The Beginning of Electronic Communications

Telegraph Register Patent Model, patented May 1, 1849, patent number 6,420, by Samuel F. B. Morse

Samuel Morse

While a professor of arts and design at New York University in 1835, Samuel Morse proved that signals could be transmitted by wire. He used pulses of current to deflect an electromagnet, which moved a marker to produce written codes on a strip of paper - the invention of Morse Code. The following year, the device was modified to emboss the paper with dots and dashes. He gave a public demonstration in 1838, but it was not until five years later that Congress (reflecting public apathy) funded $30,000 to construct an experimental telegraph line from Washington to Baltimore, a distance of 40 miles.

Six years later, members of Congress witnessed the sending and receiving of messages over part of the telegraph line. Before the line had reached Baltimore, the Whig party held its national convention there, and on May 1, 1844, nominated Henry Clay. This news was hand-carried to Annapolis Junction (between Washington and Baltimore) where Morse's partner, Alfred Vail, wired it to the Capitol. This was the first news dispatched by electric telegraph.

What Hath God Wrought?

The message, "What hath God wrought?" sent later by "Morse Code" from the old Supreme Court chamber in the United States Capitol to his partner in Baltimore, officially opened the completed line of May 24, 1844. Morse allowed Annie Ellsworth, the young daughter of a friend, to choose the words of the message, and she selected a verse from Numbers XXIII, 23: "What hath God wrought?", which was recorded onto paper tape. Morse's early system produced a paper copy with raised dots and dashes, which were translated later by an operator.

The Telegraph Spreads

Samuel Morse and his associates obtained private funds to extend their line to Philadelphia and New York. Small telegraph companies, meanwhile began functioning in the East, South, and Midwest. Dispatching trains by telegraph started in 1851, the same year Western Union began business. Western Union built its first transcontinental telegraph line in 1861, mainly along railroad rights-of-way.

In 1881, the Postal Telegraph System entered the field for economic reasons, and merged with Western Union in 1943.

The original Morse telegraph printed code on tape. However, in the United States the operation developed into sending by key and receiving by ear. A trained Morse operator could transmit 40 to 50 words per minute. Automatic transmission, introduced in 1914, handled more than twice that number. Canadian, Fredick Creed invented a way to convert Morse code to text in 1900 called the Creed Telegraph System.

Telephone Rivals the Telegraph

Until 1877, all rapid long-distance communication depended upon the telegraph. That year, a rival technology developed that would again change the face of communication -- the telephone. By 1879, patent litigation between Western Union and the infant telephone system was ended in an agreement that largely separated the two services.

Samuel Morse is best known as the inventor of the telegraph, but he is also esteemed for his contributions to American portraiture. His painting is characterized by delicate technique and vigorous honesty and insight into the character of his subjects.

The electric telegraph is a now outdated communication system that transmitted electric signals over wires from location to location that translated into a message.

The non-electric telegraph was invented by Claude Chappe in 1794. This system was visual and used semaphore, a flag-based alphabet, and depended on a line of sight for communication. The optical telegraph was replaced by the electric telegraph, the focus of this article.

In 1809, a crude telegraph was invented in Bavaria by Samuel Soemmering. He used 35 wires with gold electrodes in water and at the receiving end 2000 feet the message was read by the amount of gas caused by electrolysis. In 1828, the first telegraph in the USA. was invented by Harrison Dyar who sent electrical sparks through chemically treated paper tape to burn dots and dashes.

UNITED   STATES   PATENT   OFFICE

ZENAS C. ROBBINS, OF WASHINGTON, DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA.

INSULATOR FOR TELEGRAPH-WIRES.

Specification forming part of Letters Patent No. 8,419, dated October 14, 1851.

By 1853 there were 26000 miles of telegraph lines, 5000 telegraph operators sending 10 million messages a years. 

Telegraph Lineman

• Telegraph lines which worked well ... were just bare iron and later bare hardened copper wire, attached to special stoneware or porcelain insulators and later glass insulators, on poles.
• Very little current was used by telegraph transmissions.
• The railway telegraph battery lines were 'closed circuits' ... they were ON all the time when not in use ... for reasons which will become clearer ...

Starting from the outside ...
Glass tumbler filled with diluted sulphuric acid.
Cast zinc cylinder goes into the tumbler.
Unglazed pottery cup (not visible) fits inside the zinc cylinder and sits in the dilute sulphuric acid.
Unglazed pottery cup is filled with concentrated nitric acid.
Platinum or Copper electrode is placed into the unglazed cup and the nitric acid.
A wire or other soldered connection runs from the zinc terminal of one cell, to the platinum cell of the next.

Platinum or Copper is the positive terminal.
Zinc is the negative terminal.
The unglazed pottery cup allows 'ions' to pass through it but not water molecules ... the acids do not mix.

Oh ... and as current is developed,
poisonous nitric oxide gas constantly evolves from the cells.

• Wires stapled to living trees make very bad telegraph lines ... water and sap drain off the current before it travels anywhere.
• Poles cut from trees should be cut in the winter when the sap is out, debarked, and DRY before they are used. Otherwise ... water will get in, current will drain off, AND your poles will quickly rot out and fall over.
• The flow of electrical signals is not slowed by slack wires which dip between poles.
• Bi-metallic wire (e.g. copper-covered iron) deteriorates quickly out in the elements.
• Copper wire can stretch, iron wire can rust, either can break. Finding the right conductor and the right gauge of wire to use is a difficult problem.
• You must brace a pole line on a curve.

