History of Business Communications, from the Pigeon to Internet Faxing

Progress is an interesting thing, which is why various aspects of it are studied from such different perspectives as the arts, the sciences, politics and culture. Since business is a basic human activity, even when undertaken for dictators and despots in less-than-free settings, it reflects all the progress made in such areas as manufacturing, transportation and, perhaps most importantly, communications. One wag even suggested that a working definition of "capitalism" would be something like "what people do when they're left alone," so in countries with relative amounts of freedom compared to their neighbors will, in fact, become richer than those neighbors through the accumulation of new technologies and discoveries.In the ancient world, the only source of capital sufficient enough to allow road building, geographic expansion, war and global trade was a country or region's rulers. Regimes would change by following the lineage - the prince replaces the king when he dies, etc.
- or through conquest. Those in charge would favor certain families, creating the various world aristocracies, and would also occasionally patronize artists, philosophers and scientists to fund literature, music, art and (occasionally) technological progress. It was, at best, a haphazard system. In the Middle Ages and into the centuries that saw the Enlightenment and the Age of Discovery, however, certain fundamental social changes occurred, particularly in the Western world, to bring about our modern life.Businesspeople as leadersUntil the Protestant Reformation, the only source of power besides monarchs - meaning money, influence, the wherewithal to travel and extend influence -- was the Catholic Church. In the first millennium AD, regional churchmen, Rome-based bureaucrats and the Pope all supported favored thinkers, artists and scientists. Of course, as the stories of Galileo and Copernicus ably demonstrate, one's research results were likely to find skeptical reactions
in an environment subject to thorough "thought control." As the Reformation neared, however, a continent undergoing great political and intellectual ferment was ripe for an explosion in creativity. The freedoms that issued from the Reformation made this progress possible.We find the first private businesspeople and the first attempts at creating legal entities that would outlive their founders in the years between 1500-1600. Guilds, partnerships and cooperative ventures began to form in the various Italian city-states, England, France Spain and, particularly, the Netherlands. Sometimes in league with governments, sometimes with the Church and, in a growing number of instances, among different combinations of private groups and individuals, true innovators and builders began to undertake an almost unlimited number of global explorations in search of opportunity. With travel came the need for improved communications, and it is from this point in history, the Age of Empire, th
at progress in this area came to be the province of business, rather than countries, monarchs and governments.Faster, cheaper, betterIn 1600, it took three months for a message to get from the Imperial Russian Court to whatever French palace the Gallic monarch was inhabiting. Written messages were physically transported, often by a single contingent of official persons, using horses, drawn carts and ocean-going vessels when needed. For several hundred years, during the world's first flush of (comparative) economic freedom, these methods did not change a great deal, although the process was better managed all the time and shaved weeks off some routes. By the time of the famous, and short-lived, Pony Express in the United States, the same technology, the horse, was still in use. The American penchant for organization and management, however, increased the efficiency of the method, but it wouldn't last long. A new age, of invention and technological progress, was at hand.With t
he confluence of transportation and communications technologies in the 1830s to 1850s, the world shrank by huge amounts almost yearly. The railroads that first knit together the Eastern seaboard of the U.S. were soon connecting East to West across the huge North American expanse, while the application of electricity to language and communication resulted in the telegraph. Interestingly, it was private railroads and private communications firms that led the way, as the need to do business (and the promise of profits) continued to drive inventions, adaptations and continued progress in communications.Into the present (and future)The 20th century dawned with a huge dose of progress in a variety of areas. Automobiles were being perfected, powered flight was showing promise, the telephone was becoming a commodity item around the world and radio technology would draw people closer and closer yet. In every instance, businesspeople were at the forefront of the developments, as the p
rofit motive has always supplied, and will continue to supply, a powerful incentive for invention and progress. The moral basis of capitalism, which is not widely publicized in the age of growing government entitlements, is that people who voluntarily do business together enjoy greater incentives for excellence and inventiveness that those who do so in bureaucratic positions and government sinecures.The latter half of the 20th century saw the development of television, fax machines, computers and large-format displays and unprecedented progress in space travel, miniaturization, manufacturing and telecommunications. By filling customer needs, creating new products of value and risking their own capital on research and development, businesspeople took over from monarchs and governments the job of creating the future, of business communications and everything else. From clay tablets and passenger pigeons to the fax machine and cellphone, the history of business communications h
as paralleled human progress itself. Indeed, it moved from a nearby and parallel track onto the one, combined track of progress we all have our eyes on today. The difference is that, instead of pushing progress from behind, businesspeople are now out in front, coming up with all the Next Big Things and pulling the rest of the world, public and private, along behind.

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