is brought to you by PeakNutritionLabs.com A team of international researchers working on the development nutritional suppliments for improving health and longevity.

PeakNutritionLabs.com And by Swiss International Airlines.

Flying to over 70 worldwide locations.

Truly Swiss made.

Swiss International Airlines.

And by the BMW European Delivery Program, a way to experience the roads that BMW was made to drive.

BMW European Delivery Program.

♪ Oh yes, wait a minute Mr. Postman.

♪ ♪ Hey, Hey, Hey ♪ Mr. Postman ♪ Hey Mr. Postman look at me ♪ Whoa yeah.

♪ Please, please, Mr. Postman.

♪ Whoa yeah.

♪ There must be some word today.

♪ ♪ From my boyfriend so far away.

♪ ♪ Please Mr. Postman, look and see ♪ ♪ Is there a letter, a letter for me?

♪ ♪ I've been standing here waiting Mr. Postman.

♪ ♪ So, so patiently.

♪ For just a card or just a letter ♪ ♪ Say he needs me turn it onto me ♪ ♪ Please Mr. Postman.

♪ I just called to say, I love you.

♪ ♪ I just called to say how much I care.

♪ - I Just Called to Say I Love You is a pretty good example of where we are in communications these days.

Stevie needed language in order to express his love, and he needed the sophisticated technology of a telephone in order to send it to the right person, and I needed an internet connection, so I could see what Stevie was doing.

We kind of take all this stuff for granted, but it actually took over 500,000 years to put it together.

In this series of programs, we're going to take a look at language and symbols and how we communicate.

- You talking to me?

You talking to me?

- We'll also take a look at the technology that has been developed to help us communicate and what things might look like in the future.

Humans began using speech about 500,000 years ago.

If you wanted to communicate with someone, you just spoke to them.

Sometimes they gave it a like and passed it on.

But what if you wanted to communicate with somebody who was not sitting next to you?

Communication over a distance is known as telecommunication.

(drums playing) It got started hundreds of years ago.

In Africa, they used talking drums.

In North America and China, smoke signals were a favorite.

In ancient Persia, homing pigeons were messengers.

They were also a regular means of communication for Roman armies.

Dear Brutus, come over to my tent for dinner, I made a great salad.

Yours, Caesar.

During the middle of ages, light beacons were built on hilltops to relay signals.

The messages they sent had to be short and agreed upon in advance.

A significant example was a chain of messages sent from Plymouth, England to London to signal that this Spanish Armada had arrived.

(smooth classical music) Light beacons are still in use today in the form of lighthouses.

As early as the 4th century BC, the Greeks were using semaphore.

They could only send a limited number of messages and only when visibility was good.

The towers were expensive to maintain and they could only work between 20 miles.

As a result, the last commercial system closed down in 1880.

However, for decades semaphore communication has been used by the Navy.

- Admiral Nimitz call your mother.

- As a long time resident of the Swiss Alps, I am obliged to add two additional forms of long distance communication.

(horn music) For centuries, the alp horn has been used to send messages between Alpine villages.

A rough translation for that notification would be, Orce, your last shipment of cheese had holes in it but don't worry, I think we can give it a positive twist in our marketing campaign.

And of course there is yodeling.

- Heidi, please bring home another bottle of milk.

- Thomas, talk louder the kids are making a racket.

- Along with the development of language came the invention of symbols which seems to have developed about 30,000 years ago.

Some of the earliest are the cave paintings in Lascaux, France.

Then came the petroglyphs, which are images carved into the surface of a rock.

The first petroglyphs we know of date back about 10,000 years.

An ideogram is a graphic symbol that represents an idea.

Some of the ideas presented in ideograms are almost universal.

An eye I with a tear meant sadness to Native Americans, Aztecs, Egyptians, and the Chinese.

And now it's used on the internet.

Then came the big breakthrough, writing.

Looks like it was developed about 3,000 BC by the Sumerians.

