Communications

Technology has changed how we communicate. Behind every call and message is communication infrastructure: cables, wireless devices, towers, satellites and data centres that carry messages, pictures and videos.

When Rani, in a village in Madhya Pradesh, sends a voice note to her cousin in Tamil Nadu, it feels simple: tap, record, send. But what journey does that tiny message take?

It's not just two phones. Electricity powers the mobile tower near her village. The message zips through fibre cables buried under fields and roads, goes up to satellites in space, passes through giant servers in faraway cities, and finally pops up on her cousin's phone — all in seconds. A whole invisible network works together so one little 'Namaste' can cross India.

What this makes possible: students can join online classes, use digital libraries and watch learning videos even in remote areas; SMS alerts and apps warn people in disasters; businesses sell worldwide through e-commerce (buying and selling online); and people pay online and use e-governance — the government using technology to deliver services, such as applying for documents, filing complaints or using the DigiLocker app.

A quick timeline:

• 200 BCE–1200 CE — pigeons, runners and horse couriers;
• 1605 — first printed newspaper (Germany); 1780 — India's first newspaper, the Bengal Gazette;
• 1843 — fax machine; 1844 — telegraph (dots and dashes); 1876 — telephone; 1899 — wireless;
• 1927 — television; 1930 onward — All India Radio;
• 1970 — personal computers; 1993 — first smartphone; 1994 — internet and World Wide Web;
• 2000 onward — social media; today — 5G, cloud and AI services.

Two thousand years of runners and pigeons, then everything else in under two hundred.

Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858–1937) was an Indian scientist who pioneered wireless transmission using microwaves. In 1895, in Calcutta, he showed that signals could pass through a wall, ringing a bell from a distance. He also invented a new kind of coherer, a key part of early wireless systems that decoded signals.

Later, Guglielmo Marconi patented a similar device in 1901, sent a radio signal across the Atlantic that year, and won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1909. Bose invented many devices (a crystal detector — an early semiconductor — antennas, waveguides) but rarely patented them, so they did not get international recognition. (A patent is a right that lets only the inventor make, sell or use an invention for a certain number of years.) Bose founded the Bose Institute in 1917.