Many inventors, one idea
The electric telegraph was not the work of a single inventor. Scientists in several countries learned in the early nineteenth century that electricity could carry signals along wires, and a number of them tried to turn this into a usable system. Early proposals in the 1800s and 1810s used chemical effects, and in the 1830s Pavel Schilling in Russia, and Carl Friedrich Gauss and Wilhelm Weber in Germany, built working experimental telegraphs. Two sets of inventors then produced the systems that became commercial: William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone in Britain, and Samuel Morse with Alfred Vail and others in the United States.
Calling any one of them “the” inventor is misleading. They developed different designs at nearly the same time, sometimes with knowledge of each other’s work, and later disputes over credit were bitter.
The British needle telegraph
Cooke was an entrepreneur who had seen a demonstration of a telegraph and wanted to build one. Wheatstone was a physicist at King’s College London who had worked on electricity and sound. Together they patented a system in 1837. Their early version used magnetic needles that pointed at letters on a diamond-shaped board. An operator sent currents through wires, deflecting the needles to point to a letter, and a receiving clerk read the letters directly. It required no code and little training, although it needed several wires.
The first commercial use was on the Great Western Railway in the late 1830s, one of the early railways of Britain, along a short stretch west of London. Later versions used fewer needles and fewer wires. A single-needle system, in which the needle moved left or right to give a code of deflections, became common in Britain.
The Morse system
In the United States, Morse developed the idea of recording signals as marks on paper by an electromagnet, and with Alfred Vail created a code of dots and dashes that could be sent by short and long pulses. Vail is often credited with important parts of the practical apparatus and the code, and the extent of each man’s contribution has been debated. The system needed only one wire and a key to send, and operators soon learned to read the code by ear from the clicks of the receiver instead of from marks on paper.
In 1843 Congress paid for an experimental line between Washington and Baltimore. In May 1844, Morse sent the message “What hath God wrought” over the line, and the system soon spread. Private companies built lines along railroads and between cities, with more than a few competing methods in the early years. Morse’s version came to dominate in North America, and, with changes, it was later adopted widely elsewhere in Europe.
A criminal caught by wire
An early public demonstration of the telegraph’s value came in Britain in 1845. A man suspected of a murder near Slough boarded a train to London. The telegraph line along the railway allowed the station at Slough to send a description to the London terminus, where police were waiting. The suspect was identified and arrested. The case was widely reported and is often cited as an example of how the new technology could be used. The details of the story are told in a number of versions, but the central point, that a message traveled faster than a train, is well established.
News faster than people
The telegraph’s effect on news was swift. Newspapers received reports of events from distant places the same day. Wire services developed to supply them. Reports of speeches, elections and battles reached the public in hours rather than days or weeks. Financial and commercial news, such as market prices, traveled equally fast, with consequences for trade.
This changed what people expected of information. News could now be “late” in a way that it had not been before. It also encouraged shorter, factual reporting, because telegrams were charged by the word.
Cables and continents
Land lines spread rapidly, and by the 1850s attention turned to crossing water. Cables under the English Channel worked from 1851, and the first Atlantic cable of 1858 operated only briefly. A more robust cable laid in 1866 provided lasting transatlantic service. These submarine cables linked continents and are described in detail in the history of the system’s expansion. They allowed messages that once took roughly ten days by ship to arrive within hours or minutes.
Business and government
Governments used the telegraph for administration and war. Armies used it to coordinate movements and relay orders, and it appeared in mid-century conflicts, including the Crimean War and the American Civil War. Governments also began to regulate and sometimes own telegraph networks. In India and some European countries, the state was heavily involved from early on.
Businesses used it to manage railways, where it worked alongside steam locomotives and railway signals, exchanges and shipping. The telegraph became a basic infrastructure of the industrial economy.
Why it was revolutionary
Before the telegraph, communication and transportation were the same thing. A message could only go as fast as a person or a vehicle. The telegraph separated them. This was a historic change, and its effects were so large that later technologies, including the telephone and the radio, are often described in terms of what the telegraph began. Later systems, from the telephone to wireless telegraphy, are often described in terms of what the telegraph began. It is hard to overstate how new it felt to people who watched messages cross a continent in the time it took to boil a kettle.