Research On The Development Of Wireless Communication From Telegraph To Mobile Phone In The Perspective Of Sociology Of Technology

Wireless Communication—a new-born technology for just more then a hundred years—affected our society profoundly from lifestyle to industry and others. In the beginning as telegraph, then the pagers, mobile phones and wireless accessing networks, we even cannot imaging what our life will be without all these wireless communicational tools. And the amazement of it development from theoretical assumption, engineering application to ubiquity attracted us mostly. Many theses and books are written about, and also clarified, the historical development of wireless communication based on the massive historical materials, but there is one aspect that almost neglected, which is to analyze it's history from a perspective of the Sociology of Technology, and to explore the technology by the humanities and social issues arising from it. In addition, by the help of historical analysis about the development of the technology at different stages, we should re-examine the mode of technological development, relationship between technology development and the social changes, and then we may get some new conclusions. The initial purpose of writing this article is also derived from this.Sociology of Technology is a science which regarded the technology as a social phenomenon, and studied the interaction and coordination between the technology and the society. The sociology researches of technology include, on the one hand, the social impact of technology, that is, the social mechanism of technological development; on the other hand, the impact of technology on society, that is, the social function of technology. In contemporary, the relationship between technology and economy, technology and society are more and more closely, so if we want to grasp the technological and social law of develop, we must considered all this aspects comprehensively. Therefore, study from a sociology perspective of technology about the history of wireless, and also explore the humanities and social problems caused by this technology should be of great practical significance.In this paper, the development of wireless communication will be divided into a number of stages in accordance with different historical periods, each stage analyzes the interaction of technology and society based on the historical investigation. The full text is divided into five parts: the introduction is about the basic research and technical background before the appearance of radiotelegraph. Since then four chapters followed, each chapter includes history retrospect, sociological exploration and a summary. The first chapter is about the invention of wireless telegraphy and it's early applications; the second chapter about the birth of modern wireless communications; the third chapter on the massive application of modern wireless communications; the last one on the status of wireless communication technologies and trends.