 Telecommunication is the transmission of signs, signals, messages, words, writings, images and sounds or information of any nature by wire, radio, optical or 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. Since the latent term communication is considered the social process of information exchange, the term telecommunications is often used in its plural form because it involves many different technologies. Early means of communicating over the 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 drum beats, 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. The revolution in wireless communication began in the first decade of the 20th century with the pioneering developments in radio communications by Gliilmo Marconi, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1909, and others notable pioneering inventors and developers in the field of electrical and electronic telecommunications. These included Charles Wheatstone and Samuel Morse inventors of the telegraph Alexander Graham Bell inventor of the telephone Edwin Armstrong and Lee D. Forrest inventors of radio as well as Vladimir K. Zvorikin, John Logee Baird and Philo Tharnsworth some of the inventors of television.