A History of Media
Past - Pixels
A long long time ago
• To be human is to create.
• This human impulse to create and express
has always been a part of man’s psyche.
This trait can seen man’s distant cousin,
the Neanderthal.
45,000 B.C.E.
• In what is now Hungary, a Neanderthal
carves onto a mammoth tusk.
30,000 B.C.E.
• In what Modern Germany, someone
engraves a horse in a pelvis bone.
10,000 B.C.E
• Writing on skin. Tattooing instruments
found in Europe.
4,000 B.C.E
• Egyptian pharaohs listen to flutes and
harps.
3372 B.C.E
• Start of the Mayan calendar.
3,000 B.C.E.
• Egypt develops hieroglyphic writing.
• In the Mediterranean or Near East, an
abacus derived from counting boards.
Note:
• The Abacus is one of the precursors to the
modern computer.
2,000 B.C.E.
• Enheduanna, a woman in Mesopotamia,
writes first signed text, a hymn
• Vikings toot on trumpets.
• Nine Greek muses, responsible for poetry,
history, comedy, song, dance.
14 C.E.
• Rome sets up network of relay runners
carrying messages 50 miles in a day.
70 C.E.
• Estimated date of Matthew's Gospel.
230 C.E.
• Japanese begin keeping historical records.
370 C.E.
• Rome is said to have 28 public libraries.
393 C.E.
• Church sanctions 27 books of the New
Testament; Christian Bible is complete.
450 C.E.
• Ink on seals is stamped on paper in China.
This is true printing.
598 C.E.
• The first school in England, at Canterbury.
600 - 619 C.E.
• Books printed in China.
• In China, large orchestras, with bells,
drums, flutes, gongs, guitars
900 C.E.
• The 1001 Arabian Nights of tales within a
tale
1038 C.E.
• Arab scholar Alhazen describes a roomsize camera obscura.
– Note: This will ultimately lead to photography
and film
1168
• Oxford University is founded.
1300s
• Paper is made in England (1309)
• Dante Alighieri dies after completing his
epic poem, The Divine Comedy. (1321)
• Legends of King Arthur are written. (1325)
1387
• Geoffrey Chaucer writes The Canterbury
Tales.
1430 – 1450 -1451 - 1465
• Start of Renaissance music era: sacred
music, secular madrigals; lute is favored.
• Africans carry culture with them as 400
years of slave exports to West begins
• Gutenberg’s press prints an old German
poem.
• Printed music.
1472 -1477
• William Caxton brings Gutenberg’s
invention of printing to England.
• An advertising poster in England
1482 - 1498
• Leonardo da Vinci begins filling notebooks
with ideas, sketches.
• Leonardo da Vinci completes The Last
Supper.
1500 - 1517
• By now approximately 35,000 books have
been printed, some 10 million copies.
• Martin Luther nails his "Ninety-five
Theses" to a church door in Wittenberg.
1570
• Women forbidden to sing on stage;
castration imitates female voice
1593 – 1611-1612
• William Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis.
• The King James version of the Bible is
published.
• The Tempest is performed .
1750
• J.S. Bach dies, signals end of music’s
Baroque period.
1789
• New United States proposes Bill of Rights,
with freedom of faith, speech, press.
• In England, the narrative of a former slave
is published.
1890
• Typewriters are in common use in offices.
• The $1 Brownie camera; film is 15 cents a
roll.
Late 1800s
• 1893: Dickson builds a motion picture
studio in New Jersey.
• Norwegian artist Edvard Munch, The
Scream.
• Emile Berliner sells 1,000 gramophones,
25,000 records.
1800s
• 1895: In Berlin, Max and Emil
Skladanowsky show a 15-minute motion
picture
• 1896: The first comic strip, The Yellow Kid,
in the New York American.
• 1896: Nikola Tesla invents a spark radio
transmitter.
1900s
• 1940: U.S. gets first regular TV station,
WNBT, New York; estimated 10,000
viewers.
• 1943: British code breaking machine
Colossus cracks Germany’s Enigma code.
(Precursor to computer)
• 1949: Network TV established in U.S.
1900s
• 1951: Color television sets go on sale.
• 1952: EDVAC takes computer technology
a giant leap forward.
• 1956: IBM ships a hard drive, the 5 MB.
305 RAMAC as big as two refrigerators.
• 1958: The microchip; it will enable the
computer revolution.
• 1962: FCC sees a demonstration of
cellular technology.
• 1963: Sony offers an open-reel videotape
recorder for the home, $995.
• 1964: IBM’s OS/360 is first massproduced computer operating system.
• 1969: The Woodstock music festival.
• 1971: ARPANET, Internet forerunner, has
22 university, government connections.
• 1973: Computer in England, another in
Norway connect to ARPANET.
• 1976: Death Race 98 raises public
complaints about video games.
• 1983: Internet domains get names instead
of hard-to-remember numbers.
• 1985: Cellphones go into cars.
• 1987: The Simpsons, animated cartoon,
introduced on Fox TV.
Work Citied
• "Media History Project." Timeline: Media
History n.pag. Web. 23 Aug 2012.
<http://www.mediahistory.umn.edu/timeline
/>.