Watch an old WWII movie and you most likely will see officers tapping away on a single-switch machine, alerting front line commanders of an impending attack. Thanks to the invention of the telegraph, the encrypted dot-and-dash coded messages spelled success or disaster for warring troops. A communication device whose inception began in the mid-1700s, the electric telegraph transformed American society, ushering in new ways to communicate during war, disseminate news across the U.S., wire money at far distances, and bring personal telegrams to families in every household.
Prior to the telegraph, early forms of long-distance communication could be found in reading material printed on presses, letters written by hand, and the Pony Express, an early American mail system that took riders on horseback at least 10 days to cross the continental U.S. to deliver their messages. Communication methods were slow at best and disastrous at worst. Consider Samuel Morse, creator of the modern electric telegraph, who changed his career from painter to inventor when a letter from his father about Morse’s ill wife arrived too late; upon Morse’s return to his home, he learned the sad news that his wife Lucretia had already died and been buried. Other communication methods—drumbeats, signal fires and the semaphore (hilltop stations equipped with telescopes for reading letters and numbers between nearby locations)—were likewise ineffective and affected by weather and other factors. The necessity for speed and ease warranted a new form of long-distance communication.
Inventors began to experiment with the idea of telegraphy as early as the 1750s. Inventions like Allesandro Volta’s voltaic pile, the first electric battery that provided a continuous electric current, and William Sturgeon’s electromagnet, which offered increased magnetic force, built on every new iteration of the telegraph. By 1840, English scientist Charles Wheatstone patented his alphabetic telegraph that operators used to click off messages around a dial. Unfortunately, like previous and later telegraph attempts, the “Wheatstone A B C instrument” was expensive to build and time-consuming to use, requiring 52 bleeps just to spell the word hello.
It wouldn’t be until Morse’s electric telegraph, with its easy-to-use and easy-to-make cheaply options, that the telegraph came into wider use. Instead of the alphabetic signal system, Morse’s telegraph employed a universal code that he created, assigning each letter of the alphabet and numbers (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 0) to a series of dots and dashes. With the single-switch knob of his simple machine, messages could be sent more easily and quicker than any previous device. Although both analog and digital signals were subject to noise and distortion across long distances, digital signals virtually eliminated signal degradation, providing a perfect and precise replica of the transmitted information. The integrity of the message was not lost with the digital telegraph. Morse’s telegraph proved to be effective, efficient and exact, as evidenced by the miles of telegraph cables installed in every rail station across the U.S. and laid across the Atlantic to Europe during the 1860s.
But all good things usually come to an end, or at least to the beginning of something better. The demise of the telegraphic era runs parallel to the fall of the Western Union Telegraph Company, who made the short-sighted error of mistaking the telephone as a short-lived device, allowing the National Bell Company to lead the charge into the next communication age. As telecommunication developments seem to rise with every new generation, the influence and transformative power of the telegraph can never be dismissed. No SOS (that’s … — …) needed.