Atlas of Telecommunication Technology in the 20th Century

Elina Oikonomaki

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.

Trends to be aware of: countries with higher GDP have a strong tendency to acquire new technology more rapidly, but particular smaller countries like Japan and Germany often acquire technology disproportionately quickly.

Dataset: Cross-country Historical Adoption of Technology (CHAT) dataset with discussion here.

TELEPHONE

Invention of the Telephone - 1876

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]. The USA led the world in adopting telephones with 1.3 million telephones by 1900, while Germany came in second with 306,000.

References [1] [2]

RADIO

First commercial Radio broadcast - 1920

Line Chart Year Range [1920,2000]

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. The noise seen in the median lines in these graphs can be attributed to instances of missing data.

References [3] [4]

CELLPHONE

First commercially available cellular phone - 1983

Line Chart Year Range [1980,2000]

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.

References [5]

INTERNET

Invention of the World Wide Web - 1989

Line Chart Year Range [1990,2000]

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]. However, by 1995, it’s clear that Germany and Japan are once again disproportionately ahead 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.

References [6] [7]

POPULATION

The Fall of the USSR - 1991

Line Chart Year Range [1960,2000]

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 in technology usage during 1991 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. The following graphs of population vs. GDP and population vs. year corroborate this guess, since it’s clear that the population of “Russia” dips after 1991. This dip is also apparent in the earlier graph about radio usage.

References [8]

INTERNET

1992 on wards

Line Chart Year Range [1992,2003]

In the remainder of the dataset, up until the last values in 2003, usage of the internet continues to increase across the world. The following graph, with the y-axis of internet users set to a logarithmic scale, shows how over time nearly all of the countries we’ve focused on have exponentially increased their internet usage. In particular, India and China have accelerated their internet usage even more rapidly than exponentially! Finally, like many of the graphs in this narrative, the median internet acquisition follows the same trend of the superpowers.