visionaries

Anything one man can imagine other men can make real

True geek visionary Jules VerneIn the modern media of the 21st century people often complain that the news seems to focus on problems rather than solutions. As we study geek history we find many examples of the news media telling what can't be done while someone was in the process of showing us what is possible.

In the 1870s there were three different inventors working on the technology to transmit speech electrically that would become our telephone system. Thankfully they did not believe what they read in the newspaper back then.

In 1865 an editorial in the Boston Post stated that, "Well informed people know it is impossible to transmit the voice over wires and that were it possible to do so, the thing would be of no practical value."

A New York news item from 1868 reports, "A man has been arrested in New York for attempting to extort funds from ignorant and superstitious people by exhibiting a device which he says will convey the human voice any distance over metallic wires so that it will be heard by the listener at the other end. He calls this instrument a telephone. Well-informed people know that it is impossible to transmit the human voice over wires."

Jules Verne was a true inventor and visionary

There were many people who could look into the future and see what was possible, such as a true visionary Jules Verne, who was quoted in 1865 as saying, "In spite of the opinions of certain narrow-minded people who would shut up the human race upon this globe, we shall one day travel to the moon, the planets, and the stars with the same facility, rapidity and certainty as we now make the ocean voyage from Liverpool to New York."

When was internet invented and who invented the internet

Geek History explores who invented the internetIn the case of the internet, and various internet technologies, they were not conceptualized in a single invention or event, but have evolved over time as the result of many events. The creation of the internet is the work of many visionaries that we discuss here at Geek History.

If you study the history of the United States in the 1960s, you will see the unlikely cold war partnership that created the internet as ground breaking as the technology they were creating. On one hand you had the California universities full of college students organizing demonstrations protesting against the Vietnam war. You would not think the universities would see the military as their friend. But on the other hand you have various projects funded by ARPA (the Department of Defense) using these same universities to research the concepts that would create the framework for the ARPAnet.

There are many facets of the internet that were unprecedented. University geeks using Department of Defense money to create a world wide communications network, with parts and accessories being built by American companies. The creation of the internet shows what is possible when the government, the academic world, and business, join forces and work together. It brought together very different people to work for one common mission.

The concept of a "world wide web" to be built upon the internet was not the improvement on any existing idea, because anything world wide was pretty non existent the 1950s.

When was internet invented?

To answer the question when was internet invented we need to put the question into perspective. Many people use the term internet interchangeably with "the web" or world wide web. The internet is the information super highway, the infrastructure on which we travel. HTML and Web browsers make up the world wide web, the vehicle we use to travel on the highway.

The Internet we know today was not developed from a single network that simply grew and grew, it was an evolution of many different communications and technology tools coming together.

Subscribe to RSS - visionaries