The electric telegraph

The story

Slow news

Until two hundred years ago, a message travelled at the speed of a horse, a ship or a runner. A letter from London to Rome could take a week or more; one from London to New York, by sea, took a couple of months. Important news, such as a victory in battle or the death of a king, arrived days or weeks later. There were some faster systems, such as beacon fires on hills, flag signals or carrier pigeons, but they were not suited to long, precise messages.

At the end of the 18th century a Frenchman, Claude Chappe, had built an “optical telegraph”: a chain of towers on hills, each topped by big movable wooden arms which, set in certain positions, stood for letters. Each tower repeated the signal to the next, and a message could cross France in a few hours. It worked only in fine weather, by day, and it was very expensive, but it was a great step forward.

The discovery of electricity

With Volta's battery and then the discoveries about electromagnetism by Ørsted, Ampère, Faraday and Henry, scientists realised that a metal wire could carry an electric signal over a distance, almost instantly. Several experiments were made, and in 1837 in England William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone set up an electric telegraph along a railway. But their device was complicated and used several wires and needles that pointed to the letters.

In the United States, a painter and professor of drawing, Samuel Morse, had the same idea. Morse, born in 1791, was a famous portrait painter who suffered a painful experience: in 1825, while he was painting a portrait in Washington, he received a letter telling him that his wife was ill; by the time he got home, in Connecticut, after days of travelling, she had already been buried. A few years later, on a voyage by ship, listening to a talk about electromagnetism, he realised that a message could be sent using electricity, and he began to work on it.

Dots and dashes

Morse was not an expert in electricity, and he got help from others: Professor Joseph Henry, who gave him technical advice about electromagnets, and a young mechanic, Alfred Vail, who helped him build the machines and perfect a code. The system was simple: a key, called a sender, opened and closed an electric circuit; at the other end of the wire, an electromagnet moved a pen that marked dashes and dots on a strip of paper. With combinations of dots, dashes and pauses, every letter could be written: this is “Morse code”. The most common letters had the shortest signs: E, for example, is a single dot.

24 May 1844

In 1843 the United States Congress granted thirty thousand dollars to build an experimental line between Washington and Baltimore, about sixty kilometres long, running alongside the railway. On 24 May 1844, in a room in the Capitol in Washington, in front of a few politicians, Morse sent the first official message to Vail, who was in Baltimore: “What hath God wrought”. The phrase, taken from the Bible, had been chosen by a girl, Annie Ellsworth, the daughter of an official. In Baltimore, Vail replied by repeating the same message. It worked.

A network around the world

Within a few years telegraph wires stretched along the railways, and then across every country. In 1851 a submarine cable was laid under the English Channel, between Dover and Calais. In 1858 a cable across the Atlantic was opened, and Queen Victoria sent a message to the American president: it took sixteen hours to transmit, and the cable stopped working after a few weeks. But in 1866 a new cable, laid by the great ship Great Eastern, worked: from then on, a message from London to New York took a few minutes instead of weeks.

In 1861 the telegraph crossed the whole of the United States, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and the Pony Express, the service of mounted couriers which carried the mail in ten days, closed two days later, after only nineteen months of life.