From Gutenberg to Google

Exploring the world of media and technology, starting in the 1450s when Gutenberg invented the printing press.

1450s Johannes Gutenberg invents the printing press, which revolutionizes Bible distribution by making it widely accessible. 

1826 French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce produces the first known permanent photograph. 

1844 Samuel F.B. Morse demonstrates his telegraph by transmitting the message “What hath God wrought?” to Baltimore from the chambers of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. The message marks the start of a new era in communication. 

1874 Alexander Graham Bell invents the telephone and is granted the first patent in 1876.That year he also debuts the telephone at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. 

1895 Frenchman Louis Lumière and his brother, Auguste, project moving, photographic pictures to a paying audience through their cinématographe, giving birth to the cinema and the modern film age.

1901 Guglielmo Marconi transmits the first radio signal across the Atlantic Ocean—from Cornwall, England, to Newfoundland.

1912 The first American feature film, From the Manger to the Cross, premieres. The film is an account of the life of Christ based on the Gospels. 

1921 Calvary Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh broadcasts on local radio station KDKA the first regularly scheduled church service.

1922 Aimee Semple McPherson becomes the first woman to preach a sermon over the radio. She launches a regular radio broadcast, which helps propel her to prominence, and in 1924 becomes the first woman to own a radio station.

1927 At the ripe old age of 21, Philo Farnsworth transmits the first image on television. 

1950 Evangelist Billy Graham airs “motion pictures” of a crusade event in theaters and on television between 1950 and 1954.

1960 Pat Robertson launches the first Christian television network, Christian Broadcasting Network.

1969 Four host computers are connected into ARPANET, the grandfather of the Internet. 

1973 Martin Cooper of Motorola develops the first cell phone approved for commercial use.

1979 Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp. launches the first commercially automated cellular network in Japan.

1979 Campus Crusade for Christ’s Jesus film opens in theaters. It becomes the most widely viewed Christian film, with translations in more than 800 languages and billions of viewers.

1981 IBM sells its first personal computer. Sales are so overwhelming, Time magazine names the PC its “Man of the Year” in January 1983. (The Altair 8800, the first successful personal computer, had been available since 1975.)

1992 Internet Christian Library (ICLnet) launches what may be the first Christian website. Christians’ presence on the Web takes off in 1995, with early sites such as Brigada Today, an online newsletter affiliated with the AD2000 & Beyond prayer and missions movement, and the apologetics site Stonewall Revisited, which launches that year.

1998 Google was first incorporated as a privately held company. Stanford University students Larry Page and Sergey Brinn launched the search engine a year earlier.