Telecommunication is the exchange of signs, signals, messages, words, writings, images and
sounds or information of any nature by wire, radio, optical or
other electromagnetic systems.[1][2] Telecommunication occurs when the exchange
of information between communication participants includes the use of technology. It is transmitted
through a transmission medium, such as over physical media, for example, over electrical cable, or
via electromagnetic radiation through space such as radio or light.[3][4][5][6][7][8] Such transmission paths
are often divided into communication channels which afford the advantages of multiplexing. Since
the Latin term communicatio is considered the social process of information exchange, the
term telecommunications is often used in its plural form because it involves many different
technologies.[9]
Early means of communicating over a distance included visual signals, such as beacons, smoke
signals, semaphore telegraphs, signal flags and optical heliographs.[10] Other examples of pre-modern
long-distance communication included audio messages such as coded drumbeats, lung-blown horns,
and loud whistles. 20th- and 21st-century technologies for long-distance communication usually
involve electrical and electromagnetic technologies, such as telegraph, telephone,
and teleprinter, networks, radio, microwave transmission, optical fiber, and communications satellites.
A revolution in wireless communication began in the first decade of the 20th century with the
pioneering developments in radio communications by Guglielmo Marconi, who won the Nobel Prize in
Physics in 1909, and other notable pioneering inventors and developers in the field of electrical and
electronic telecommunications. These included Charles Wheatstone and Samuel Morse (inventors of
the telegraph), Alexander Graham Bell (inventor of the telephone), Edwin Armstrong and Lee de
Forest (inventors of radio), as well as Vladimir K. Zworykin, John Logie Baird and Philo
Farnsworth (some of the inventors of television).