Communication

Gutenberg adapted screw-press and metallurgy into movable metal type, printing 180 Bibles by 1455. Europe had no patent system, so...

Morse, a painter, patented the electromagnetic telegraph with Vail and Gale after witnessing electromagnetism aboard ship. The 184...

Bell's patent application arrived February 14, 1876, hours before Elisha Gray's caveat for the same idea. The famous Mr Watson, co...

Edison's tinfoil cylinder phonograph stunned 1878 audiences, singing and speaking back. He patented it, then shelved it for a deca...

Sholes patented the first commercially successful typewriter, sold to Remington in 1873. The QWERTY layout, arranged to stop typeb...

Marconi patented wireless telegraphy in Britain in 1896 and America as patent 586,193 (1897), building a company that spanned the ...

Farnsworth conceived raster scanning at 14 plowing Idaho potato rows, then built the all-electronic image dissector by 1927. Paten...

Motorola's Cooper made the first handheld cellular call in April 1973, phoning his rival at Bell Labs. Patent 3,906,166, radio tel...

Naval Research Lab's Easton patented Timation-based satellite navigation, granted 1980 as GPS's passive-ranging foundation. The 24...

Ericsson's Haartsen built the short-range frequency-hopping spec in 1994, patents filing through the decade. The 1998 SIG with Nok...

Australia's science agency CSIRO patented OFDM-based wireless LAN methods in 1996, solving indoor multipath echoes that defeated o...

Schawlow and Townes extended the maser principle to light and received their patent for optical masers in 1960, the same year Theo...