They're the earliest culture we know about, and they existed between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what is now Southern Iraq.

The early Sumerians used writing to keep a record of what they were making and selling.

They didn't have paper or ink, so they kept the information by making marks in soft clay tablets.

They were the ancient equivalent of modern spreadsheets.

This writing system came to be known as cuneiform, which means wedge shaped.

It was several hundred characters that were used to write words or syllables.

This is one of the earliest examples of cuneiform writing.

It dates back to 2600 B.C..

It's a list of the gifts given to the High Priestess of Adab on the occasion of her election to the job.

In addition to the Sumerians, writing was developed independently in at least three other early civilizations.

The ancient Egyptians created a distinctive script known as hieroglyphs, which means sacred words.

This system used various pictures to form characters which could be read as symbols for objects or symbols for sounds.

The earliest writings in China were found around 1400 B.C.

during the Shang dynasty.

These inscriptions on bones and shells are called Oracle bones and were used as a vehicle to contact the gods and record memorable events.

A few years ago, I traveled through Central America learning about Mayan culture.

I was particularly impressed with the ancient Mayan societies in Guatemala.

The formal beginning for Mayan culture is dated to about 600 B.C..

They created a complex system of writing that was based on phonetic signs called glyphs.

Each symbol represented a word or a sound.

Throughout Guatemala, there are ancient Mayan structures covered with the symbols of their written language.

The Maya used the written language to record astronomical events, numerical data, proper names, places, medicines, art, historic events and laws.

These days, it's used to record email addresses in websites.

And when communication began to use electricity, once again there was a dramatic change.

- Hello?

Hello?

Hello?

- Hello.

- Hello.

- Hello, how are you?

- Hi, oh it's you.

I didn't expect to see you right here.

- Quiet!

Get out of here.

- Why do you think I'm calling you, just to say hello?

Of course, I like to speak to you.

Of course I like to say hello.

Not now, but any time Dmitri, I'm just calling up to tell you something terrible has happened.

It's a friendly call.

Of course, it's a friendly call.

Listen, if it wasn't friendly you probably wouldn't have even got it.

On March 10th, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone.

Bell was born in Scotland, attended school in London, and at the age of 23, moved with his family to Canada.

A year later, he relocated to the United States and became a teacher at the Boston School for the Deaf.

Bell's interest in helping people with hearing difficulties began with his mother as a result of a childhood illness.

She was almost totally deaf and used an ear trumpet to hear the sounds around her.

Bell's father and grandfather were talented speech therapists, and Alexander followed in their footsteps.

In 1873, Bell joined the faculty at Boston University as a professor of vocal physiology, studying how hearing worked.

It was at Boston University, where he met his future wife, Mabel Hubbard.

As a result of having scarlet fever in her childhood, Mabel had lost all her hearing.

Bell's constant exposure to people with hearing problems was the basis for his interest in acoustics and the transmittal of sound waves.

He was even Helen Keller's private tutor and became her lifelong friend.

At the age of 29, Bell was awarded the first U.S. patent for a telephone.

Three days later, the first successful telephone transmission took place.

When Bell's assistant heard Bell talked to him on a device from another room, the famous words were, Mr. Watson, come in here.

I want you.

Here's an extraordinary clip of Alexander Graham Bell actually talking.

Now, you may be using your phone to save the world like it was used in Dr. Strangelove, or you may be using it to save yourself the trouble of making dinner.

The telephone, in fact, changed even the way we use language.

♪ With trunks, and toll, and telegram, ♪ ♪ And all exchanges too.

♪ Just telephone and we will put you through.

♪ ♪ Ring Abercorn or Archway.

- The early phones had a hook on which the earpiece hung, which gave rise to the phrase, she hung up on me.

At first, all phone calls were made through an operator.

My favorite is Lily Tomlin as Ernestine.

Here's a clip of her calling President Richard Milhous Nixon.

- Pardon, pardon?

