The Story of Samuel Morse and the Telegraph
But they were spotted by the captain who sent a telegram to Scotland Yard in time for a police officer to board a faster boat to Canada, and arrest Crippen on arrival. He was hanged back in Britain later that year.
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On a lighter note, when American author Mark Twain heard that his obituary had accidentally been published in the US in , he sent a telegram from London saying: American journalist Robert Benchley, meanwhile, famously sent a droll telegram to his editor at The New Yorker upon arriving in Venice for the first time: With telegram messages paid for by the letter, users tried to keep messages as pithy as possible. The shortest telegram ever sent was probably one from legendary writer Oscar Wilde.
Samuel F.B. Morse
While living in Paris, he cabled his publisher in Britain to see how his new book was doing. His message simply read: We urge you to turn off your ad blocker for The Telegraph website so that you can continue to access our quality content in the future.
In , Morse sent his first telegraph message, from Washington, D. Although the telegraph had fallen out of widespread use by the start of the 21st century, replaced by the telephone, fax machine and Internet, it laid the groundwork for the communications revolution that led to those later innovations. Before the development of the electric telegraph in the 19th century revolutionized how information was transmitted across long distances, ancient civilizations such as those in China, Egypt and Greece used drumbeats or smoke signals to exchange information between far-flung points.
However, such methods were limited by the weather and the need for an uninterrupted line of sight between receptor points. These limitations also lessened the effectiveness of the semaphore, a modern precursor to the electric telegraph. Developed in the early s, the semaphore consisted of a series of hilltop stations that each had large movable arms to signal letters and numbers and two telescopes with which to see the other stations.
Like ancient smoke signals, the semaphore was susceptible to weather and other factors that hindered visibility.
Samuel Morse
A different method of transmitting information was needed to make regular and reliable long-distance communication workable. In the early 19th century, two developments in the field of electricity opened the door to the production of the electric telegraph. First, in , the Italian physicist Alessandro Volta invented the battery, which reliably stored an electric current and allowed the current to be used in a controlled environment. Second, in , the Danish physicist Hans Christian Oersted demonstrated the connection between electricity and magnetism by deflecting a magnetic needle with an electric current.
While scientists and inventors across the world began experimenting with batteries and the principles of electromagnetism to develop some kind of communication system, the credit for inventing the telegraph generally falls to two sets of researchers: In the s, the British team of Cooke and Wheatstone developed a telegraph system with five magnetic needles that could be pointed around a panel of letters and numbers by using an electric current.
Earlier Signal Systems
Their system was soon being used for railroad signaling in Britain. During this time period, the Massachusetts-born, Yale-educated Morse who began his career as a painter , worked to develop an electric telegraph of his own. He reportedly had become intrigued with the idea after hearing a conversation about electromagnetism while sailing from Europe to America in the early s, and later learned more about the topic from American physicist Joseph Henry In collaboration with Gale and Vail, Morse eventually produced a single-circuit telegraph that worked by pushing the operator key down to complete the electric circuit of the battery.
This action sent the electric signal across a wire to a receiver at the other end. All the system needed was a key, a battery, wire and a line of poles between stations for the wire and a receiver. To transmit messages across telegraph wires, in the s Morse and Vail created what came to be known as Morse code.
Initially, the code, when transmitted over the telegraph system, was rendered as marks on a piece of paper that the telegraph operator would then translate back into English. Rather quickly, however, it became apparent that the operators were able to hear and understand the code just by listening to the clicking of the receiver, so the paper was replaced by a receiver that created more pronounced beeping sounds. In , Morse and Vail received funding from the U.
Congress to set up and test their telegraph system between Washington , D. Michael Faraday's recently invented electromagnet was much discussed by the ship's passengers, and when Morse came to understand how it worked, he speculated that it might be possible to send a coded message over a wire.
While a student at Yale College years before, he had written his parents a letter about how interesting he found the lectures on electricity. Despite what he had learned at Yale, Morse found when he began to develop his idea that he had little real understanding of the nature of electricity, and after sporadic attempts to work with batteries, magnets, and wires, he finally turned for help to a colleague at the University of the City of New York, Leonard D.
Gale was a professor of chemistry and familiar with the electrical work of Princeton's Joseph Henry, a true pioneer in the new field. Well before Morse had his shipboard idea about a telegraph, Henry rang a bell at a distance by opening and closing an electric circuit.
To the distress of his austere parents, he also enjoyed painting miniature portraits. He wrote numerous letters to the New York Observer his brother Sidney was the editor at the time urging people to fight the perceived Catholic menace. In , Morse and Vail received funding from the U. Travelling aboard the ship Sully in , Morse struck up a conversation with fellow passengers regarding the possibility of using electromagnetism as a means of communication. May 17, Sold by: He chose to portray a night scene, balancing the architecture of the Rotunda with the figures, and using lamplight to highlight the work. Morse encountered the problem of getting a telegraphic signal to carry over more than a few hundred yards of wire.
In , he had published an article, of which Morse was unaware, that contained details suggesting the idea of an electric telegraph. Gale's help and his knowledge of this article proved crucial to Morse's telegraph system because Gale not only pointed out flaws in the system but showed Morse how he could regularly boost the strength of a signal and overcome the distance problems he had encountered by using a relay system Henry had invented. Henry's experiments, Gale's assistance, and, soon after, hiring the young technician Alfred Vail were keys to Morse's success.
By December , Morse had enough confidence in his new system to apply for the federal government's appropriation, and during the next year he conducted demonstrations of his telegraph both in New York and Washington.
However, when the economic disaster known as the Panic of took hold of the nation and caused a long depression, Morse was forced to wait for better times. It was during this period that Morse visited Europe again and tried not only to secure patent protection overseas but to examine competing telegraph systems in England.