Chapter 35: The Telegraph
This week, we discuss the development and impact of the electric telegraph – a new means of communicating through metal wires at the end of the First Industrial Revolution. This episode covers:
The possibilities made by Alessandro Volta’s battery
The early telegraph systems made by von Sömmerring, Ronalds, and Schilling
The first functional telegraph made by William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone
The life of Samuel Morse and his more successful telegraph
The economic and political impacts of the telegraph in the 19th Century
Sources for this episode include…
Allitt, Patrick N. “The Industrial Revolution.” The Great Courses. 2014.
Feifer, Jason. “Telegraph.” Pessimists Archive. March 7, 2019.
McCullough, David. "Samuel Morse’s Reversal of Fortune: It wasn’t until after he failed as an artist that Morse revolutionized communications by inventing the telegraph." Smithsonian Magazine. September 2011. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/samuel-morses-reversal-of-fortune-49650609/
Weightman, Gavin. The Industrial Revolutionaries: The Making of the Modern World, 1776-1914. Grove Press. 2007.
Full Transcript
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In 1746, a French priest and scientist named Jean-Antoine Nollet conducted a strange experiment. He gathered a group of about 200 monks into a large circle, roughly a mile in circumference, and connected them by pieces of wire. He used a new invention, a Leyden jar battery, to create an electric current. The current sped through the circle of monks, giving them all a shock at roughly the exact same time.
Electricity was a phenomenon known about since antiquity. But in the Age of Enlightenment it was becoming increasingly studied. About a year after the Nollet experiment, the British scientist Sir William Watson found that electricity could travel through water, earth, and about 10,000 feet of wire. He also posited the existence of positive and negative charges. Benjamin Franklin came to a similar conclusion in 1748.
But the big breakthrough in electricity came in the year 1800, when an Italian scientist wrote to the Royal Society of London to tell them about a new invention he came up with.
His name was Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta.
Born in Como, Lombardy in 1745, Volta was the son of a minor noble family. By the 1770s, he had become a professor of physics, studying electricity and gasses.
During the 1790s, Volta reviewed the work of his fellow Italian scientist, Luigi Galvani. The two men disagreed about whether electrochemical properties existed within animal muscles. To prove they didn’t, Volta experimented with different metals to conduct currents. In the process, he developed something we now call a Voltaic pile – an electric battery made of alternating zinc and copper pieces capable of providing a steady flow of current.
The invention of the Voltaic pile ushered in a new era of possibilities. Little else from the Industrial Revolutions has had the same impact on our daily lives as electricity. We use it for everything. Countless inventions that have changed our lives operate on electrical currents and, in many cases, reliable batteries.
And when he wrote of his invention to the Royal Society, it kickstarted a wave of experimentation in electrical engineering. Over the next half century, it made possible the much of the work carried out by Sir Humphrey Davy and his protégé, Michael Faraday.
Other innovations followed. In the 1820s, the Danish scientist Hans Christian Ørsted experimented with electric currents to produce magnetic fields. In 1824, British scientist William Sturgeon invented the first electromagnets. And by the 1830s, an American scientist named Joseph Henry improved electromagnets and made the electric relay possible.
And very quickly, these developments made possible a new form of communication – a way to send signals in the form of electric currents. This invention would be called the telegraph, and it would change the world.
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This is the Industrial Revolutions
Chapter 35: The Telegraph
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A couple quick administrative notes before we begin…
First of all, I was recently invited to do a guest episode on the Pax Britannica podcast, hosted by Samuel Hume. In it, I discuss many of the economic changes underway in Britain during the 16th and 17th Centuries which led to the first Industrial Revolution in the 18th Century. By now, you’ll already know everything I talk about in that guest episode, but I do recommend you check out Pax Britannica. It’s a great history podcast about the British Empire. If that’s a topic that interests you – particularly the politics of the British Empire – I highly recommend giving it a listen.
