Blog Post #5

 Learnings from Each One Teach One

This past week my fellow peers put on some amazing presentations that give me more insight into the realm of communication technologies such as radio, newspapers, and Bluetooth.

So now to honor their incredible efforts and try to extend their reach of helpful knowledge, I will discuss these topics here!

Radio

The first presentation that will be discussed will be the one of the radio.

The first radio was created because of the discovery of electromagnetic waves. As such, the technology revolutionized the communication industry as it allowed mass communication easily without newspapers, which took also way longer for people to receive because of travel times. 

Because of this, radio boomed from 1930 to 1950 and this time is recognized as the golden age of radio. Eventually, the FCC was created because of the radio, and they now help control and organize radio stations. 

Shown here is one of the old vintage radios from the 1940s.

Newspapers

The next technology is that of the newspaper, which happened to be a lot older than I thought as newspapers can be found as old as during Roman times. 

The printing press heavily boosted their popularity and Sweden was the first country to give the freedom of the press. The US eventually gave freedom of the press as well about a hundred years later. In fact, the first newspaper in the US got shut down due to censorship. 

However, like mentioned during the radio section newspapers had some constraints. First, for one to receive the newspapers they had to be given it in person. This was not a problem for big cities, where most newspapers could be found, but for rural areas it practically meant they would very rarely receive news, and if they did it would likely be outdated. 

The USPS tried to solve this in America, but travel times were still quite long during the time since there were no automobiles or airplanes to decrease the travel times.

The other downside was the fact that they had to be printed. Unlike the radio, newspapers costed a lot to produce because of the numerous amounts of paper and ink that had to be used, and this problem was further exaggerated before the printing press as it was hard to mass print.

Above is a picture of a Canadian newspaper from the 1940s.

Bluetooth

For the final technology I will discuss, I chose Bluetooth due to some personal reasons.

Before going into this presentation, I knew of a person from history named Harald Bluetooth who was a leader of a group of Vikings. Due to his unique name and the unique name of the brand of Bluetooth, I wondered if there was a connection. In fact, there was! 

Bluetooth was developed in the late 1990s and received major popularity for allowing wireless connection between devices. 

Bluetooth was named after the character Harald Bluetooth (the person I thought of), and the symbol for Bluetooth is both Nordic letters H and B combined (also known as the initials for Harald Bluetooth), as shown above. 

Today, Bluetooth is still improving its technology to further increase our connections between devices wirelessly. 

So that's all the communication technologies I wanted to discuss! I hope every person reading this learned something interesting just like I did! Amazing thanks to everyone who did their presentations during class, they were absolutely delightful to learn about.