Telegraph Timeline

According to Polybius, a Greek historian of the Hellenistic period, Aeneas Tacticus, one of the earliest Greek writers on the art of war, invented the hydraulic telegraph about this time. It was a semaphore system used during the First Punic War to send messages between Sicily and Carthage.

"The system involved identical containers on separate hills; each container would be filled with water, and a vertical rod floated within. The rods were inscribed with various predetermined codes.

"To send a message, the sending operator would use a torch to signal the receiving operator; once the two were synchronized, they would simultaneously open the spigots at the bottom of their containers. Water would drain out until the water level reached the desired code, at which point the sender would lower his torch, and the operators would simultaneously close their spigots."

On March 2, 1791 inventor Claude Chappe sent his brother the first transmission over their optical telegraph: “si vous reussissez, vous serez bientôt couvert de gloire” (If you succeed, you will soon bask in glory). The initial experimental line ran between Brulon and Parcé.

Having been appointed Ingénieur-Télégraphiste and charged with establishing a line of stations between Paris and Lille, a distance of 230 kilometres (about 143 miles), Claude Chappe succeeded in completing his first optical telegraph, or semaphore telegraph. 

The Chappe telegraph was used to carry dispatches for the war between France and Austria, and communicated  news of a French capture of Condé-sur-l'Escaut from the Austrians less than an hour after it occurred.

"The first symbol of a message to Lille would pass through 15 stations in only nine minutes. The speed of the line varied with the weather, but the line to Lille typically transferred 36 symbols, a complete message, in about 32 minutes. Paris to Strasbourg with 50 stations was the next line and others followed soon after."

Chappe's system was the first widely adopted system to transmit messages overland faster than a messager or horseback can carry a message over a good road system. That speed had remained essentially fixed since Roman times. 

"In the Chappe system messages were encrypted and translated by semaphore signals built on the tops of towers miles apart. A telegrapher in the next tower would read the semaphore signals through a telescope and retransmit the message to the following tower. This process would be repeated, with error-correction checks in place at each repetition, until the message reached the end of the line. Because optical telegraph systems using semaphores required that messages be continually restransmitted from tower to tower, there was no fail-safe way to eliminate error. Furthermore it was necessary to encrypt all messages so that the operators would not be privy to secret information. Thus only the directors of the system and the inspectors were allowed to know the code for message signals. The two operators in each signaling tower knew only the limited set of control codes used for error correction, clock synchronizations, etc. The actual codes were written in codebooks. Claude Chappe's 1795 codebook had 8,940 words and phrases. By 1799 he had added four supplementary codebooks with additional words and phrases, and names of places and people. Thus each message had to include a citation of the code book employed" (Norman, From Gutenberg to the Internet [2005] 174).

"All signals on the semphore telegraph were passed one at a time, in strictly synchronus fashion. The operators were required to check [by telescope] their neighboring stations every few minutes for new signals, and reproduce them as quickly as possible. The operator then had to verify that the next station inline reproduced the signal correctly, and set an error signal if it failed to do so. Each symbol had to be recorded in a logbook, as soon as it was carried to completion. Since no symbolic or numeric code system for representing the semaphore positions was described this was done in the form of little pictograms. . . " (Hotzmann & Pehrson, The Early History of Data Networks [1995] 87).

The Chappe optical telegraph eventually covered France with "a network of 556 stations stretching a total distance of 4,800 kilometres." It was be used for military and national communications until the 1850s.

"By 1824, the Chappe brothers were promoting the semaphore lines for commercial use, especially to transmit the costs of commodities. Napoleon Bonaparte saw the military advantage in being able to transmit information between locations, and carried a portable semaphore with his headquarters. This allowed him to coordinate forces and logistics over longer distances than any other army of his time. However because stations had to be within sight of each other, and because the efficient operation of the network required well trained and disciplined operators, the costs of administration and wages were a continuous source of financial difficulties."