Second, I want to give you a heads up that episodes of this podcast might get a little sporadic over the next couple of months. I’m going on vacation to Japan during the final weeks of November, and then – a bit of big news here – my wife and I are moving from California to Boston, Massachusetts. Yes, I am very excited to move a city with so much history – not just with the American Revolution, but also the American Industrial Revolution, from Francis Cabot Lowell to current work of Boston Dynamics.
That being said, moving across the country is no easy task, even with the help of modern transport. So, there may be a few interruptions in the normal schedule. I do apologize ahead of time.
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Now the concept of telegraphy predates the Volta battery. In fact, it predates the battery by thousands of years. The words “telegraph” and “telegraphy” derive from the Greek expression “to write from a distance.” Smoke signals, beacon lighting, drum beats, and other ideas had been used throughout the centuries to send messages quickly from long distances.
During the 17th and 18th Centuries, new telegraphic systems were developed, including the optical telegraph, which used large mechanical arms on top of towers to convey messages with an early form of semaphore code.
The first known proposal of electric telegraphy came in 1753. In an article in Scots Magazine, a contributor who signed simply as “C.M.” suggested that a series of wires could be relayed from one place to another, each wire representing a different letter of the alphabet. Currents sent through the different wires would be able to construct words and sentences.
But 18th Century batteries produced uneven, unpredictable flows of current. With the Voltaic pile invented, a viable electric telegraph system would be possible.
It took less than a decade for inventors to start experimenting with the idea. An early example was developed by a recently ennobled Bavarian physician named Samuel Thomas von Sömmerring. Not a whole lot is known about this prototype, but it seems to have used multiple wires for the many different Latin characters and Hindu-Arabic numerals.
An operator on one end would create the electrical current and send it through the wires. On the other end, another operator would watch the wires create bubbles in a tube. That operator would then record the message, based on which wires were bubbling.
Other experimental systems were developed in the years to come.
Among them was the creation of an English scientist named Francis Ronalds. The son of London cheese-mongers, Ronalds had studied the advancements made in electricity throughout his twenties. In 1816, at the age of 28, Ronalds acquired about 8 miles of wire which he set up in his backyard.
Making use of recent innovations in wire insulation and brass dials for recording messages, he sent signals through the wires that traveled at lightning speeds.
Seven years later, he published a written account of his electric telegraph system, saying…
“electricity, may actually be employed for a more practically useful purpose than the gratification of the philosopher’s inquisitive research, the schoolboy’s idle amusement, or the physician’s tool; that it may be compelled to travel as many hundred miles beneath our feet as the subterranean ghosts which nightly haunt our metropolis, our provincial towns, and even our high roads; and that in such an enlightened country and obscure climate as this its travels would be productive of, at the least, as much public and private benefit.”
He went on to write “give me materiel enough, and I will electrify the world.”
But not everyone was convinced by this breakthrough. When Ronalds offered his invention to the British Admiralty, he was turned down. Despite the fact that it didn’t work in conditions of poor visibility, they told Ronalds that the semaphore system they already used was adequate for their needs.
Another such inventor was Baron Pavel L’vovitch Schilling of Candstadt, a Russian diplomat in Munich who had seen the von Sömmerring system and took his own crack at it. He demonstrated it back in Moscow, as a way to speed up communication across the massive Russian Empire, and pitched it to folks as he traveled throughout Europe and even to China. But like Ronalds, Schilling couldn’t seem to convince anyone of its utility.
But by the 1830s, the situation was changing. The introduction of railways in Great Britain and the United States – and, next, across Continental Europe – created a new need for telegraphy. Preventing railway collisions and improving efficiencies required better regulation of when trains left the stations. A faster means of sending messages across the railways was needed.
The first individuals to take advantage of this change were the Englishmen William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone.
