List of different means of communication used since early days and also mention in which century/decade that were used
Answers
It all depends on what exactly you mean by ‘olden days’. Decades ago? centuries ago? or millennia ago? In the late forties, early fifties and sixties, we communicated either verbally by actually meeting one another face to face, or by sending letters.
Landline telephones became common in the fifties, but middle class homes could not afford them. Offices had them, and people in the upper middle class could afford them. If we, the ordinary middle class folks, had good relations with them, they were often kind enough to receive messages for us and also allowed us to use the phone, when we wished to talk to others.
All telephone calls were local calls. STD calls were unknown then. To talk to someone in another city in another part of the country, trunk calls were used, but they were expensive and had to be booked in advance through the telephone operator. Telephony was rather primitive those days compared to today. We had to shout into the mouthpiece to be heard properly at the other end, and there would be frequent interruptions.
Other means of communication were telegrams that often arrived with typos, but a telegram could reach within hours on the same day anywhere in the country.
The most common means of remote communication was letter writing. We had postcards, inland letters and envelopes with stamps, and during the sixties if one posted a letter in the morning in one metropolitan city, there was a good chance of the letter being delivered before evening on the next day at another metropolitan city. The post and telegraph department was among the best in the world and commanded great respect. It was corruption-free! Other letters to rural areas sometimes took 48 hours, but almost all letters took no more than three days to reach any part of the country. It depended on how far the place was from the nearest airport or railway station at the destination. Anybody could read whatever was written, and no one was concerned with privacy, which is an obsession these days!
For even more content, we used envelopes with postage stamps stuck on them.
Other means of mass communication (one way, of course) were radio speeches and public meetings. Radio was important in our lives those days.
The eighties saw telephones becoming more common, and soon nearly all middle class families had one. But the real revolution came in the last years of the century when the mobile phone made its appearance. Only the rich could afford them, and I vaguely recall that the instruments (a bare-boned non-touch-screen instrument with a keypad, and one-and-a-half-inch black and white screen) would cost over Rs 17K, and the cost of calling or receiving a call was Rs 17 a minute. Incoming calls were not free in those days. My first cell phone used to look like this. I would keep it switched off so that I did not have to pay Rs 17 a minute to receive calls! I would switch it on only when I wanted to call.
Since then mobile phone communication has undergone a total revolution, and all of you are aware of the developments.
If you go back centuries, then the means of communication were perhaps only couriers trekking through the jungles or riding on horseback. I have heard of pigeons carrying messages, but that was not for the common people.
- Pigeons .
- Writing Letters .
- Smoke Signals .
- Drum Beats .
- Runners .
- Horsemen .
- Inscriptions .
- Cave Paintings .