In 1816 English meteorologist and inventor Francis Ronalds built the first working electrostatic telegraph. This was the first "electric" medium for communication. Ronalds's device involved two synchronized clocks whose dials were marked with the letters of the alphabet. Instead of hands, each clock had a rotating disk with a notch cut into it so that only one letter on the clock face was visible at a time. Ronalds placed one clock at each end of eight miles of wire insulated by glass tubing that he had laid down in an elaborate series of back & forth coils in his garden in Hammersmith, London, and used electrical impulses to transmit signals between them. He wrote to Viscount Melville, First Lord of the British Admiralty, offering to demonstrate his telegraph, describing his invention as "a mode of conveying telegraphic intelligence with great rapidity, accuracy, and certainty, in all states of the atmosphere, either at night or in the day, and at small expense." However John Barrow, secretary to the admiralty, wrote back to Ronalds saying that "telegraphs of any kind are now [after the conclusion of the Napoleonic wars] totally unnecessary, and that no other than the one now in use [a semaphore telegraph] will be adopted" (quoted in DNB). Ronalds never patented his work. Eventually Charles Wheatstone and William Fothergill Cooke patented and popularized Ronalds's system. 

Ronalds first published an account of his invention in Descriptions of an Electrical Telegraph, and of some other Electrical Apparatus (London, 1823).

Ronalds was also a pioneer collector of books and pamphlets on electricity, magnetism and telegraphy.  Alfred J. Frost edited a catalogue of his library: Catalogue of books, papers... electricity, magnetism, telegraph in the Ronalds Library (1880).

in 1837 Samuel F. B. Morse invented a practical form of electromagnetic telegraph using an early version of his “Morse code.” 

Morse originally devised a cipher code similar to that used in existing semaphore telegraphs, by which words were assigned three or four-digit numbers and entered into a codebook. The sending operator converted words to these number groups and the receiving operator converted them back to words using this codebook. Morse spent several months compiling this code dictionary.

The first commercial electrical telegraph, based on technology originally invented by Francis Ronalds, was co-developed by Sir William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone, and patented in May 1837 as an alarm system.  The Cooke-Wheatstone telegraph was first successfully demonstrated on July 25, 1837 between Euston and Camden Town in London. It entered commercial use on the Great Western Railway over the 13 miles (21 km) from Paddington station to West Drayton on April 9, 1839. On January 1, 1845 criminal John Tawell was apprehended following the use of a needle telegraph message from Slough to Paddington. "This is thought to be the first use of the telegraph to catch a murderer. The message was:

"A MURDER HAS GUST BEEN COMMITTED AT SALT HILL AND THE SUSPECTED MURDERER WAS SEEN TO TAKE A FIRST CLASS TICKET TO LONDON BY THE TRAIN WHICH LEFT SLOUGH AT 742 PM HE IS IN THE GARB OF A KWAKER WITH A GREAT COAT ON WHICH REACHES NEARLY DOWN TO HIS FEET HE IS IN THE LAST COMPARTMENT OF THE SECOND CLASS COMPARTMENT

"The Cooke-Wheatstone system did not support punctuation, lower case, or the letters J, Q, and Z; hence the misspelling of 'just' and 'Quaker'. "Second class compartment" should also probably read "second first-class carriage"; this information was not significant, however, as Tawell was not arrested at the station, but at a nearby coffee shop" (Wikipedia article on Electrical Telegraph, accessed 12-22-2011).

On May 24, 1844 Samuel F. B. Morse transmitted the first message on a United States experimental telegraph line (Washington to Baltimore) using the “Morse code” that became standard in the United States and Canada. The message, taken from the Bible, Numbers 23:23, and recorded on a paper tape, had been suggested to Morse by Annie Ellworth, the young daughter of a friend. It was “What hath God wrought?” The recipient of Morse's message was Morse's associate in developing the telegraph, machinist and inventor Alfred Vail. 

Vail, who had worked with Morse since September 1837, expanded Morse's original experimental numeric code based on a optical telegraph codes, to include letters and special characters, so it could be used more generally. Vail determined the frequency of use of letters in the English language by counting the movable type he found in the type-cases of a local newspaper in Morristown. The shorter marks were called "dots", and the longer ones "dashes", and the letters most commonly used were assigned the shorter sequences of dots and dashes. Vail was thus responsible for inventing the most useful and efficient features of the Morse Code.

The Morse Code became the first widely used data code.

Probably the first publication of the Morse Code was in Vail's Description of the American ElectroMagnetic Telegraph: Now in Operation between the Cities of Washington and Baltimore (1845). Vail issued two versions of this in 1845: a 24-page pamphlet, which was probably the first, and a much-expanded 208-page book.

Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace  (2002) no. 208.

American physicist Joseph Henry, first Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, and a pioneer in telegraphic research, realized that storms in the United States generally move from west to east.

