Throughout the 19th century, a second industrial revolution took place that was based on science and not on engineering. It was produced fundamentally in two fields: one was chemistry, with the appearance of synthetic dyes; the other was the fruit of Volta and Faraday’s experiments on electricity.
In the 18th century , electricity was the toy of scientists and many began to seek practical applications for it, such as transmitting information with it: in 1753 a reader of the Scots Magazine (the oldest in the world, which is still being published), who signed with the initials CM, he suggested the idea of an electrostatic telegraph : using one wire for each letter of the alphabet a message could be sent over a distance. However, the idea of such a telegraph, in which the electric current does not intervene, was totally impracticable. But with the invention of the electric battery by Volta in 1800, things changed. Foreseeing its importance, Napoleon promoted the construction of a huge galvanic cell at the Polytechnic School in Paris in 1813. Despite the obvious inconvenience of having a long row of cells linked together, it was enough to produce the electricity needed to run a Telegraph.
The first attempts
In 1809 the German physician Samuel Thomas von Sömmering proposed an electrochemical telegraph, which was an improved version of that of the Spanish physician Francisco Salva Campillo . It consisted of 36 threads, one for each letter and number. When the electrical current reached the receiver, the cable, which was submerged in a container with acid, released hydrogen, which formed bubbles: wherever it appeared was the corresponding letter. von Sömmerling’s telegraph had a range of several kilometres , although actually having 36 canisters of acid was not practical at all.
The invention of the electromagnet was an impetus for the search for the telegraph, as Joseph Henry demonstrated in 1828, who used it to develop one that solved one of the great problems of telegraphy : overcoming the high resistance that telegraph wires had and that made cause the signal to weaken rapidly. Henry was able to ring a bell a mile away.
The first operational telegraph
But the first truly operational telegraph was invented by Francis Ronalds in 1816 using, surprise surprise, static electricity! In his house he installed a complex telegraph network that stretched over 10 km. The line was connected to rotating dials where he had printed the letters of the alphabet and which moved when electrical impulses hit them. He offered his invention to the Admiralty but it was dismissed as “totally unnecessary” . Ronalds described his invention and what it would mean as a revolution in communications in a little book entitled Descriptions of an Electrical Telegraph and of some other Electrical Apparatus , in what is the first published book on electrical telegraphy . Ahead of his time, the components he described were used 20 years later when the telegraph entered society.
The 1830s were a succession of developments in different countries and with varying degrees of success. In 1837 William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone developed a successful telegraph system which, as a receiver, used a series of needles on a panel which they used to point to the letters of the alphabet. In their May patent, they recommended a 5-needle system to encode 20 of the 26 letters. It was they who laid the first telegraph line in history, between Euston and Camden, in London .
The modern telegraph
But the telegraph as we know it was patented that same 1837 by the American Samuel Morse together with his assistant Alfred Vail, who was the inventor of the instrument that collected messages and we have seen so many times in western movies: a strip of paper that it was printing dots and dashes as the message progressed. Because in addition to the apparatus, Morse had the idea of replacing letters and numbers with a new language, Morse code.
The first telegram was sent on January 11, 1838 at a distance of 3 km; in 1844 he sent the first long distance, between Washington and Baltimore, a distance of 71 km. Two years later, in Germany, Siemens and Halske founded a company that built the telegraph network in Russia and then laid a cable from London through Berlin to Calcutta.
References:
Huurdeman, AA (2003) The Worldwide History of Telecommunications, John Wiley & Sons
Standage, T. (1998) The Victorian Internet, Berkley Trade
