Can you hear me now? Good, because this week in history is all about the telegraph and the very beginning of our obsession with instant communication.
July 25, 1866 – The Shrinking World
The sheer interconnectedness of the world is both staggering and mundane.
Like most of the technologies that underpin our world, we see rapid communication as we see the wallpaper in our living rooms: always present, sometimes remarked on but rarely the subject of much concerted thought.
And yet, at the flip of a switch, the press of a button and we are instantaneously connected to all corners of the world.
To the densest jungles and the most isolated mountain ranges our calls ricochet from satellite to satellite to tower, reducing the thousands of miles separating us to the three steps to your kitchen phone.
Humans are, if anything, exceptionally adaptable, and we have absorbed this useful technology so completely into our world that it is now inextricable from it. Can you imagine business, politics, even personal relationships, surviving long in the absence of instant communication?
Yet, for all of its importance to our modern way of life, long-distance communication as we recognize it is relatively new in the history of the world. Sure the cell phone is remarkable and phones in general amazing, but the true grandfather of rapid communication is the telegraph.
Long, Long, Long, Long *Pause* Long, Long (“Hi”)
The telegraph is an exceptionally simple device, consisting of a recorder and a key at one end of the line and a recorder and key at another end. These two ends, connected by a metal wire, create an electrical circuit. By tapping one of the keys you ground the circuit, sending an electrical current through the wire to the recorder at the other end of the line. When the current reaches the recorder, it magnetizes the metal rod the wire is wrapped around, momentarily attracting a metal plate, which itself pushes a pencil against a roll of paper. The longer one holds the key down, the longer the line drawn on paper by the recorder.
In itself, this device is useless, communicating dots and dashes across the wire to the bewildered person at the other end. But by using a code, you can turn those dots and lines into letters, and letters into words.
In 1835, an American named Samuel Morse developed an electromagnetic telegraph system that sent messages using a special code, now known as the Morse code. By alternating long taps with short ones in special sequences, Morse could tap out an intelligible message across the wire.
It took several years for Congress to recognize the significance of the invention, finally lending funding to Morse to construct a line from Baltimore to Washington D.C.
In May of 1844, Morse sent his famous message, “What hath God wrought” over this completed line.
The next 10 years saw telegraph lines string up in America, connecting cities up and down the eastern seaboard.
Across the pond in England, a variation on the American telegraph system was developed at the same time and found just as fertile ground. Slowly, like veins and arteries in a body, these telegraph lines crept across the land, pumping information back and forth.
The Old World Meets the New World
By the middle of the 1850s, the web of telegraph lines had spread in America and Europe as well. Plans were under way to send a line from the east coast of the continent out West to California.
Meanwhile, it remained to be seen if a line could stretch eastward, across the Atlantic, to connected America to the land of her ancestors.
Early on Morse had found it simplest to hang the wires on tall wood poles. Soon these poles followed the construction of railroads just as a matter of course, the trains bringing goods and the wires information.
But between North America and England lay hundreds of miles of open ocean, an obstacle so monumental that there might as well have been an insurmountable stone wall instead.
Fairly early on, however, tests were made to determine if the wires could withstand long exposure to water. In 1842, Morse had sunk a line in New York harbor and the British tried the same two years later. Both trials failed, the water finding its way through the insulation each had tried to wrap around the metal wires.
Nature had the answer to the dilemma in the form of a rubbery tree sap called gutta percha, which came from a tree in Malaysia.
In 1851, the first successful use of the gummy substance as an insulator was completed when a line was laid across the English Channel to France. Subsequent lines across the channel proved that submarine cables were possible, although fraught with challenges (one cable failed when a ship’s anchor dragged it around).
In 1854, an American by the name of Cyrus Field sought to connect North America to Old World England via the island of Ireland.
By laying a line from New York to Newfoundland Field shrunk the distance needed to cross by water (a similar tactic used by the first successful transatlantic flight years later). In 1858 all that lay between success and failure were 1,600 miles of the Atlantic. Survey of the route showed that the seabed ran on a relatively flat slope approximately two miles below the surface of the crashing waves.
Outfitting a small armada of ships with huge rolled coils of wire, Field set out to lay his line. After several setbacks, he successfully completed the line later that year. Unfortunately, the signal proved too weak to send and receive most messages.
Nevertheless, for 23 days a flurry of half-intelligible messages raced across the submarine wire, including congratulatory praises between Queen Victoria and American President Buchanan. It all came to an abrupt end in September of 1858, however, when the wire went silent.
To this day, no one is quite sure why this line failed, but fail it did, bringing this years-long project to an end. Or, not an end but a road block, as Cyrus Field saw it.
Going back to the drawing board, Field immediately set about correcting mistakes, developing more sensitive sending and receiving instruments and manufacturing a stronger line.
Sidetracked by its own Civil War and reconstruction, America was in no position to help with Field’s 1865-66 attempts. British ships, therefore, carried the line and, after a brief mishap in 1865, the line was finally completed on this day in 1866. It remained in place successfully and messages were sent and received with ease.
This single project connected for the first time continents separated by the yawning expanse of ocean waters. In 1865, news of the assassination of President Lincoln took two weeks to reach London. When President Garfield was shot in 1881 the news reached London papers in a matter of hours.
Measured by the improvement in communication following its invention, the telegraph is arguably the most innovative piece of communication technology in human history.
Further online reading:
http://www.cntr.salford.ac.uk/comms/transatlanticstory.php
http://atlantic-cable.com/Article/GuttaPercha/index.htm
http://www.sil.si.edu/DigitalCollections/hst/atlantic-cable/ac-index.htm
http://www.theiet.org/resources/library/archives/featured/trans-cable1865.cfm
Antone Pierucci is a Sacramento-based public historian and a freelance writer whose work has been featured in such magazines as Archaeology and Wild West as well as regional California newspapers.