Henry wrote in the Smithsonian's 1847 annual report that "the extended lines of telegraph will furnish a ready means of warning the more northern and eastern observers to be on the watch for the first appearance of an advancing storm."

By 1849, Henry worked out an arrangement with a number of telegraph companies to allow free transmission of local weather data to the Smithsonian. He proposed to supply "the most important stations" with barometers and thermometers. By the end of the 1849 150 volunteers throughout the United States reported weather observations to the Smithsonian regularly by telegraph. This became the basis for the first national weather service where weather observations from distant points could be "rapidly" collected, plotted and analyzed at one location -- the beginnings of "surface weather analysis".

In 1848 the Associated Press (AP) was founded in New York City to reduce the high cost of telegraphic transmissions among six highly competitive newspapers.

In 1850 telegraphic engineer John Watkins Brett and his brother Jacob Brett laid the first telegraph cable between England and France. After a French fisherman cut the cable, thinking it was a new kind of seaweed, in September 1851 the brothers installed an armored cable that lasted for many years. Their Submarine Telegraph Company between France and England became operational from London though Dover and Calais to Paris on November 13, 1851.  Messages were transmitted through the submarine cable from Calais to Dover, the narrowist point in the English Channel, from which they were passed to the South Eastern Railway for telegraphing to its London Bridge Station, and then by messenger to the telegraph company’s office.

In 1851 Paul Julius Reuter founded the Reuters news agency in London using telegraph lines, and a fleet of carrier pigeons that grew to exceed 200. Reuter opened an office in London’s financial center close to the main telegraph offices. He transmitted stock market quotations and news between London and Paris over the new Dover-Calais submarine telegraph cable, using his "telegraph expertise."

In 1852 a cable laid by the Submarine Telegraph Company linked London to Paris.

In New York Cyrus Field organized the New York, Newfoundland, and London Electric Telegraph Company with the intention of laying an Atlantic Cable. Working with Samuel Morse and the Brett brothers the company laid a cable from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia to Cape Ray on the west coast of Newfoundland in 1855. The next challenge was to lay a 400 mile cable across Newfoundland to St John’s on its east coast. This was completed in 1856. At the end of this cable was a telegraph station at Trinity Bay.

In London David Edward Hughes invented the first perfected mechanism for printing telegraph messages, using a keyboard in which each key caused the corresponding letter to be printed at a distant receiver. Hughes's printing mechanism worked something like a "golfball" typewriter, but it was produced before the typewriter was invented.

In 1856 Cyrus W. Field in New York and Charles Bright, John Brett, and Jacob Brett in England formed The Atlantic Telegraph Company to lay and exploit commercially a telegraph cable across the Atlantic ocean. 

"The project stemmed from an agreement between the American Cyrus Field and the Englishmen John Watkins Brett and Charles Tilston Bright, and was incorporated in December 1856 with £350,000 capital, raised principally in London, Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow. The board of directors was composed of eighteen members from the UK, nine from the U.S. and three from Canada. The original three projectors were joined by E.O.W. Whitehouse as chief electrician. Curtis M. Lampson served ably as vice-chairman for over a decade. 

"The board recruited the physicist William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin), who had publicly disputed some of Whitehouse's claims. The two enjoyed a tense relationship before Whitehouse was dismissed when the first cable failed in 1858" (Wikipedia article on Atlantic Telegraph Company, accessed 12-25-2012).

The first attempt to lay the Atlantic Cable using the American navy vessel Niagara and the British steam and sail powered battleship HMS Agamemnon failed. The Niagara was then the largest navy ship in the world: 345 feet long, 55 feet wide and 5,800 tons. 

On August 11, 1857 the cable snapped.and an inquiry was held on August 20 to assess the causes of failure. One conclusion arising from this was that any future expedition should commence mid-ocean with the two ships splicing their respective halves of the Atlantic cable before sailing in opposite directions towards Newfoundland and Ireland.

Reuters opened offices all over Europe, following telegraph lines.

On August 16, 1858 communication was established on the Atlantic Cable. In 23 days of operation a total of 271 messages totalling 14,168 letters were sent from Newfoundland to Valentia Island and 129 messages totalling 7,253 letters were sent from Valentia Island to Newfoundland. However, on the 18th September 1858 the cable failed.