William Fothergill Cooke was born in London in 1806. His father was a surgeon who, at one point, was a neighbor of Francis Ronalds. In fact, Cooke’s father even had an opportunity to try out Ronalds’ telegraph, although it’s not clear whether his son ever knew about it.
After his education at Durham and Edinburgh universities, Cooke joined the East India Company at age 19 and served in it for the next eight years. Then in 1833, he went to Heidelberg to learn about the anatomical model industry, but while he was there, he saw a demonstration of the Schilling telegraph.
Cooke did not have the scientific training to make a telegraph machine himself, but he clearly understood the value of the technology. He envisioned a national telegraph system with all sorts of purposes, from sending orders along the railways to sending market news to businessmen and alerting workers about family emergencies. It could be used to carry secret messages too, for the sake of national security. As he wrote in a pamphlet, the telegraph could be used “…in case of disturbance to transmit orders to the local authorities and, if necessary, to send troops to their support; whilst all dangerous excitement of the public might be avoided.”
Cooke pitched his telegraph to the directors of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, but they were unimpressed by the amateur’s prototype. Fortunately for him, he was then introduced to the new Professor of Experimental Philosophy at King’s College, London: Charles Wheatstone.
Professor Wheatstone was born just a few years before Cooke, out in Gloucestershire. He came from a family of musical instrument makers, which gave him a lifelong fascination with the science of transmitting sounds. He was similarly interested in the science of transmitting light and, increasingly, of transmitting electrical discharges. Not long before he met Cooke, Wheatstone had developed his own electric telegraph. Unlike many others, which used different wires for each alpha-numeric character, Wheatstone’s used just six wires which could transmit messages through five needles. As the needles moved, they would point to different alpha-numeric characters on a metal plate.
Not surprisingly, Wheatstone’s telegraph was better than Cooke’s. But Wheatstone was a working academic, not a businessman. So, the two men came up with an arrangement for a business. In 1837, they took out a patent together using Wheatstone’s design. Cooke would promote the system commercially while Wheatstone would serve as a sort of technical adviser.
Among their customers was Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s Great Western Railway, which ran the telegraph for a 13-and-a-half-mile stretch between Paddington Station in London and the station at West Drayton. It took about a year to set up and went into operation in 1839. Although Cooke figured he lost money on the deal, he had proved the viability and utility of a telegraph on railways. Additional orders came in throughout the 1840s.
But despite these successes, Cooke and Wheatstone had a hard time of it. For one thing, it seems the two men never really got along with each other all that well. For another thing, Cooke kept running into resistance in the form of price shock. Customers were weary of the high cost of installing a telegraph system.
Instead, a much more successful telegraph scheme was beginning to take off in the United States. Its promoter was determined to be remembered as the inventor of the telegraph and for the telegraph to be remembered as the first great American invention.
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Samuel Finley Breese Morse was born in the Charlestown neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts in 1791. (See what I mean about the industrial history there?) His father was a rather conservative Congregationalist minister and a notable geographer. His conservative, Calvinist outlook was passed on to Samuel, who was pro-slavery and anti-Catholic.
As a teenager, Morse worked with his brother to invent a portable fire extinguisher. This would be his only work as an inventor until he was in his 40s.
After graduating from Yale in 1810, Morse got married and began a career as a painter. He was a mediocre artist who had a fair number of commissions as he traveled across the United States, painting portraits as well as grander works on large canvasses. He struggled financially, a little bit, after the Panic of 1819.
Then in 1825, while working on a portrait of our old friend, Lafayette, in Washington, Morse received word from Connecticut that his wife had died. He rushed back up there, but still missed the funeral. Later, he credited the delayed news of her illness, death, and burial as an influence for him to develop the telegraph.
In 1829, he set sail for Paris, to hone his artistic skills further. While there, he attempted a 6-by-9-foot panting of a chamber inside the Louvre, which was ambitious, but the result was no masterpiece.