Your last name is not Milhous.

Oh, I see.

Last name.

And your first name is Milhous.

Well Milhous, about your bill.

Now, according to our files, you have 175 extension phones installed at your residence and you do make a great many long distance telephone calls.

Well, well there's, there's Paris and London, Beirut, Tel Aviv, Johannesburg.

Tell me, sir, confidentially.

Don't you have any friends in this country at all?

- During the 1880s, specially designed ships began laying telephone cables between the continents, and in 1927 the first regular telephone link was established between the United States and England.

- America.

Hello America.

This is London calling you.

- I was about four years old when the telephone first arrived in my home.

It was a party line, which meant that two other families used the same phone line.

If you wanted to make a call, you had to pick up the phone listen and make sure that one of the other parties was not using it, and if they were, you had to wait until they finished.

Good morning Miss McCardle.

How did the market open?

By the early 1950s, there were portable phones in cars.

I'm just leaving the house.

You can put the coffe on in 45 minutes.

- My first portable phone was in a small suitcase.

You needed to pull up an aerial when you wanted to use it.

Today, all of the tasks associated with my phone and my computer, plus a few hundred other functions, are in my mobile phone.

All that happened during the past 50 years.

I began to think about how things might change over the next 50 years.

How would my children and grandchildren talk to each other, assuming they wanted to talk to each other?

(person speaking over intercom) And the more I looked into how we communicate these days and what the future might look like, the more it became apparent that there were two major groups of developers.

And has often been the case in history, it's east meets west, with China being the central point in the east, and the United States the developmental hub in the west.

China has a long history in relation to communication.

About 3,500 years ago, they developed one of the earliest written languages.

In 200 BC, they invented paper.

In the 6th century, they invented printing with blocks, followed by the development of color printing in India ink.

They developed the hanging scroll, which was an excellent way of communicating as opposed to the hanging Chad that was developed in Florida and totally confused the presidential election of 2000.

And my personal favorite, the Chinese invented the restaurant menu.

The experts I spoke to in the United States about what was happening in communication technology suggested I look at Apple, Google, and Microsoft.

In 1975, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak belonged to something called the Homebrew Computer Club.

It was a bunch of people who got together and talked about computers and traded stuff with each other.

At one point, Jobs and Wozniak took over the garage that belonged to Jobs' parents, and began trying to develop a computer which they believed they could sell to other members of the club.

- The Apple I really was the first fully assembled machine that had a keyboard, and you could use your home television set.

So it really started the journey towards what modern computers were.

Because these were intended for hobbyists, a lot of people modified them.

- In 1977, Jobs and Wozniak introduced the Apple II computer, which was the first computer with a keyboard for input and a color display.

It changed the industry.

- There have only been two milestone products in our industry to date.

The first was Apple II in 1977.

The second was the IBM PC in 1981.

(audience applauds and laughs) Come on, let's be fair.

(audience laughs) What we need now is the third industry milestone product.

And that's what Macintosh is all about.

- Seven years later, Apple introduced the Macintosh, which was the first computer to use a mouse and a graphic display.

- But tonight, really, for the second time ever, we'd like to let Macintosh speak for itself.

- Hello, I am Macintosh.

- And in 2007, Apple redefined the mobile phone industry with the iPhone.

- Today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone and here it is.

- The iPhone brought together the cell phone and the computer.

- Larry had this crazy idea that he was gonna download all the links on the web and then do something with them.

- Google was launched in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

The objective was to market Google Search, which has become the most used web-based search engine.

They developed the algorithm when they were students at Stanford University in California.

Google, by the way is a misspelling of googol, the number one followed by a hundred zeros.

The name was chosen to indicate that the search engine was designed to offer large amounts of information.

In 1975, Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded a company they called Microsoft.

The name is a combination of the words microcomputer and software.

New computers were being developed and offered to the public.

The manufacturers who were producing the computers thought the profits would be in the sale of the computers themselves.

