Telegraph
From GHN
Telegraph
One of the most important ways that electricity and magnetism have been put to use is making communication faster and easier. In this day of instant messaging, cell phones, and pagers, it’s hard to imagine a time when messages had to be written and might spend weeks or even months reaching their destination. They had to be carried great distances by ships, wagon, or even by horseback—you couldn’t just call somebody up to say hello. That all changed when inventors began using electricity and magnetism to find better ways for people to talk to each other.
The telegraph was first conceived of in the 1700s, but few people pursued it. By the 1830s, however, advancements in the field of electromagnetism, such as those made by Alessandro Volta and Joseph Henry, created new interest in electromagnetic communication. In 1837, English scientist Charles Wheatstone opened the first commerical telegraph line between London and Camden Town, a distance of 1.5 miles. Building on Wheatstone's ideas, Samuel Morse, an American artist and inventor, designed a line to connect Washington, DC and Baltimore, Maryland in 1844.
Morse’s telegraph was a simple device that used a battery, a switch, and a small electromagnet, but it allowed people miles apart to communicate instantly. Although Morse is often credited with inventing the telegraph, his greatest contribution was actually Morse Code, a special language designed for the telegraph.
In 1844 Samuel Morse used this telegraph key to send the message “What hath God wrought” on the experimental line between Washington, DC and Baltimore, Maryland. Courtesy: Smithsonian Institution.
A detail of the first telegraph message sent by Samuel Morse in 1844. The word represented is the “What” in the message “What hath God wrought”. The handwriting is Morse’s, although his penciled text was written over in ink by a friend. Courtesy: Library of Congress, Samuel Finley Breese Morse Papers.
Morse's commercialization of the telegraph spread the technology quickly. In 1861 California was connected to the rest of the United States with the first transcontinental telegraph line. Five years later, engineers found a way of spanning the AtlanticOcean with telegraph lines, thus connecting the United States and Europe. This was an enormous and challenging job.
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