The Pony Express, a fast mail service crossing the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, California was operational for little more than one year. Carrying messages by horseback riders in relays to stations across the prairies, plains, deserts and mountains of the western United States, it reduced the transit time for messages between the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts to about 10 days, with telegraphic communication covering about half the distance and couriers on horseback covering the rest.

"In 1860 there were about 157 Pony Express stations that were about 10 miles (16 km) apart along the Pony Express route. This was roughly the distance a horse could travel at a gallop before tiring. At each station stop the express rider would change to a fresh horse, taking only the mail pouch called a mochila (from the Spanish for pouch or backpack) with him. The employers stressed the importance of the pouch. They often said that, if it came to be, the horse and rider should perish before the mochila did. The mochila was thrown over the saddle and held in place by the weight of the rider sitting on it. Each corner had a cantina, or pocket. Bundles of mail were placed in these cantinas, which were padlocked for safety. The mochila could hold 20 pounds (10 kg) of mail along with the 20 pounds of material carried on the horse. Included in that 20 pounds were a water sack, a Bible, a horn for alerting the relay station master to prepare the next horse, a revolver, and a choice of a rifle or another revolver.  Eventually, everything except one revolver and a water sack was removed, allowing for a total of 165 pounds (75 kg) on the horse's back. Riders, who could not weigh over 125 pounds, changed about every 75–100 miles (120–160 km), and rode day and night. In emergencies, a given rider might ride two stages back to back, over 20 hours on a quickly moving horse.

"It is unknown if riders tried crossing the Sierra Nevada in winter, but they certainly crossed central Nevada. By 1860 there was a telegraph station in Carson City, Nevada. The riders received $25 per week as pay. A comparable wage for unskilled labor at the time was about $1 per week" (Wikipedia article on Pony Express, accessed 12-24-2010).

Completion of the first transcontinental telegraph line on October 24, 1861 made the Pony Express obsolete, and it shut down two days later.  Remarkably, this legendary U.S. mail service existed for only one year and seven months!

The U.S. Federal Pacific Telegraph Act of 1860, passed June 16, 1860 to subsidize a telegraph line that would complete telegraphic communication between the east and west coast of the United States, incorporated one of the earliest statements of network neutrality: 

"messages received from any individual, company, or corporation, or from any telegraph lines connecting with this line at either of its termini, shall be impartially transmitted in the order of their reception, excepting that the dispatches of the government shall have priority. . ." (Wikipedia article on Network neutrality, accessed 12-24-2010).

The first transcontinental telegraph line connected New York and San Francisco.  As a result of the completion of this line, the Pony Express was immediately obsolete, and it ceased operations two days later.

The single overland telegraph line was operated until 1869, when it was replaced by a multi-line telegraph that had been constructed alongside the route of the Transcontinental Railroad.

Using the Great Eastern steamship, the attempt to lay the second Atlantic Cable was undertaken. The cable snapped after twelve hundred miles.

On July 27, 1866, roughly ten years after the project began, the Great Eastern laid the third and successful Atlantic Cable, connecting the cable at Heart’s Content, a fishing village in Newfoundland, with the Telegraph Field (also known as Longitude Field) Foilhommerum Bay, Valentia Island, in western Ireland.  Communication by electric telegraph between Europe and America was finally established on a permanent basis. The first message sent over the cable was “A treaty of peace has been signed between Austria and Prussia."

In 1870 9,158,000,000 telegraph messages were sent in the United States.

In 1870 British telegraph systems were nationalized.

French telegraph engineer Émile Baudot invented the Baudot code, a character set predating EDCDIC and ASCII, which has been called the first means of digital communication. In Baudot's code each character in the alphabet is represented by a series of bits sent over a communication channel. The symbol rate measurement (symbols per second or pulses per second) is known as baud in Baudot's honor.

"Baudot invented his original code during 1870 and patented it during 1874. It was a 5-bit code, with equal on and off intervals, which allowed telegraph transmission of the Roman alphabet and punctuation and control signals. It was based on an earlier code developed by Carl Friedrich Gauss and Wilhelm Weber in 1834.

"Baudot's original code was adapted to be sent from a manual keyboard, and no teleprinter equipment was ever constructed that used it in its original form. The code was entered on a keyboard which had just five piano type keys, operated with two fingers of the left hand and three fingers of the right hand. Once the keys had been pressed they were locked down until mechanical contacts in a distributor unit passed over the sector connected to that particular keyboard, when the keyboard was unlocked ready for the next character to be entered, with an audible click (known as the "cadence signal") to warn the operator. Operators had to maintain a steady rhythm, and the usual speed of operation was 30 words per minute." (Wikipedia article on Baudot code, accessed 12-22-2011).

