Information & communication

Topics represented

Information & communication (35) · Infrastructure (35) · Technology (35) · Oceans, navigation & cartography (20) · Nautical cartography (11) · Empire, trade & power (6) · Institutions & standards (6) · Hydrography & bathymetry (5) · Ocean navigation (4) · Indigenous knowledge (3) · War & military technology (3) · British Empire (3)

Records and sources

Ordered by start date. Long lives and processes may begin before the period you want to study.

1. c. 3200 BCE

   Proto-cuneiform records at Uruk

   Tablets from Uruk recorded goods and rations with pictographs. They are among the earliest evidence of writing and show information becoming storable and transmissible beyond human memory.

2. trad. 451 BCE–trad. 449 BCE

   Law of the Twelve Tables

   Tradition places the codification of the Twelve Tables between 451 and 449 BCE. Their surviving fragments show written fixation of rules, not a complete code or a guarantee of equality before the law.

3. 46 BCE–45 BCE

   Julian calendar reform

   Caesar introduced a solar calendar that reordered Roman civic timekeeping. Its implementation combined calculation, political decision, and administration; later adjustments show it was not a finished, immutable system.

4. c. 50

   Periplus of the Erythraean Sea records Indian Ocean routes

   Around the mid-first century, an anonymous Greek-speaking merchant described ports, goods, and sailing seasons from the Red Sea to East Africa and India. The text preserves one merchant perspective, yet documents systematic use of monsoons within networks already shared by many peoples.

5. 105

   Court report on papermaking

   Chinese sources attribute a 105 report on a papermaking method to Cai Lun. It marks the improvement and spread of a lightweight medium for recording and circulating information, not the absolute origin of all paper.

6. c. 150

   Ptolemy systematizes coordinates and projections

   Claudius Ptolemy’s Geography combined a gazetteer with instructions for plotting places through latitude, longitude, and projections. It was not directly a nautical chart, and no secure original maps survive, but its system enabled map reconstruction and influenced later Islamic and European traditions.

7. c. 850–c. 1100

   Transmission of Greek manuscripts

   Greek manuscript production and copying reached great intensity in the middle Byzantine period, preserving and reworking ancient and Christian texts. It was a practice of varied workshops, readers, and patrons, not passive or exclusive preservation.

8. c. 1270–c. 1500

   Portolan charts for Mediterranean coasts and bearings

   From the late thirteenth century, manuscript charts represented ports and coastlines with bearing networks useful for Mediterranean voyages. They did not account for Earth’s curvature or solve ocean navigation by themselves, but turned accumulated pilots’ experience into a reusable graphic medium.

9. c. 1375

   Catalan Atlas: routes, power, and cosmography

   The atlas attributed to the Jewish Majorcan cartographer Abraham Cresques combined portolan techniques with geographic, political, economic, and legendary information about the known world. It was a courtly cosmography rather than simply a shipboard chart, showing how maps and patronage organized knowledge and power.

10. 1377

    Jikji printed with movable metal type

    Jikji was printed in Cheongju with movable metal type. It is the oldest surviving evidence of printing by this method and locates a decisive textual-reproduction innovation in Korea.

11. c. 1450

    European reusable movable-type printing

    In the 1450s, Gutenberg and collaborators developed mechanized printing with reusable metal type in Mainz. It accelerated book production in Europe without being the world’s first history of printing.

12. c. 1450

    Fra Mauro world map synthesizes travelers’ knowledge

    Fra Mauro’s monumental Venetian world map assembled thousands of inscriptions and knowledge from texts, merchants, and travelers around 1450. It marks a transition between medieval cosmography and new nautical information, yet represents the world known through its informant networks rather than a neutral, complete view of the planet.

13. 1490

    Ibn Mājid compiles Indian Ocean nautical knowledge

    Aḥmad ibn Mājid assembled in the Kitāb al-Fawāʾid treatises on routes, ports, landfalls, directions, and astronomical navigation across the Indian Ocean and neighboring seas. The work establishes a written Arab deep-sea tradition on its own merits; it does not treat the claim that Ibn Mājid personally piloted Vasco da Gama as fact.

14. 1507

    Waldseemüller names America and separates the Pacific

    Martin Waldseemüller’s world map was the first known to use the name America and to show a Western Hemisphere separated from Asia by another ocean. It fixed a new European conception of the globe, although the cartographic sources behind its depiction of that ocean before Balboa and Magellan remain uncertain.

