Atlas of
Telecomm-
unication
Technology
in the
20th Century
Kii Kang
Elina Oikonomaki
Megan Prakash
Humanity worldwide is continually developing new technology. Innovations such
as the telephone, TV, and internet permanently change global communication, and
adoption of novel technology is very disproportionate between countries.
Throughout the history of technology adoption documented in our dataset, a
country's GDP is strongly correlated with how quickly it is able to adopt
its use of a technology per capita. However, particular smaller countries like Japan and Germany
often acquire technology disproportionately quickly.
Scroll on to see how these trends manifest throughout communications technology in the 20th century.
All y-axes are log scale and describe the total number of devices in a given country in a particular year.
We chose not to do technology per capita, because the rate of technology acquisition is not related to
a country’s population.
The issue with relating the two is particularly noticeable with the extremely
populous China and India, where a large segment of the population is less privileged with access to new
technology. Measuring technology per capita causes those countries to score very low compared to the rest
of the world. On the other hand, technology acquisition showed a strong correlation with country GDP.
Dataset:
Cross-country Historical Adoption of Technology (CHAT) dataset with discussion
here.
TELE-
PHONE
1876: Invention of the Telephone
1876 saw the invention of the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell in Boston, USA, which other countries soon
rushed to replicate [1]. The most successful countries of the century in telephone acquisition were the USA
and Germany, who had rapidly set up commercial telephone manufacturing by 1877 [2].
By 1900, the USA led the world in adopting telephones with 1.3 million telephones,
while Germany came in second with 306,000.
Click on "Switch to GDP ratio view" to see which countries have a large number of telephones relative
to their GDPs.
RADIO
1920: First commercial radio broadcast
On November 2, 1920, the radio station KDKA in Pittsburgh, USA made the first ever commercial radio
broadcast. [3] Decades prior, the Italian inventor Gugliermo Marconi had demonstrated radio communication
in 1899. Though the USA was not considered to be the world leader in scientific and engineering innovation
pre-1920, the American companies General Electric (GE), American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) and
Westinghouse convened to form the Radio Company of America (RCA) and accelerate radio development in the
USA.
The earliest data for the number of radios in the USA is from 1938; by that year, the USA led with
40,800 radios, followed by Germany with 9,575, Russia with 5,624, and Japan with 4,166.
By 1985, however,
Germany and Japan plateaued in radio acquisition while the USA, Russia, and China led the world with 500,000,
162,000, and 120,000 respectively.
CELL-
PHONE
1983: First commercially available cellular phone
Though the world’s first cellular network had already been launched in Japan by Nippon Telegraph and
Telephone in 1979, it was not until 1983 when commercial cellular phone communication became available.
The first 1G network was launched in the USA by Chicago-based Ameritech, shortly followed by the DynaTAC
8000X, Motorola’s first commercial portable cellular phone. [5]
From 1983-1985, the USA and Japan benefited from their early access to cellular phone technology,
though the UK is quick to catch up by 1986. However, by 1990, the USA is an order of magnitude ahead of
the others with 5.3 million cellphones compared to the UK's 1.1 million and Japan's 867,558.
INTERNET
1989: Invention of the World Wide Web
The World Wide Web was invented in 1989 by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, an English contractor at CERN in
Switzerland. Berners-Lee, in particular, was the first to use computer networking technologies and markup
languages such as HTML to create an international, publicly-accessible network for sharing information. The
early adopters of the Web were academic research institutions who were peers of Berners-Lee and CERN and
quickly published research work as well as webcomics and animated images. [7]
The creation of the internet predates the World Wide Web by many decades, and internet innovation was
primarily concentrated in the USA with collaborators in the UK and in France [6]. Even by 1995,
it’s clear that Germany and Japan are once again disproportionately ahead with Internet users both
in absolute terms and
relative to their GDP, while the USA is a full order of magnitude ahead with 25.2 million users
compared to Japan and Germany’s 2 million.
NOTE:
1991: Fall of the Soviet Union
A noticeable quirk in the dataset is related to the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. On a
significant number of technologies, Russia (considered to be the same bucket as the Soviet Union
in this dataset) dipped significantly in technology usage starting 1990. While it is known that
multitudes of Soviet engineers and scientists left Russia following the dissolution of the USSR [8],
a more likely explanation is that pre-1991, the “Russia” label of the dataset included the entire USSR.
On the other hand, post-1991 it only includes the country of Russia and none of the sovereign states
formed after the USSR’s collapse.