1800s
- 1801: Jacquard (or Jaccard) Loom mechanical loom controlled by a chain of punched cards, laced together into a continuous sequence
1820s
- 1822: Difference engine Charles Babbage: proposed mechanical calculator designed to tabulate polynomial functions, including logarithmic and trigonometric; never built; inspired by Napoleon's tables?
- Computer History Museum: Babbage
- Who Invented the Computer?
1830s
- 1836: Telegraph: long-distance transmission of textual messages without the physical exchange of an object bearing the message
- pneumatic tubes; How Pneumatic Tubes Work
- "Victorian internet"; 'steampunk': science-fiction with steam-powered machinery; steam engines were invented earlier
- How Steampunk Works; How Robber Barons hijacked the "Victorian Internet"
- 1837: Analytical engine Charles Babbage: proposed mechanical general-purpose computer; never built
- Computer science: Enchantress of abstraction Richard Holmes re-examines the legacy of Ada Lovelace, mathematician and computer pioneer; 9/3/2015
- How Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage Invented the World’s First Computer: An Illustrated Adventure in Footnotes and Friendship 6/15/2015
- Lady Ada Lovelace; A Day to Remember the First Computer Programmer Was a Woman 10/15/2013
1840s
- 1844: Arithmometer commercial (4-function) mechanical calculator
- How Calculators Work
- 1846: Fax machine: transmission of scanned printed material (both text and images)
- How Fax Machines Work
- The Secret Life of the Fax Machine
1850s
- 1858: Transatlantic cable
- What Lies Beneath: The First Transatlantic Communications Cables 3/18/2016
- The Remarkable Story of the Underwater Internet 7/2014
- This Is What the Internet Looks Like as a Subway Map submarine fiber optic cables; 4/4/2014
- laying cables: first; later ones
1860s
- 1863: Darwin Among the Machines article by Samuel Butler article reworked into his 1872 novel Erewhon
1870s
- 1874: Typewriter first commercial
- Why are the keys arranged the way they are on a QWERTY keyboard?
- 1876: Telephone
- How Telephones Work
- The Secret Life of the Telephone
- More 1876 than 1995 how the Internet of Things is more on par with the Industrial Revolution than the digital revolution; 2/20/2014
- 1876: Telectroscope conceptual model of a television or videophone system
- 1878: Telephonoscope fictional videophone + television illustration by George du Maurier
1880s
- 1883: "internet" was used, uncapitalized, as a verb and adjective to refer to interconnected motions.
1890s
- Le Vingtième siècle. La vie électrique by Albert Robida 'The twentieth century. Electric life' SF novel: life in 1955 France; Telephonoscope combines the capabilities of the modern TV, VCR and webcam
- 1894: Radio; How Radio Works
- 1895: Paul Otlet, father of "informaton science": Universal Bibliographic Repertory, a card catalog, information system, search service, universal libraries -- later: Mundaneum
- A forgotten Belgian genius dreamed up the internet over 100 years ago 5/23/2014
- 1898: "From The 'London Times' of 1904", short story by Mark Twain described a fictional invention called a "telectroscope," which worked as a global telephone and made "daily doings of the globe visible to everybody, and audibly discussable too, by witnesses separated by any number of leagues."
References
- Wikipedia: Timeline of computing hardware: 1641–1850, 1851–1930
- Paleofuture (predictions): 1870s; 1880s; 1890s; Early Predictions of the Internet Date Back to 19th Century Sci-Fi
- 'From Atoms to Bits': A Brilliant Visual History of American Ideas word frequency in patent applications from 1840s to present; 2/16/2015
- Understanding the Web, for Fans of Charles Dickens flowchart: "Explain the Internet to a 19th Century British Street Urchin"; 10/26/2010
- Top 10 Industrial Revolution Inventions #10: Difference and Analytical Engines; #3: Telegraph