Use the resources quicklinks below to jump to an item of interest or simply browse down the page.
Sites about the telegraph
Sites about radio
Sites about the telephone
Sites about television
Sites about the internet
Books about the telegraph
Books about radio
Books about the telephone
Books about television
Books about the internet
For online information about telegraph history, try these links:
The History of the Telegraph and Telegraphy (About.com).
Telegraphy, from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Technical History of the Electromagnetic Telegraph
A Brief History of the Telegraph
Library of Congress: Samuel F.B. Morse Papers
For online information about telephone history, try these links:
The History of the Telephone (About.com)
Telephone, from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Library of Congress: Inventing the Telephone
The JKL Telephony Museum website.
For online information about radio history, try these links:
The Invention of Radio (About.com)
Radio, from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
United States Early Radio History, a wonderfully detailed site by Thomas H. White
Old-Time Radio – about programs from radio’s “golden age”
Carly Hallman, “The History of the Car Radio” (resource suggestion submitted by the New Hampshire STEM Club for Girls)
For online information about television history, try these links:
Television History (About.com)
Television, from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
FCC: The Technology of Television
Television History – The First 75 Years
For online information about internet history, try these links:
All About the Internet, from the Internet Society
W3C’s A Little History of the World Wide Web
FCC: Looking Back at How We Got Connected to the Internet
The Internet Archive: the home page, a page with links to original ARPANET info.
Internet, from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Histories of the Internet from Many Sources – Links from the Internet Society
The Wired magazine archive – The Wired sitemap has links to complete contents of issues from 1.01 to most recent (readers may have to subscribe to access some of this content)
The Internet History Mailing List
Classic books offer pre-2000s information-technology history lessons
To read more about the history of the telegraph, see:
Menahem Blondheim, “News Over the Wires” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).
Charles F. Briggs and Augustus Maverick, “The Story of the Telegraph” (New York: Rudd & Carleton, 1858).
Lewis Coe, “The Telegraph: A History of Morse’s Invention and Its Predecessors in the United States” (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 1993).
George P. Oslin, “The Story of Telecommunications,” (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1992).
Frank Parsons, “The Telegraph Monopoly” (Philadelphia: C.F. Taylor, 1899).
Victor Rosewater, “History of Cooperative News-Gathering in the United States” (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1930).
Tom Standage, “The Victorian Internet” (New York: Walker & Company, 1998).
Robert Luther Thompson, “Wiring a Continent: The History of the Telegraph Industry in the United States, 1832-1866 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947).
Frederick Williams, “The Communications Revolution” (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1982).
To read more about the history of radio, see:
Hugh G. J. Aitken, “Syntony and Spark: The Origins of Radio” (New York: Wiley, 1976).
Hugh G.J. Aitken, “The Continuous Wave: Technology and American Radio, 1900-1932” (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985).
W.J. Baker, “A History of the Marconi Company” (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1970).
Eric Barnouw, “A Tower in Babel: A History of Broadcasting in the United States to 1933” (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966).
Kenneth Bilby, “The General: David Sarnoff and the Rise of the Communications Industry” (New York: Harper & Row, 1986).
Susan J. Douglas, “Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899-1922” (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987).
W.P. Jolly, “Marconi” (London: Constable & Company, 1972).
Tom Lewis, “Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio” (New York: HarperCollins, 1991).
Paul Schubert, “The Electric Word” (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1928).
J.C.W. Reith, “Broadcast Over Britain” (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1924).
To read more about the history of the telephone, see:
H.M. Boettinger, “The Telephone Book: Bell, Watson, Vail and American Life, 1876-1983” (Stearn, 1983).
Robert V. Bruce, “Bell: Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude” (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973).
Lewis Coe, “The Telephone and Its Several Inventors: A History” (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1995).
Ithiel de Sola Pool, “Forecasting the Telephone: A Retrospective Technology Assessment of the Telephone” (Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Company, 1983).
Claude S. Fischer, “America Calling” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
Edwin S. Grosvenor and Morgan Wesson, “Alexander Graham Bell: The Life and Times of the Man Who Invented the Telephone” (Harry Abrams, 1997).
John E. Kingsbury, “The Telephone and Telephone Exchanges: Their Invention and Development” (Longmans, Green, 1915; reprinted by Arno Press, 1972).
George B. Prescott, “Bell’s Electric Speaking Telephone: Its Invention, Construction, Application, Modification and History” (D. Appleton, 1884; reprinted by Arno Press, 1972).
George Shiers, “The Telephone: An Historical Anthology” (Printed in Arno Press, “Historical Studies in Telecommunications,” 1977).
To read more about the history of television, see:
Albert Abramson, “History of Television, 1880-1941” (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1987).
Erik Barnouw, “Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American Television” (New York: Oxford, 1990).
R.W. Burns, “John Logie Baird: Television Pioneer” (London: Institution of Electrical Engineers, 2000).
D.G. Fink, “Television Broadcasting in the United States, 1927-1950,” Proceedings of the IRE (February 1951), 116-123.
David E. and Marshall J. Fisher, “Tube: The Invention of Television” (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1996).
Donald Godfrey, “Philo T. Farnsworth: Father of Television” (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2001).
Thomas H. Hutchinson, “Here Is Television: Your Window to the World” (New York: Hastings House, 1946).
Axel G. Jensen, “The Evolution of Modern Television,” Journal of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (November 1954), 174-188.
George Shiers, “Historical Notes on Television Before 1900,” Journal of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (March 1977), 129-137.
Hugh R. Slotten, “Radio and Television Regulation: Broadcast Technology in the United States, 1920-1960” (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).
Joseph H. Udelson, “The Great Television Race: History of the American Television Industry, 1925-1941” (University of Alabama Press, 1982).
Peter F. Yanczer, “The Mechanics of Television: The Story of Mechanical Television” (St. Louis: the author, 1987).
To read more about the history of the internet, see:
Janna Quitney Anderson, “Imagining the Internet: Personalities, Predictions, Perspectives” (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005). Information about the content is available online here.
Manuel Castells, “The Internet Galaxy” (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Tim Berners-Lee, “Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web” (New York: HarperCollins, 1999).
Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, “Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet” (New York: Touchstone, 1996).
Nicholas Negroponte, “Being Digital” (New York: Vintage, 1996): portions available online here.
Howard Rheingold, “The Virtual Community” (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000); 1993 version available online at here.
William Mitchell, “City of Bits: Space, Place and the Infobahn” (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996); available online here.
View history of other information technologies:
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