The History Of The Telegraph Is Way More Interesting Than You Think
We’ve all seen it in books or movies — a guy from the 1870’s hunched over a little telegraph key, tapping out messages to someone far off in the distance. It got a sentence or two in my elementary school textbook — Samuel Morse developed the telegraph, and a code to use it. It’s a pretty simple device — just an electromagnet pulling down on a spring loaded arm. That’s it, right? Simple.
No.
It was much more than that. The development of the practical, commercially viable telegraph spanned more than fifty years and two continents. That elegant little telegraph key and sounder were the result of constant experimentation and refinement. As we came to understand electricity through the work of Volta, Oersted, Henry and others, each advance drove a corresponding improvement in telegraphy. The approaches were ingenious, and looking back, some were pretty amusing.
Morse’s electrical telegraph was the eventual winner, but it was far from the first.
The following information and drawn images are sourced from the concisely titled “The telegraph manual : a complete history and description of the semaphoric, electric and magnetic telegraphs of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, ancient and modern” by Taiaferro Shafner. I ran across it while researching another…