• Telegraph lines don't work well if you run them through railway tunnels.
• Whenever possible run the telegraph wires along a rail line or a road because it is too difficult to negotiate with all the landowners.
• Some materials such as ceramics or glass as 'insulators' help the signals flow farther down the wire.
• Some people like to shoot at insulators or throw rocks at them ... some people believe telegraph lines hurt their crops and livestock.
• Lightning can come into a railway station building and destroy the telegraph instruments.
• Rain or moisture in the air can interfere with the strength of telegraph signals. In particular, a line of wet insulators and poles can draw some current into the ground (a path of lower resistance) so little is left to flow through the wires.
• If wires have too much slack so they won't break ... wind can blow the bare conductors into contact with each other and 'we can get our wires crossed'.

As telegraphs were the first commercial use of electricity ...
This was the first time humans had strung electrical conductors across an expanse of land.

By 1851, there were over 50 separate telegraph companies operating in the United States. This corporate cornucopia developed because the owners of the telegraph patents had been unsuccessful in convincing the United States and other governments of the invention's potential usefulness. In the private sector, the owners had difficulty convincing capitalists of the commercial value of the invention. This led to the owners' willingness to sell licenses to many purchasers who organized separate companies and then built independent telegraph lines in various sections of the country.

By the time of the Civil War, there was a strong commercial incentive to construct a telegraph line across the western plains to link the two coasts of America. Many companies, however, believed the line would be impossible to build and maintain.

In 1860, Congress passed, and President James Buchanan signed, the Pacific Telegraph Act, which authorized the Secretary of the Treasury to seek bids for a project to construct a transcontinental line. When two bidders dropped out, Hiram Sibley, representing Western Union, was the only bidder left. By default Sibley won the contract. The Pacific Telegraph Company was organized for the purpose of building the eastern section of the line.

Throughout the remainder of the 1800s, the telegraph became one of the most important factors in the development of social and commercial life of America. In spite of improvements to the telegraph, however, two new inventions-the telephone (1800s) and the radio (1900s)-eventually replaced the telegraph as the leaders of the communication revolution for most Americans.

Alexander Graham Bell (March 3, 1847 – August 2, 1922) was an eminent scientist, inventor, engineer and innovator who is credited with inventing

the first practical telephone.

His research on hearing and speech further led him to experiment with hearing devices which eventually culminated in Bell being awarded the first US patent for the telephone in 1876.

The Bell Telephone Company was created in 1877, and by 1886, over 150,000 people in the U.S. owned telephones. Bell company engineers made numerous other improvements to the telephone, which emerged as one of the most successful products ever. In 1879, the Bell company acquired Edison's patents for the carbon microphone from Western Union. This made the telephone practical for long distances and it was no longer necessary to shout to be heard at the receiving telephone.

At the turn of the century, Alexander Graham Bell abandoned its struggles to maintain a monopoly through patent suits, and entered into direct competition with the many independent telephone companies. Around this time, the company adopted its new name, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T).

In January 1915, Bell made the first ceremonial transcontinental telephone call. Calling from the AT&T head office at 15 Dey Street in New York City, Bell was heard by Thomas Watson at 333 Grant Avenue in San Francisco. The New York Times reported:

Western Union

The period from 1866 through the turn of the century was the apex of Western Union's power. Yearly messages sent over its lines increased from 5.8 million in 1867 to 63.2 million in 1900. Over the same period, transmission rates fell from an average of $1.09 to 30 cents per message. Even with these lower prices, roughly 30 to 40 cents of every dollar of revenue were net profit for the company. Western Union faced three threats during this period: increased government regulation, new entrants into the field of telegraphy, and new competition from the telephone. The last two were the most important to the company's future profitability.

The company continued to grow, acquiring more than 500 smaller competitors. Its monopoly power was almost complete in 1943 when it bought Postal Telegraph, Inc., its chief rival.

Western Union's greatest threat came from a new technology, the telephone. Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone in 1876, initially referring to it as a "talking telegraph." Bell offered Western Union the patent for the telephone for $100,000, but the company declined to purchase it. Western Union could have easily gained control of AT&T in the 1890s, but management decided that higher dividends were more important than expansion. The telephone was used in the 1880s only for local calling, but with the development in the 1890s of "long lines," the telephone offered increased competition to the telegraph. In 1900, local calls accounted for 97% of the telephone's business, and it was not until the twentieth century that the telephone fully displaced the telegraph.

In 1909, AT&T gained control of Western Union by purchasing 30% of its stock. In many ways, the companies were heading in opposite directions. AT&T was expanding rapidly, while Western Union was content to reap handsome profits and issue large dividends but not reinvest in itself. Under AT&T's ownership, Western Union was revitalized, but the two companies separated in 1913, succumbing to pressure from the Department of Justice. In 1911, the Department of Justice successfully used the Sherman Antitrust Act to force a breakup of Standard Oil. This success made the threat of antitrust action against AT&T very credible. Both Postal Telegraph and the independent telephone companies wishing to interconnect with AT&T lobbied for government regulation. In order to forestall any such government action, AT&T issued the "Kingsbury Commitment," a unilateral commitment to divest itself of Western Union and allow independent telephone firms to interconnect.

End of the telegraph era

In the United States, Western Union discontinued all telegram and commercial messaging services on 27 January 2006, although it still offered its electronic money transfer services.

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