What makes man different from the animals? Talking, walking, using tools, and, of course, speech! Now we are not all Zeus, so as we started to need to communicate over greater distances we used everything from pigeons to drums then semaphore and in 1800-odd, we discover electricity and that enabled the telegraph, then the telephone - and now automatic networks enable hassle - and crackle - free conversations from one side of the world to the other. Meantime, Marconi was experimenting with the wireless in the 1890s and gradually that became indispensable as a means of quickly and efficiently inf...