On June 30, 1875 the New York Tribune published a series of 36 relief blocks on its front page showing the targets at an International Rifle Match in Dublin, Ireland.

The blocks were produced in New York from target coordinates transmitted over the Atlantic telegraph. These were the first significant series of illustrations published in a daily newspaper.

On March 3, 1885  American Telephone and Telegraph Corporation (A T & T) was established to to create a nationwide long-distance network with a commercially viable cost-structure.  Starting from New York, the network reached Chicago in 1892.

By 1900 telegraph systems connected most of the civilized world.

In 1909 William D. Weaver published Catalogue of the Wheeler Gift of Books, Pamphlets, and Periodicals in the Library of the American Institute of Engineers.With Introduction, Descriptive and Critical Notes by Brother Potamian. This 2-volume work, which remains the most comprehensive historical bibliography on the subjects, described primarily the library of Latimer Clark, a British electrical engineer and inventor working in London who, in partnership with Sir Charles Tilson Bright, was responsible for laying many of the first submarine telegraphic cables. While pursuing a remarkably successful and creative scientific and entrepeneurial career, Clark also found time to build one of the most complete collections ever formed of early books and manuscripts on the history of electricity and magnetism, including virtually every known publication in English on these subjects prior to 1886.

In collecting the history of electricity and telegraphy Clark followed in the path of Francis Ronalds, another telegraphy pioneer who assembled a somewhat smaller library on the subjects, the catalogue of which appeared in 1880. Nearly coincident with the publication of the catalogue of the Ronalds Library, in 1881 Francesco Rossetti and Giovanni Cantoni issued Bibliografia Italiana di Elettricità e Magnetismo, on the occasion of an international fair on electricity held in Paris in 1881. This briefly annotated bibliography presented the history of the Italian literature on the subject.

In 1901 Clark's library was purchased by the American engineer, Schulyer Skaats Wheeler, and donated by him to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (now Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers [IEEE]) in New York. The extensively annotated and illustrated catalogue of the collection of 5,966 items, edited by William Weaver and annotated by Brother Potamian, was financed by Andrew Carnegie. Though the title page of the catalogue takes no notice of it, a high percentage of the items in Clark's library, particularly the final 2000 items, concern telegraphy.

♦ Problematic Management of the Latimer Clark Library in the Twentieth Century:

"In 1913 the Engineering Societies Library was established in New York City, a joint venture of the AIEE, the ASME (Mechanical Engineers), and the AIME (Mining Engineers), funded by a $1.5 million gift from Andrew Carnegie. The AIEE’s main contribution to the Library was the Wheeler Gift Collection. For many years the collection was accessible according to the terms above, but in the 1990s the ESL decided that it could no longer maintain its Manhattan premises and closed the library there.

"By that time the Wheeler Gift Collection had been merged with other works at the library, and had suffered from neglect over the years, much of the material being kept in poor physical conditions. A 1985 survey of the collection showed about 9% (532 items) were missing, and it seems unlikely that the situation improved in the following ten years, prior to the dispersion of the collection.

"Constrained by the terms of the Gift to keep the collection in New York City, the ESL boxed up whatever could be definitely identified as part of the original Wheeler Gift and in 1995 sent 205 cartons of books and papers to the Humanities and Social Sciences division of the New York Public Library at 42nd Street. The rest of the collection, including items in the 1909 catalog that were part of the Wheeler Gift but did not have identifying labels, went to Linda Hall Library in Kansas City, MO"(http://atlantic-cable.com/CablePioneers/LatimerClark.htm, accessed 07-31-2009).

Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace (2001) No. 211.

George Stibitz's Complex Number Calculator, an electromechanical relay machine located in New York, was demonstrated via a remote teletype terminal at the American Mathematical Association Meeting in Dartmouth College, New Hampshire.

Mathematician Norbert Wiener and Physicist and computer designer John Mauchly spent a lot of time experimenting with the system. This was the first demonstration of remote computing.

In 1945uUse of telegraphy peaked in the United States with the transmission of "236,169,000,000" messages during that year, presumably because this was the year in which so many soldiers returned home from World War II.