Claim: Motorola makes electronic equipment.

Telecommunication is the transmission of signs , signals , messages , words , writings , images and sounds or intelligence of any nature by wire , radio , optical or other electromagnetic systems . Telecommunication occurs when the exchange of information between communication participants includes the use of technology . It is transmitted either electrically over physical media , such as cables , or via electromagnetic radiation . Such transmission paths are often divided into communication channels which afford the advantages of multiplexing . The term is often used in its plural form , telecommunications , because it involves many different technologies .   Early means of communicating over a distance included visual signals , such as beacons , smoke signals , semaphore telegraphs , signal flags , and optical heliographs . Other examples of pre-modern long-distance communication included audio messages such as coded drumbeats , lung-blown horns , and loud whistles . 20th and 21st century technologies for long-distance communication usually involve electrical and electromagnetic technologies , such as telegraph , telephone , and teleprinter , networks , radio , microwave transmission , fiber optics , and communications satellites .   A revolution in wireless communication began in the first decade of the 20th century with the pioneering developments in radio communications by Guglielmo Marconi , who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1909 . Other notable pioneering inventors and developers in the field of electrical and electronic telecommunications include Charles Wheatstone and Samuel Morse -LRB- inventors of the telegraph -RRB- , Alexander Graham Bell -LRB- inventor of the telephone -RRB- , Edwin Armstrong and Lee de Forest -LRB- inventors of radio -RRB- , as well as Vladimir K. Zworykin , John Logie Baird and Philo Farnsworth -LRB- some of the inventors of television -RRB- .