Gates and Allen had a different idea.

They thought the money was in the software that would be run on the computers.

In 1975, the world's first microcomputer was introduced, the Altair 8800.

It was the first computer which the average person could afford, and it launched the microcomputer business.

But it had a major problem.

It was very difficult to use.

You controlled it with a set of switches on the front panel.

It would respond with a row of lights.

It communicated in binary code, which is the computer equivalent of Morse code.

And to think that the average person could use it was ridiculous.

- Clear?

Why, a four year old child could understand this report.

Run out and find me a four year old child, I can't make a head of tail out of it.

- Gates and Allen called up Altair and offered them their basic system to use with their computer.

The big breakthrough for Microsoft came in 1981, when IBM selected Microsoft to provide the software for their new computer.

The software was called MS-DOS.

Like the other manufacturers of computers, IBM thought the profits were in the hardware.

Software was something you just gave away free with each computer.

Microsoft didn't ask IBM to pay a great deal of money to use MS-DOS.

All Microsoft wanted was an itsy bity, teeny weeny license fee on every computer that IBM sold.

Microsoft also retained the rights to sell MS-DOS to other computer manufacturers.

It wasn't long before virtually every computer sold included a copy of MS-DOS.

The major exception was Apple.

As the PC industry exploded, Microsoft quickly became the biggest software company in the world.

That's part one of our series on the history and future of communication.

In our next program, we'll see some other things that are happening because of the extraordinary advances in technology.

- Three, two, one, ready, go.

- We'll cover a story about a team that developed a technology that allows a blind skier to complete in major skiing events by attaching a mobile phone to the top of her helmet, and how the team installed a mechanism that sends a picture to her coach at the speed of the human nervous system, and how the coach sends back instructions.

We'll see how the international space station, orbiting 240 miles above the earth, is tracking and reporting on the location and movement of wildlife and the health of our planet's ecosystem, and how that information from the space station inspired the internet of animals.

You can actually log on eBird and get real time information about different species of birds and what they're doing.

We'll also meet Topher White, who runs an organization called the Rain Forest Connection that uses recondition mobile phones to track the movement of animals in the rain forest.

He listens for illegal loggers and notifies the police.

We'll also take a look at how a program being developed by an ophthalmologist in Spain will allow parents to use their mobile phones to spot visual problems in their young children.

That's really amazing stuff.

That's our first installment of the History and Future of Communication.

I'm Burt Wolf.

Ah but wait, there's more.

Whenever we edit one of our programs, we always end up with more good material than we can fit in interviews, stories, recipes.

So we decided to put them on our website.

BurtWolf.com.

- Oh, just a minute, I'll call them.

Telephone for the Three Stooges!

- Hello?

- Hello?

- Hello?

- Hello.

- Hello, oh.

- Just a minute, my friend, Mr. Hardy will speak to you.

- Hello?

Excuse me, please.

My ear is full of milk.

- Get me Mr. Whitmore.

(phone ringing) - Hello?

- Here's your Florida call Mr. Whitmore.

- All right.

Hello?

- Florida Medical Board, good morning.

- I'd like to talk to the man in charge of the records, please.

- Record Department, just a moment sugar.

Record Department, Colonel Hawkins talking.

- Colonel Hawkins, did you get a wire from me regarding Dr. Hackenbush?

- I'm sorry, sir, but there's a hurricane blowing down here and you will have to talk a little louder.

Woo.

It sure is the windiest day we ever did have.

Woo, it sure is windy.

- [Narrator] Travels and Traditions with Burt Wolf is brought to you by PeakNutritionLabs.com A team of international researchers working on the development nutritional suppliments for improving health and longevity.

PeakNutritionLabs.com And by Swiss International Airlines.

Flying to over 70 worldwide locations.

Truly Swiss made.

Swiss International Airlines.

And by the BMW European Delivery Program, a way to experience the roads that BMW was made to drive.

BMW European Delivery Program.