15. 1569

    Mercator publishes his projection for navigators

    Gerardus Mercator published a world map using a conformal projection on which a constant bearing appears as a straight line, a practical advantage for plotting courses. The projection distorts area, especially near the poles; its nautical usefulness does not make that distortion a neutral picture of the world’s size.

16. c. 1701

    Halley maps magnetic variation

    Edmond Halley assembled ocean observations and drew lines joining places with equal compass variation. The chart turned a changing magnetic phenomenon into navigable information and was an early use of isolines, although it depended on incomplete measurements and required updating.

17. c. 1725–c. 1770

    Tupaia

    A priest, adviser, and navigator from Ra‘iātea, Tupaia brought the Endeavour extensive knowledge of Pacific islands, routes, languages, and relationships. He acted as navigator, interpreter, and mediator; reducing him to Cook’s companion obscures the Polynesian agency that made the ocean legible to the European expedition.

18. c. 1745–c. 1797

    Olaudah Equiano

    Equiano survived Atlantic enslavement, purchased his freedom and became a sailor, merchant, writer and abolitionist activist. His 1789 autobiography turned a life spanning Africa, the Caribbean, America and Britain into public evidence against the slave trade. Historians continue to debate his birthplace; this profile separates that uncertainty from his extensively documented travels, writings and abolitionist campaign

19. 1769–1770

    Tupaia and the Endeavour create a cross-cultural chart

    Tupaia and members of the Endeavour crew made the chart in two sessions and three stages between August 1769 and February 1770. It evidences the reach of Polynesian knowledge and a translation between mapping systems; its spatial logic remains interpreted, so no modern reconstruction should be presented as consensus.

20. 1787

    National organization of the campaign against the slave trade

    Quaker and Anglican activists formed the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, coordinating petitions, evidence, publications, and boycotts. The metropolitan campaign also depended on Black testimony and the continuing resistance of enslaved people

21. 1789

    Olaudah Equiano publishes his narrative of enslavement and freedom

    The Interesting Narrative recounted Olaudah Equiano’s kidnapping, Atlantic passage, enslavement, purchase of freedom, and maritime life. Its success gave public authority to an African voice within abolitionism; some details of his birthplace remain debated, not his authorship or impact

22. 1795

    British Hydrographic Office is established

    The British Admiralty established a hydrographic department in 1795 and began issuing official charts in 1800. The office turned naval surveys, corrections, and notices into continuous state infrastructure serving both navigation and imperial expansion.

23. c. 1800–c. 1900

    Stick charts teach Marshall Islands swell patterns

    Marshallese navigators built stick-and-shell charts to model swells, refraction, and relationships among atolls. They were teaching and memory aids interpreted by specialists before a voyage, not scale maps or objects normally consulted at sea.

24. 1844

    Morse’s first public telegram

    A line between Washington and Baltimore carried Morse’s first public telegraph message. Electric signaling turned distant messaging into near-instant infrastructure.

25. c. 1847

    Maury turns logbooks into wind and current charts

    Matthew Fontaine Maury systematized observations from many logbooks to produce wind-and-current charts and sailing directions. The method shortened routes and turned data contributed by many mariners into operational knowledge, although institutional authorship should not hide that collective work.

26. c. 1850–c. 1871

    Railways, telegraphy, and mass-mobilization planning

    By the mid-nineteenth century, general staffs and civil administrations increasingly coordinated reserves, trains, maps, supplies, and telegraphic communications to concentrate forces. The Prussian case shows both the possibilities of railway plans and their limits: rapid transport alone did not solve loading, storage, supply, political decisions, or an opponent’s response.

27. 1866

    Operational transatlantic telegraph cable

    After several failed attempts, the 1866 cable operationally connected Ireland and Newfoundland and reduced messages that had traveled for days by ship to minutes. It was costly, fragile infrastructure initially oriented toward states, news, and business, not universal or instantaneous communication for everyone.

28. 1876

    Bell’s practical telephone

    Bell received a patent and demonstrated an apparatus capable of transmitting voice; its development was collective and contested. The telephone enabled real-time conversation over wired networks.

29. 1895

    Demonstration of wireless telegraphy

    Guglielmo Marconi demonstrated modern wireless telecommunications in Italy. Radio freed electric communication from exclusive dependence on cables, building on contributions by many researchers.

30. 1903–2026

    GEBCO coordinates a global bathymetric chart

    A commission chaired by Albert I of Monaco initiated the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans in 1903 to harmonize nomenclature and assemble soundings. GEBCO evolved from printed sheets to global digital atlases and grids; in 2026 it continues as a joint IHO–UNESCO-IOC program.