At the 1932 Plenipotentiary Telegraph Conference and the International Radiotelegraph Conference in Madrid, the two organizations decided to merge to form the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). They defined telecommunication as "any telegraphic or telephonic communication of signs, signals, writing, facsimiles and sounds of any kind, by wire, wireless or other systems or processes of electric signaling or visual signaling (semaphores)."

The definition was later reconfirmed, according to Article 1.3 of the Radio Regulations (RR), telecommunication, which defined it as "Any transmission, emission or reception of signs, signals, writings, images and sounds or intelligence of any nature by wire, radio, optical, or other electromagnetic systems".

Beacons and pigeons

A replica of one of Chappe's semaphore towers
Homing pigeons have been used throughout history by different cultures. Pigeon post had Persian roots and was later used by the Romans to aid their military. Frontinus claimed Julius Caesar used pigeons as messengers in his conquest of Gaul. The Greeks also conveyed the names of the victors at the Olympic Games to various cities using homing pigeons. In the early 19th century, the Dutch government used the system in Java and Sumatra. And in 1849, Paul Julius Reuter started a pigeon service to fly stock prices between Aachen and Brussels, a service that operated for a year until the gap in the telegraph link was closed.

In the Middle Ages, chains of beacons were commonly used on hilltops as a means of relaying a signal. Beacon chains suffered the drawback that they could only pass a single bit of information, so the meaning of the message such as "the enemy has been sighted" had to be agreed upon in advance. One notable instance of their use was during the Spanish Armada, when a beacon chain relayed a signal from Plymouth to London.

In 1792, Claude Chappe, a French engineer, built the first fixed visual telegraphy system (or semaphore line) between Lille and Paris. However semaphore suffered from the need for skilled operators and expensive towers at intervals of ten to thirty kilometres (six to nineteen miles). As a result of competition from the electrical telegraph, the last commercial line was abandoned in 1880.

Telegraph and telephone
On July 25, 1837, the first commercial electrical telegraph was demonstrated by English inventor Sir William Fothergill Cooke and English scientist Sir Charles Wheatstone. Both inventors viewed their device as "an improvement to the  electromagnetic telegraph" and not as a new device.

Samuel Morse independently developed a version of the electrical telegraph that he unsuccessfully demonstrated on September 2, 1837. His code was an important advance over Wheatstone's signaling method. The first transatlantic telegraph cable was successfully completed on July 27, 1866, allowing transatlantic telecommunication for the first time.

The conventional telephone was patented by Alexander Bell in 1876. Elisha Gray also filed a caveat for it in 1876. Gray abandoned his caveat and because he did not contest Bell's priority, the examiner approved Bell's patent on March 3, 1876. Gray had filed his caveat for the variable resistance telephone, but Bell was the first to document the idea and test it in a telephone. Antonio Meucci invented a device that allowed the electrical transmission of voice over a line nearly 30 years before in 1849, but his device was of little practical value because it relied on the electrophonic effect requiring users to place the receiver in their mouths to "hear." The first commercial telephone services were set up by the Bell Telephone Company in 1878 and 1879 on both sides of the Atlantic in the cities of New Haven and London.

Radio and television
In 1894, Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi began developing a wireless communication using the then-newly discovered phenomenon of radio waves, showing by 1901 that they could be transmitted across the Atlantic Ocean. This was the start of wireless telegraphy by radio. On 17 December 1902, a transmission from the Marconi station in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, Canada, became the world's first radio message to cross the Atlantic from North America. In 1904, a commercial service was established to transmit nightly news summaries to subscribing ships, which incorporated them into their onboard newspapers.

World War I accelerated the development of radio for military communications. After the war, commercial radio AM broadcasting began in the 1920s and became an important mass medium for entertainment and news. World War II again accelerated the development of radio for the wartime purposes of aircraft and land communication, radio navigation, and radar. Development of stereo FM broadcasting of radio began in the 1930s in the United States and the 1970s in the United Kingdom, displacing AM as the dominant commercial standard.

On March 25, 1925, John Logie Baird demonstrated the transmission of moving pictures at the London department store Selfridges. Baird's device relied upon the Nipkow disk and thus became known as the mechanical television. It formed the basis of experimental broadcasts done by the British Broadcasting Corporation beginning on 30 September 1929. However, for most of the 20th century, televisions depended on the cathode ray tube invented by Karl Braun. The first version of such a television to show promise was produced by Philo Farnsworth and demonstrated to his family on 7 September 1927. After World War II, interrupted experiments resumed and television became an important home entertainment broadcast medium.

Thermionic valves
The type of device known as a thermionic tube or thermionic valve uses thermionic emission of electrons from a heated cathode for a number of fundamental electronic functions such as signal amplification and current rectification.

The simplest vacuum tube, the diode invented in 1904 by John Ambrose Fleming, contains only a heated electron-emitting cathode and an anode. Electrons can only flow in one direction through the device—from the cathode to the anode. Adding one or more control grids within the tube enables the current between the cathode and anode to be controlled by the voltage on the grid or grids. These devices became a key component of electronic circuits for the first half of the 20th century and were crucial to the development of radio, television, radar, sound recording and reproduction, long-distance telephone networks, and analogue and early digital computers. While some applications had used earlier technologies such as the spark gap transmitter for radio or mechanical computers for computing, it was the invention of the thermionic vacuum tube that made these technologies widespread and practical, leading to the creation of electronics.

In the 1940s, the invention of semiconductor devices made it possible to produce solid-state devices, which are smaller, cheaper, and more efficient, reliable, and durable than thermionic tubes. Starting in the mid-1960s, thermionic tubes were replaced with the transistor. Thermionic tubes still have some applications for certain high-frequency amplifiers.

Computer networks and the Internet
On 11 September 1940, George Stibitz transmitted problems for his Complex Number Calculator in New York using a teletype and received the computed results back at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. This configuration of a centralized computer (mainframe) with remote dumb terminals remained popular well into the 1970s. In the 1960s, researchers started to investigate packet switching, a technology that sends a message in portions to its destination asynchronously without passing it through a centralized mainframe. A four-node network emerged on 5 December 1969, constituting the beginnings of the ARPANET, which by 1981 had grown to 213 nodes. ARPANET eventually merged with other networks to form the Internet. While Internet development was a focus of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) who published a series of Request for Comments documents, other networking advancements occurred in industrial laboratories, such as the local area network (LAN) developments of Ethernet (1983) and Token Ring (1984).

Growth of transmission capacity
The effective capacity to exchange information worldwide through two-way telecommunication networks grew from 281 petabytes (pB) of optimally compressed information in 1986 to 471 pB in 1993 to 2.2 exabytes (eB) in 2000 to 65 eB in 2007. This is the informational equivalent of two newspaper pages per person per day in 1986, and six entire newspapers per person per day by 2007. Given this growth, telecommunications play an increasingly important role in the world economy and the global telecommunications industry was about a $4.7 trillion sector in 2012. The service revenue of the global telecommunications industry was estimated to be $1.5 trillion in 2010, corresponding to 2.4% of the world's gross domestic product (GDP).
Give me a list of the key elements of telecommunications developed over time
Beacons, telegraph, telephone, radio, television, thermionic valves, computer networks and the Internet