• German scientist Karl Ferdinand Braun constructs the first cathode ray tube scanning device, a technology still in use today in TVs and computer monitors.
• British physicist Joseph Thomson discovers the electron.

• Niagara Falls polyphase AC power plant begins operation.

• Guglielmo Marconi sends and receives wireless signals in Italy; Alexander S. Popoff accomplishes the same feat in Russia.

• United States Gramophone Company is founded in Washington, D.C.

1893

• Valdemar Poulson invents the wire recorder, in use until the magnetic tape recorder developed just after World War II.
• Nikola Tesla describes and demonstrates the basics of radio; later he is awarded patent supremacy over Marconi.

• Nikola Tesla invents the Tesla coil, which produces high voltage at high frequency.

• Emile Berliner applies for a patent on the flat phonograph disc.
• Thomas Edison and William Dickson make a sound "motion picture" with a phonograph synchronized with a Kinetoscope.
• Heinrich Hertz detects and produces radio waves.
• Oberlin Smith describes a magnetic sound recording system, a forerunner of the magnetic tape recording system.
• Nikola Tesla invents first AC induction motor, AC/DC transformer and polyphase AC system.

1887

• The first "dry" battery cell, the forerunner of the modern battery, is  developed.
• Emile Berliner patents the gramophone, the first record player.

1886

• Westinghouse begins operation of first AC power plant at Buffalo, N.Y.

1884

• Paul Nipkow invents a scanning disc for the first mechanical television.

1883

• Thomas Edison patents the Edison Effect, which later developed into the vacuum tube by Lee deForest.

1882

• Lars Ericsson invents the telephone handset with a combined microphone and earpiece.

1879

• Thomas Edison invents the incandescent light bulb.

1877

• Thomas Edison invents the phonograph.
• French Poet Charles Cros suggests recording sound on flat disc.

1876

• Alexander Graham Bell receives a U.S. patent for the telephone.

1872

• Thomas Edison patents an electronic typewriter, the prototype for later teletype machines.

1863

• Giovanni Caselli receives a U.S. patent for the fax machine based on Bain’s ideas called the "pantelegraph". Service between Paris and Lyons, France, operates between 1865 and 1870, but the Franco-Prussian War ends the experiment.

1857

• French Scientist Leon Scott de Martinville demonstrates rudimentary sound recording technology using soot-covered paper cylinders.

1844

• Samuel F.B. Morse sends the telegraph message "What hath God wrought?"

1840

• Alexander Bain proposes a fax machine that uses synchronized pendulums to scan an image at the transmitting end and send electrical impulses to a matching pendulum at the receiving end to reconstruct the image. The device, however, is not developed.

1832

• Babbage conceives the first computer, the analytical engine, a mechanical calculating machine driven by external instructions akin to modern-day software. He never builds it.

1831

• Michael Faraday converts mechanical energy into electrical energy.

1822

• Charles Babbage develops the Difference Engine, the first – albeit enormous – calculator.

1799

• Alexandra Volta invents the first battery. 

• Benjamin Franklin demonstrates lightning is electricity.