Inventions & Innovation: Telegraph

Samuel F.B. Morse devised a system of telegraphy that employed an electrical circuit, with an overhead wire and the ground forming the circuit, and used an electromagnetic receiver activated by completing and then breaking the circuit. Morse developed a code of long and short audible sounds that corresponded to the alphabet and could be transmitted over great distances (referred to as “Morse code”). Having convinced the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad company to allow the construction of overhead wires along its tracks, Morse was able to establish a communications link between Baltimore and Washington. On May 24, 1844, Morse demonstrated to Congress the effectiveness of his device by transmitting the message “What hath God wrought?” By 1866, the first transatlantic telegraph cable had been laid. During the 1870s, additional improvements allowed multiple messages to be transmitted over a single wire at the same time.

The story of the struggle to cross a vast continent and build the telegraph line that would bring Australia to the world and the world to Australia. Australia in the mid 1800s was a land isolated by distance and divided between two very different cultures. John McDouall Stuart, a migrant from Scotland, was determined to cross the centre of Australia and reach the north coast. His success would pave the way for a communications revolution. Charles Todd had dreamed of constructing a telegraph line through the heart of the continent and in Stuart he found the man who could prove the inhospitable centre could be crossed. The telegraph’s construction heralded the start of a new communications era every bit as revolutionary as the internet. News from overseas arrived in hours rather than months, securing Adelaide's position as the centre for early colonial communications. It made Todd a hero, but Stuart, the man who made it possible, was destroyed by the hardships he had endured and died in obscurity.

Learn how our growing information economy is reshaping the way the world does business. Professor Harreld takes you back 500 years to reveal the evolution from a world when information was slow (and often out of date when it was received) to the 21st century, when information is instantly available and at a fairly low cost.

The death of his wife inspired Samuel Morse to invent a way to send messages quickly over long distances. Charles Jackson introduced him to electromagnets. Morse developed a dot and dash system representing letters. Distributed by PBS Distribution.

In 1860, renowned natural philosopher (now referred to as a ‘scientist’ or, more specifically in the case of Clerk Maxwell, a ‘physicist’) James Clerk Maxwell wrote ‘Valentine from a Telegraph Clerk ♂ [male] to a Telegraph Clerk ♀ [female]’ (Harman, 2001).[1] The short poem was a slightly tongue-in-cheek ode to the romance of the electric telegraph littered with references to manufacturers of batteries used in electrical telegraphy around this time such as John Daniell, Alfred Smee, and William Grove and electrical units (now SI derived units) such as Ohm, Weber, Farad and Volt (Mills, 1995). Although intended as slightly tongue-in-cheek, Maxwell’s short ode can be read as a state of play of electrical telegraphy as it stood in 1860 when Britain dominated the limited undersea electrical telegraph network as it existed at the time and continued to do so as the network expanded to a global interconnected electrical network by the end of the nineteenth century.

This paper explores the early development of practical electric telegraphy in Britain during the nineteenth century. It exposes the two fundamentally different approaches to the design of telegraphic instruments specified in a joint patent between William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone in 1840. Cooke’s design was a relatively simple needle instrument that required skilled operators to transcode and transcribe the telegraphic despatches. Wheatstone’s design, on the other hand, relied on an innovative step-by-step (escapement) technology which was at the heart of a user-friendly, albeit more complex dial instrument that could be operated by any literate person. The deteriorating relationship between the two men during this period had a detrimental impact on the development of telegraphy. To prevent Wheatstone benefiting from the commercial venture that came to be known as the Electric Telegraph Company, which Cooke believed should be entirely his own, in 1845 Cooke acquired the full rights to the joint patent and subsequently ignored Wheatstone’s design, stifling in the process the development of the promising step-by-step technology. It would be another twelve years before Wheatstone resumed work on this technology and produced ultimately the ABC instrument – a dial telegraph that marked a milestone in the history of communication.