But it was while he was sailing back from Paris in 1832, aboard a ship called the Sully, that Morse conceived of an electric telegraph. How he conceived of it, well, it’s a bit controversial. Morse was pretty convinced that he was the first person who ever conceived of such an idea – which obviously wasn’t true. And it may be that he got the idea because of another passenger on board: Dr. Charles Jackson.
A recent Harvard graduate, Jackson would soon go on to open a Boston laboratory and serve as the state geologist for Maine. And while in Paris, Jackson claimed, he had seen a demonstration of an electric current sent around a room 400 times at the Sorbonne. Now, this would hardly be the only time in his life that Dr. Jackson claimed to have made a discovery or conceived an invention after someone else got famous for it, so who knows. But as Jackson claimed, it was a conversation he had with Morse that gave Morse the idea.
Whatever happened on that voyage, Morse didn’t get to work on the telegraph right away when he got home to America. First, he then tried his hand at politics, writing scathing editorials for his brother’s newspaper, The Observer, under the pen name “Brutus”, warning how Catholic immigrants were detrimental to democracy. In 1836, he ran for Mayor of New York City on the Nativist Party ticket, but was soundly defeated, coming in a distant last place. (Ah, those were the days.)
Then he tried getting a spot among the painters to decorate the US Capitol building, but he failed, likely due to his disgusting politics. He was so distraught by the failure that he decided to give up painting – the profession he had grinding away at for over 20 years. Instead, he focused on his day job as an art professor at New York University.
Then on April 15th, 1837, Morse was reading the Observer and came across an article about two Frenchmen promoting a new kind of telegraph that could transmit messages across continents in just minutes. He thought, “Wait a minute, didn’t I think of this?!” (he earnestly thought the French had stolen his idea) and totally lost it. He had never written this brilliant idea of his down anywhere, so he had to try to think of where and when he came up with it.
He concluded he must have thought about it while onboard the Sully. Morse wrote to the captain, William Pell, and a few of the passengers, stating
“There is a contest, it seems, for priority of invention of this Electric Telegraph between England, France, Germany, and this country. I claim for myself and consequently for America, priority over all other countries in the invention of a mode of communicating intelligence by electricity.”
He then asked everyone if they remembered him mentioning anything about it while on the voyage.
Pell wrote back:
“I am happy to say I have a distinct remembrance of your suggesting, as a thought newly occurred to you, the possibility of a telegraphic communication being effected by electric wires. As the passage progressed, and your idea developed itself, it became frequently a subject of conversation. Difficulty after difficulty was suggested as obstacles to its operation, which your ingenuity still labored to remove, until your invention, passing from its first crude state through different grades of improvement, was, in seeming, matured to an available instrument, wanting only patronage to perfect it, and call it into reality.”
Well, that was encouraging. Now, Pell also noted that it was possible others in Europe had previously conceived of the idea independently of Morse (and they did), but that he believed Morse was innocent, at least, of intentional plagiarism.
Now, Morse may have had a great idea, but he had no significant amount of money nor the scientific training to develop it. So, he turned to a fellow NYU professor, Leonard Gale, who taught chemistry there. Gale was an old friend of a guy named Joseph Henry, an American physicist whose research had been instrumental in the Cooke-Wheatstone telegraph. Morse and Gale worked together to create a telegraph wire that could send signals through several relays at a distance of about 10 miles.
As it happens, a 30-year-old NYU graduate named Alfred Vail was visiting his alma mater and saw this telegraph experiment. He came from a family of successful ironmasters in New Jersey, and he convinced his father to supply the funds to create a telegraph business. His dad was skeptical but gave him the cash for a 25% stake in the company. Alfred’s brother, George, meanwhile, would assist with the technical side of the business, along with his team at the ironworks.
Morse also went to Congress to seek public investment in the telegraph. That would take a little while to get sorted, but one of the Congressmen he met – Francis Smith – decided to get in on the action himself, making his own investment.
