The Telegraph Throughout History

For every invention, it seems there is someone who had a spark of an idea or who created a partial technology that another was inspired by and went on to improve upon. The telegraph is no different. Several inventors from Bavaria, Germany and Britain were using electrical telegraphy as early as 1809. In 1830, American inventor Joseph Henry used an electromagnetic current over a wire a mile long to charge a magnet that struck a bell. Samuel F. B. Morse took Henry’s idea, created telegraph technology that was more advanced and turned it into a communication’s system that served the country greatly for many years.

With his new and improved technology at hand, Morse used signals transmitted by wire while his assistant Alfred Vail developed the Morse code, a signaling alphabet. The codes were produced on strips of paper first using dots and dashes.

After public demonstrations, Congress heard of Morse’s technology and gave him $30,000 to build a telegraph line a 40-mile distance from Baltimore to Washington. The first telegram was sent over the finished line on May 24, 1844, from the U.S. Capital to Baltimore. Morse obtained private funding to extend the line to New York and Philadelphia. Soon after, throughout the South, East and Midwest, telegraph companies started popping up.

Morse’s original dot and dash code on paper strips soon turned into a method of sending and receiving by key and ear. With this system, a trainer could transmit many words a minute. An automatic transmission was then created soon after, which doubled the efficiency of code retrieval.

The creation of the telegraph and its expanding technology opened up a whole new world of instant communication over long distances to the world. Unlike the days of communicating by post, which could take weeks or months, businesses could now work deals instantaneously, family members and friends could reach each other with timely news, information of events of national importance could be gained quickly and the military had the technology it needed to use during times of war.

Before electricity, crude telegraph systems were being used with a system of tall poles with movable arms that were set within sight of one another, the operator could gather information from the movements of the arms. As technology developed, the electric telegraph came into use which involved a worldwide system of wires with stations and operators that carried messages through electricity, and then at the height of its use, were the wireless instruments. The new wireless technology used more electricity and required larger units to send signals through airwaves, but it worked much faster.

When the Civil War began, telegraph companies had already covered most of the Eastern U.S., and a telegraph line had been constructed through the Rocky Mountains connecting the West Coast to the established network. The telegraph was used to report battle and intelligence information and soon became the most used form of military communication. Although it was not full-proof, as enemies intercepted messages and replaced them with misinformation that led to enemy capture.

As the war progressed telegraph lines were quickly added everywhere the armies went, and by the end of the war more than 15,000 miles of telegraph lines had been built. Telegraph technology became so valuable it affected battle outcomes. Abraham Lincoln used the telegraph to communicate with those commanders on the war front. He was able to guide his troops from afar, unlike any military leader before him. The telegraph helped him in his victory of winning the Civil War.

Without the telegraph’s founding fathers and Morse’s inventiveness, history would have taken a much different path. The telegraph paved the way for our vast modern-day communications systems, that without, society as we know it would be lost.

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