Telegraph

A telegraph is any system that transmits information by encoded signal across a distance. Telegraphs using electricity were invented separately in Europe and the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century. Their development contributed to the Industrial Revolution in the second half of the century.

Invention of the telegraph

In 1791, French engineer Claude Chappe (1763–1805) and his brother Ignace (1760–1829) invented an optical telegraph called a semaphore. It consisted of a series of towers with arms for making signals, and telescopes for seeing the arms between cities. Claude Chappe named it the telegraph after the Greek words tele, meaning distant, and graphien, meaning to write.

The invention of the battery by Italian physicist Alessandro Volta (1745–1827) in 1800 led to the development of an electric telegraph by English inventors William Fothergill Cooke (1806–1879) and Charles Wheatstone (1802–1875) in 1837. Their system used electricity to control five needles that pointed to letters and numbers arranged on a panel. The British railway adopted the new system, which was used in England until around 1870.

Around 1832, Samuel F. B. Morse (1791–1872) saw the semaphore system in France. Although he was an artist, Morse devoted himself to

developing a telegraph system in America using electricity. With assistance from Alfred Vail (1807–1859), Joseph Henry (1797–1878), and others, Morse created a telegraph that he demonstrated publicly in Morristown, New Jersey, in 1837.

Morse's system could transmit a message over 1,700 feet of wire. To protect his invention, he filed for a patent from the U.S. Patent Office. To enable communication with the telegraph, Morse developed a code for translating short and long electric pulses into letters and numbers.

Development of the telegraph industry

Morse did not have enough money to build a system for testing the telegraph over great distances. He asked Congress to provide the money, which it finally did in 1843. With the money, $30,000, Morse constructed a pole line from Baltimore, Maryland , to Washington, D.C. On May 24, 1844, Morse sent his famous message to Vail along the line, asking, “What hath God wrought?”

Telegraph operators learned to read telegraph messages by listening to the clicking sound made by the system, according to Morse's code. By the 1850s, there were telegraph stations in major eastern and midwestern cities operated by many different companies. Operators sent messages from one station to another. The receiving station decoded the message into written form and gave the message to runners, who hand-delivered them to their recipients. The cost to send a message was about twenty-five cents per hundred miles for ten words or less.

Constructing telegraph lines was costly, requiring a commitment of between $100 and $200 per mile. The first line across North America to San Francisco, California , was completed in October 1861. By 1866 more than one hundred thousand miles of lines connected cities in North America, and the telegraph industry employed thousands of workers. That same year, a line was successfully laid in the Atlantic Ocean to link America with England by telegraph.

Impact on the nation

The Western Union Telegraph Company was organized in 1856. During the American Civil War (1861–65), both the Union and Confederate forces used the telegraph to communicate. After the war, Western Union emerged as the dominant company in the telegraph industry. Industrialist Jay Gould gave Western Union its greatest competition with the American Union Telegraph Company, formed in 1879.

The telegraph was instrumental in the Industrial Revolution and its progress across the North American continent. Manufacturers, financiers, and other businessmen could communicate directly and distantly with customers and agents. Steamboat operators used it to communicate navigation conditions on rivers. Railroads constructed their own telegraph lines to allow train schedules to work more efficiently. The invention of the stock ticker with telegraph technology allowed the investment industry to grow on Wall Street in New York and elsewhere.

The telegraph changed the newspaper industry, too. Prior to the telegraph, newspapers excelled at publishing editorial opinions. The telegraph allowed papers to publish the facts of news events soon after they happened. To minimize the cost of sending telegrams, journalists invented a form of abbreviated communication called telegraphic reporting.

Western Union's Last Telegram

On Friday, February 2, 2007, Western Union sent its last telegram. The popularity of telegrams peaked in the 1920s and 1930s. Telegrams declined as long-distance telephone calls became affordable in the middle of the twentieth century. In 2006, Western Union sent around 20,000 telegrams, charging about $10 for each. According to an article by the Associated Press, itself a product of the telegraph industry, Western Union telegrams sent in its final week of telegram operation included birthday wishes, condolences on a death, notice of an emergency, and other telegrams by people trying to be the last to send one. Although the telegram died, Western Union lived on as a major company in the field of money transfers and financial services.

In 1848, seven daily newspapers in New York formed the Associated Press (AP) to share the cost of using telegraph technology for gathering news. By 1880, fifty percent of the country's morning newspapers and twenty-five percent of its evening newspapers had access to the service. Because the papers covered all parts of the political spectrum of opinion, writers for AP news reports were instructed to report facts without slant. Some historians say this contributed to the development of a tradition of objectivity, or without bias, in journalism.