It's amazing how far technology has taken us, seeing modern devices like the Iphone and Ipad transforming people's everyday lives. How did we go from humble folk content with casual in-person conversation to a global community aware of international events enabled by the internet? The catalyst happens to date back to 1830, when Joseph Henry first successfully propagated an electric signal. This signal was fundamentally made of mere blips, nowhere close to the information content modulated signals are carrying today. Though what Joseph Henry first established was the means to create an electrical disturbance from a significant distance. It took another 7 years for Samuel Finley Breese Morse to invent the telegraph, finally giving meaning to these electrical perturbations by relating a series of them (dits and dahs) to the alphabet, a coding scheme popularly known as Morse code. If it weren't for this marvelous invention, the Titanic would never have had the means of calling for help to the Californian or any nearby ship during its distress. However, man is severely limited against a computing machine, bounded by his own literacy and aptitude. So a receiver circuit took his place, and Morse code was swapped with a more suitable form of “dits and dahs”, i.e. binary encoding.

Binary surpasses Morse in numerous ways. It doesn't need human judgment to identify boundaries, predetermined  prior to coding. Binary also provides flexibility to compression algorithms, giving it an edge in transmission bandwidth. But despite these advantages, binary applications to society's needs were still fraught with challenges. The main obstacle summed up in one word – cost. At the time, circuitry processing binary came at a hefty price. It  consumed so much space, and necessitated copious hours of maintenance (because vacuum tubes usually had misguided bugs and insects crawling in them - messing up operations - coining the infamous phrase “a computer bug”). The electronics industry would have to wait until 1947 for digital communications to flourish, solid-state transistors rising as a contender to handle binary codes practically. Prior to that, the world will have to make do with Morse and raw unmodulated analog signals.

Based on these historical facts, it can be deduced that growth rate in one field of science can determine that of another field, i.e. development of different sectors in science is interdependent. Growth of communications was slow because solid-state electronics needed to implement such growth had to catch up.

When transistors finally gained traction in the market, everyday life would never be the same again. Computing power and memory exploded exponentially. One entrepreneur of transistors, Gordon Moore (co-founder of Intel), predicted transistor density will double yearly on integrated circuits, and remains valid until present times. Because of smaller size, technology became portable. Because of higher computing power and memory, technology found more uses and became indispensable. From bipolar junction transistors (BJTs), solid-state electronics moved further to complementary metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistors. Then came the tri-gate transistor of Intel, integrated in what is marketed as the Ivy Bridge, achieving peak efficiency amongst them all (for now). From analog AMPS (Advanced Mobile Phone System), communications moved up the evolutionary ladder to 2G, 3G, 3.5G, and 3.9G (Long Term Evolution LTE). True 4G is yet to come, and was announced by 3GPP 3rd Generation Partnership Project in its 10th release (LTE-A or LTE Advanced).

Note: Old technologies are not always obsolete. Take vacuum tubes, ancestors of solid-state transistors, which are still used in broadcasting signals because of their appeal in high power applications. Furthermore, copper wire is sometimes still preferred over fiber optic cables in networking due to it being cheaper and easier to handle.

The golden age of electronics and communications is far from over. The threshold is still elusive due to barriers in physical implementation. Some technologies to look forward to are under the fields of photonics and optical circuitry, facets more compatible with fiber optic cables ubiquitous in modern communications today.