By John Taylor
Nuclear engineer and Sandia manager
The Information Age dawned in the middle of the 20th century. Demands for data processing, driven by the Manhattan Project and advanced aircraft designs, began to be satisfied by ENIAC, Mark I, and commercial mainframe computers. The invention/creation/introduction of the transistor in 1947 enabled power, size, and heat loads to be drastically reduced, enabling the PC.
Intensifying requirements for real-time battlefield situation awareness and threat assessment following the launch of Sputnik drove the Department of Defense to the first computer networks in the late 1960s and gave rise to the full-blown Internet a few decades later. The rise of PCs and the Internet led to an increasing demand for real-time information, including graphics and images.
Each of these innovations has its origin in the transformational insights of one of our "founding fathers," who created the expectation that information should be shared and could be made accessible. Absent their contributions, the Information Age would have dawned much later, if at all.
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| Johannes Gutenberg |
The first transformational developments on the road to the Information Age were those that broadly demonstrated the power and utility of information.
Ts’ai Lun, a eunuch in the court of the Han emperor Ho Ti, was the first to manufacture paper. Although writing and printing on papyrus, vellum, and silk were already well established, Ts’ai Lun developed a cheaper, more transportable, more available, and more flexible alternative.
Johannes Gutenberg invented neither the printing press nor movable type. His contribution was as a systems engineer — combining modern inks, metal type, a new press, etc., to produce the first practical printing system. This system is widely credited with enabling the Reformation, among other major cultural shifts, as texts became widely disseminated and accessible to any reader.
Thomas Edision A second revolution transformed electricity from a laboratory curiosity to power for the world.
From earliest childhood, Alessandro Volta had a passion for electricity. When he was a boy, electricity was just a laboratory curiosity, known primarily through lightning and static electricity captured in Leyden jars. In 1800, Professor Volta's “voltaic pile” combined zinc, silver, and brine into the first true battery, demonstrating the ability to store electrical charge and generate a steady current. Volta’s portrait adorns the Italian 10,000 lira bill.
Thomas Edison received over a thousand patents, doing so with only three months of formal education. In fact, one of his teachers said that poor Tom had an “addled brain.” Best known for inventing the light bulb (which he actually only improved, having purchased the patent from two Canadian inventors), Edison's concepts for providing electricity to homes and businesses changed the way the world functioned. Although his DC concept yielded to AC — a system proposed and refined by the likes of George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla — electricity was now controlled and available to the public.
Joseph Henry
The third critical transformation enabled the global telecommunication infrastructure, leading to ubiquitous, near-instantaneous transfer of information.
In 1830, William Henry, the first director of the Smithsonian and one of the founding members of the National Academies of Science, demonstrated telegraphy, the use of electricity (actually electromagnetism) to provide signals at a distance. Although best known for his invention of the electric motor, Henry’s foundational contribution to telecommunications, later improved by men like Samuel Morse and Alexander Graham Bell, may have been even more important.
Guglielmo Marconi, inspired by Heinrich Hertz’s confirmation of the existence of electromagnetic radiation, patented the first practical radio system in 1896. Although early radio communications used Morse code, wireless voice communication arrived in 1906, leading to commercial radio in the 1920s. Marconi continued his work in short-wave and microwave communication up to his death in Rome in 1937.
Henry’s telegraph proved that instantaneous communication over distances was possible; Marconi made it wireless and gave it voice.