograms of objects, and symbols representing ideas. Only in the4th millennium BC in Sumer in southern Mesopotamia did a written language based on syllables appear, a step on the road to the first alphabet, which appeared 1000 years later in Egypt.
First telegram
Fast-forward several thousand years to the mid-19th century, andSamuel Morse was finalising his latest invention: theelectrical telegraph.
Although ahandful of electrical telegraphs had existed in Europe in previous years, Morse‘s is the one most identified as spawning the telegraph age. It was his dot and dash-based communications method that was used on the telegram network that later spanned the globe.See Morse‘s first patent on telegraphic equipment.
Morse‘s first telegram was hardly inspirational. He suggested that"A patient waiter is no loser" in that first message, sent down a 2-mile-long wire in New Jersey on 6 January 1838.
Perhaps with more of an eye on the history books, Morse sent a second "first" message a few years later, on 24 May 1844. This time he really hit the nail on the head, with a message that has echoed down the years.
The daughter of a US patent official suggested something biblical, and Morse duly sent his message: "What hath God wrought!" the 61 kilometres from Washington DC to Baltimore.
He borrowed those words from the prophet Balaam in theBook of Numbers to simultaneously marvel at and modestly distance himself from his new invention. Today the same quote is used most oftenin horror, something that Morse didn‘t predict.
First telephone call
Controversy surrounds the invention of the telephone, with claims that ScotsmanAlexander Graham Bell cheekily stole the idea from Ohio-born Elisha Gray.
Whether he did or not, it seems beyond doubt that Bell was the first to make a phone call, when he called his assistant Thomas Watson in the next room.
Perhaps fearing that someone else would beat him to it, Bell apparently put little thought into that famous first call. He describes the moment in his notebook (view it here):
"I then shouted into M [the mouthpiece] the following sentence: ‘Mr. Watson – come here – I want to see you.‘ To my delight he came and declared that he had heard and understood what I said."
First speech from space
On 4 October 1957 the Soviet Union sentSputnik 1 into orbit, triggering theSpace Race with the US and the founding of aUS research agency to prevent such a "technological surprise" happening again.
After Russia did just that by launchingSputnik 2 the next month the US needed to go one better.
So in 1958 it launched the world‘s first communications satellite,Project SCORE, into a low orbit that would last just three weeks.
SCORE was to carry a pre-recorded message from one of the team that built it that could be received anywhere on Earth. But unfortunately for that team member, President Eisenhower‘s staff learned of the plan and decided the commander-in-chief‘s Christmas address should go up instead.
Eisenhower taped his message shortly before the 18 December 1958 launch and the next day his was the first human voice heard from space:
"This is the President of the United States speaking. Through the marvels of scientific advance, my voice is coming to you from a satellite travelling in outer space. My message is a simple one: Through this unique means I convey to you and all mankind, America‘s wish for peace on Earth and goodwill toward men everywhere."
After 12 days SCORE‘s batteries failed and, on 21 January 1959, Eisenhower‘s message of peace burned up in Earth‘s atmosphere.
First email
Every day 210 billion emails are sent across the world, according toone market research company. But it all began in 1971 when programmerRay Tomlinson sent the first email using theARPAnet, a forerunner to the internet.
Thanks to Tomlinson, the then little-used "@" key has got an ever-more regular hammering over the decades since. He sent the first message to himself on a different computer, but the content of that message is lost to history.
It was probably something insignificant,Tomlinson told New Scientist last year, guessing it may have been the top line of letters on a QWERTY keyboard.
Unlike Morse and Bell before him, Tomlinson was not keen to go public with his invention. Colleague Jerry Burchfiel remembers that first "Send Message" program: "When [Tomlinson] showed it to me he said: ‘Don‘t tell anyone! This isn‘t what we‘re supposed to be working on‘," Burchfielrecalled in 1998.
First cellphone call
One hundred years ago this May, Kentucky resident Nathan Stubblefield filed a patent for awireless telephone, but it wasn‘t until the 1970s that personal mobile phone technology got off the ground.
Martin Cooper made the first call on 3 April 1973. Echoing the origin of the telephone a century earlier, Cooper had a rival in the race to the cell phone: Joel Engel at Bell Labs in New Jersey.
Who better, then, to be the recipient of the first mobile phone call than Engel? "Joel, I‘m calling you from a ‘real‘ cellular telephone. A portable handheld telephone,"said Cooper from a Manhattan sidewalk.
First text message
Inevitably for an invention that has become so ubiquitous,many people claim to have sent the first text message. Edward Lantz, a former NASA employee, says it was sent by Raina Fortini in 1989, from New York City to Florida. Fortini used a pager to write a message – apparently not preserved – in numbers that could be read when viewed upside down.
The first commercial text message sent over aGSM phone network was, like Eisenhower‘s space greeting, a Christmas greeting.
"Merry Christmas" texted Neil Papworth of Sema Group to Richard Jarvis of Vodafoneon 3 December 1992. Papworth actually sent the message from a PC. Riku Pihkonen of Nokia claims to be the first to have physically "texted" from a phone, in 1993.
First emoticon ;-)
On 19 September 1982,Scott Fahlman posted a significant message to the computer science department bulletin board at Carnegie Mellon University:
"I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:
:-)
Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use:
:-(
Since then the number of smileys has ballooned and a wealth of human emotion can be represented bya few keystrokes.
First Twitter tweets
Turning to less-established communications, it is just two years since the first users of the now popular microblogging serviceTwitter began sending "tweets" , blog posts limited to 140 characters.
The very first twitters were automated messages. "When the system was first started, a user would sign up and the first message would automatically be set as ‘just setting up my twttr‘," Biz Stone, Twitter co-founder, told New Scientist.
It wasn’t until Twitter number 9 that we reach the first meaningful message: On 21 March 2006 co-founderJack Dorsey said:"inviting coworkers". Stone himself sent the next message: "getting my odeo folks on this deal", followed by another early Twitter developer Dom Sagolla with "oooooooh". Not quite Samuel Morse.
Another Web 2.0 icon, YouTube, got its first video on 23 April 2005.It shows co-founder Jawed Karim with the elephants at San Diego Zoo in California.
Competition: What would your first message be?
You may think those last examples will soon be forgotten. But it is surely inevitable that new communication technologies will appear, become established, and produce first messages that are long remembered.
We want you to take a guess at what they will be. For a chance to win a six-month subscription to New Scientist (or a six-month extension to an existing subscription), use the comment form at the foot of this article to answer the following question in a few lines:
What will be the next communication medium to change the world? And what would your first, historic message be?
Remember to include an email address (in the correct box in the form, not in the comment itself) so we can reach you on if you are our winner – it won‘t be used for any other purpose or made public.
The winning entry will be chosen from entries received by midnight on 31 October 2008 and announcedon our blog.
Full terms and conditions are available here.