Attenion To Orders:  Next Event for the 24th Virginia Field Hospital & the Southern Telegraph Company is. March 24 & 25, 2012. St. Catherine's Military School, Anaheim, CA. See yaw there!

The invention of the telegraph by Samuel Morse in the 1840s opened up the vast potential for instantaneous communication of critical information to remote places. But the dashes & dots of the Morse Code still required trained telegraph operators at each station, one to send & the other to receive.

The gold rush of the late 1840s & end of the Civil War created a financial boom in gold & stock that soon demanded that stock & commodity prices be received promptly at both trading exchanges & at the offices of brokers, speculators & other

investors. Technology was now invented to directly translate & print telegraph codes into letters & numbers, greatly speeding up the communication process. In 1867 Edward Callahan invented the first stock ticker, soon followed by improvements patented by inventors such as Thomas Edison & the designers & engineers employed by the major telegraph firms (such as W.-U. Telegraph Company) of the late 19th & early twentieth centuries.

This collection of 800 patents covers the full breadth of the development of these "step-by-step" printing telegraphs from their beginnings up until their obsolescence in the 1960s. It is a must for

every collector, student of communications technology & engineering.

Bunnell telegraph relay iron base vintage 1800s

Vintage US Army Signal Flags

2 foot flags were used when the flagman wanted to avoid enemy attention 

 In making signals, the color of the flag to be used depended upon the color of the background against which it was to appear. For example, a white flag, even with its red center, could not be easily seen against the shy as a background. In such a situation a red flag was necessary. With a green or dark colored background the white flag was used, and in fact this was the flag of the signal corps, having been used, in all probability, nine times out of every ten that signals were made.

Signal Corps Shoulder Pacth

Copy of original telegraph durning the war.

THE SIGNAL CORPS OF THE UNITED STATES ARMY.-DRAWN BY MR. A. R. WAUD

 

 

 

 

 

 

Courtesy Of SCARD

The old man

William Johnson & David Cotton

Operators

 

Re-enactor's Telegraph Station

 

 

 

 

 

Telegraph Station

Tom Wilson, Thousnd Oaks, Ca

 

 

 

 

Authentic telegraph key & sounders.

Camelback Key and Sounder on Board
Charles Williams Jr. Boston
1860's

David Cotton, David Colley

John Powell, Nathan Hays.

Sgt. Jerry foster

Richmond Fayette Artillery

Southern Telegraph Copmany

Richmond Fayette Artillery

Southern Telegraph Copmany

Jerry Foster WA6BXV

 

Back to Index