Present Perfect and Past Simple

Getting in Touch Through the Ages

500 years ago it took five moths for the
first news of Christopher Columbus
arrival in America to reach
Queen Isabella in Spain 

Nobody knows who wrote the first letter or when, but we know that 4,000 years ago in Ancient Egypt people carried letters by hand over hundreds of kilometres. Very few people could write so there were special people, called scribes, who wrote leters for everyone else.

In those days you didn't need a stamp. The first stamp didn't appear until 1840 and it cost just one penny. Nowadays one of the these original stamps costs € 375. Letter writing was so popular in the 1840s that they delivered the post severeal times a day!

150 years ago, it took two
weeks for news of
President Lincoln
assassination in the USA
to reah Europe

An American company - Remington and Sons - made the first typewriter in 1871. All the letters in the word typewriter were on the top line of the keyboard so that salesmen could demonstrate the machine more easily. Amazingly, the letters are still in the same place on the modern computer keyboard!

In 1876, when Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated a fantastic new invention called the telephone, nobody was very interested in it. The first fax machine appeared at around the same time, but it was so enormous that no one wanted one - in fact fax machines didn't become popular for another hundred years

Then there was the walkie-talkie, a small two-way radio first used by the US army in the 1930s. However, since they weighed around 13.5 kilos, the talking was perhaps easier than the walking! After World War Two they became popular with police officers. Before that they had to use whistles to call for help!

Nowadays of course we can send messages and pictures around the world in a few seconds using computers and mobile phones. It's hard to believe that e-mail was only invented in 1971, and the first text message was sent in 1992. Today we send over a billion text messages around the world every single day, and an incredible thirty-six billion e-mails!