In the 19th century, the inventor who discovered a new technology would also tend to become its owner and profit from its success. It was this direct link between innovation and enterprise that gave the telecommunications industry its shape and direction.
The history of telecommunications is dominated by four different kinds of people who pushed forward technological progress, and changed the shape of the industry.
Some, like Graham Bell, were pure inventors only interested in technology for its own sake. The inventors...
The telegraph began as a series of separate and private initiatives. The first lines were owned by railway companies and other organisations that sponsored them and by the inventors who developed them.
When the telephone arrived in the 1870s, it developed initially in...