Here's a look at some of the technologies that have changed the way people communicate.
Newspapers
Australia's earliest newspaper, the Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, were first printed in 1803.
The techniques employed to print the news have changed over time, as have methods used to collect news: from relying on four-month-old news from England via ship, to receiving the latest in news via the Internet.
Newspapers revolutionised the movement of information and expanded the number of people receiving news.
Telephone
In 1876, Alexander Bell patented his revolutionary invention, the telephone. A few days later the first telephone call occurred and consisted of the conversation “Mr Watson, come here, I need you” - a message from the inventor to his assistant.
Some 100 years later in 1973, a senior engineer at Motorola, Martin Cooper, invented the first mobile phone. It weighed 1.1 kilograms, allowed 30 minutes of talking time and took 10 hours to charge.
The first mobile phones went on sale in the US in 1983 and cost a whopping $4,000 each. Interestingly, today more people in the world have mobile phones than toilets.
Radio
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The first licensed broadcast station in Australia was 2CM, owned by Charles MacLurcan in 1923.
One of the major early uses of radio was for communicating at sea, allowing ships to contact each other and people on shore.
This served as an aid to navigation, as well as allowing ships to send emergency distress signals.
Text Message
Engineer Neil Papworth sent the first ever text message on December 3, 1992. It read ‘Merry Christmas'.
While it might be easy to imagine the message being sent from mobile phone to mobile phone, it was actually sent from a computer to the Orbatel 901 mobile phone.
In 2010 the International Telecommunications Union reported that 6.1 trillion texts were sent worldwide.
Today, the SMS text message is considered out-dated with several other services and apps that resemble the text message now leading in usage.
These include Apple’s iMessage, Facebook Messenger, Viber and WhatsApp.
Email
Currently half of the worldwide population uses email. According to research firm Radicati Group, by the end of the year the number of worldwide email users will reach over 3.7 billion.
In 1971, American computer programmer Ray Tomlinson sent the first networked email, where he used the ‘@’ symbol to connect users and their devices.
His invention has now replaced handwritten correspondence in many cases of communication.
Social Media
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The first social networking site founded was Six Degrees, which ran from 1997-2001. Now, the social media platform with the highest number of users is Facebook.
Recent data shows there are over 16 million active Facebook users in Australia, meaning 65.8% of the total Australian population use the site.
Coming in second is YouTube with approximately 15 million users, followed by WordPress.com with over 5 million.
Smartphone
Different from mobile phones, smartphones are able to interpret and decipher information. The first smartphone was released in 1992 - 15 years before the Apple iPhone.
It was created by IBM and called the Simon Personal Communicator. The phone had the ability to send and receive emails and faxes, write notes as well as having other built-in features.
The term ‘smartphone’ was coined three years later.