Then Morse and Smith went to London for Queen Victoria’s coronation, hoping to use it as an opportunity to show off his invention and get a British patent, although he couldn’t, since he had already published an account of it. Then they went to France, where nobody was interested. While in Paris, Morse learned about a guy named Louis Daguerre, who had – spoiler alert – basically just invented photography. So, he then got sidetracked with photography for years before returning to the telegraph in 1841.
By this point, Morse’s team – Vail, Gale, and Smith – had gone their separate ways. So, Morse tried enlisting new backers for his great venture, including our old friend, Sam Colt. He also met a lobbyist around this time named Isaac Coffin, who offered to help Morse get federal funding for his telegraph. In 1843, Congress approved funding for the telegraph by a narrow vote.
It was enough to get Vail and Gale back on the telegraph team, and they got to work. To sell the technology, they would create a demonstration line between Washington and Baltimore, along the B&O Railroad. Originally, they planned to bury the cable, but that turned out to be really challenging, so instead ran the cable through trees and posts.
Vail got to work on making the instruments for the telegraph and Morse came up with his most famous – and ultimately, his most important – original idea: the telegraphic language of dots and dashes that we now call “Morse code.”
With Morse code, you wouldn’t need several cables and letter panels and needles. All you’d need is one cable that could send an electrical current from one end and create an embossed series of dots and dashes on the other end.
On May 24th, 1844, Morse set up his telegraph in the chamber of the US Supreme Court while Vail set up on his post in Baltimore. There, he tapped out a series of dots and dashes according to the code he invented. The message had been agreed upon beforehand, from Numbers 23:23 in the Old Testament: “What hath God wrought!” – a fairly ominous message for a new technology.
The demonstration was wildly successful for publicity. A patent commissioner named Henry Ellsworth wrote to Morse praising the technology:
“I do not doubt that within the next 10 years, you will see electric power adopted between all commercial points of magnitude on both sides of the Atlantic, for the purposes of correspondence, and men enabled to send their orders or news of events from one point to another with the speed of lightning itself. The extremities of the nations will be literally wired together.”
Over the next several years, new telegraph companies were established across the US, with Morse and Vail owning shares in them in exchange for the use of their technology. The first commercial line was built between New York and Philadelphia, and, by 1852, more than 23,000 miles of telegraph lines were up and running.
The telegraph continued to take off in Europe too. In 1847, a German inventor named Werner Siemens started his own telegraph company, which evolved into the multinational it is today.
In 1851, a telegraph cable was laid across the English Channel, creating a direct line between the UK and France. And by 1866, the two continents were permanently linked up by telegraph line. Brunel’s SS Great Eastern (shout out last week’s episode) laid the transatlantic cable along the ocean floor.
The world was suddenly a much faster, smaller, and more communicative place. It would never be the same again.
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As human beings evolved, we survived by communicating with one another. If a group of hunters was walking and one got tapped on the shoulder, he’d quickly turn around to receive the information coming to him.
As a result, our brains are wired for such communication. We get a little rush of dopamine when we connect and share information. If we get tapped on the shoulder – or if our phone dings – and we don’t stop to receive the information coming, it makes us anxious.
This wasn’t so much a problem in the old days. If you sent a letter to someone, it would take weeks before you’d get a reply. You wouldn’t drop everything and wait in the meantime, you’d get on with your life. But with the telegraph, incoming information was difficult to ignore.
During Morse’s 1868 retirement banquet, one guest made a speech decrying the telegraph, complaining that customers have become needier for information as a result. They can now interrupt a merchant’s family dinner. And there is no avoiding it. The modern businessman “must be continually on the jump. The slow express train will not answer his purpose. The poor merchant has no other way in which to secure a living for his family. He must use the telegraph.”
Thanks to the telegraph, a more national and more global economy could take shape. New York City brokers could get information on Southern cotton crops, or Midwest state bond sales, or bank defaults in a matter of minutes rather than days. It gave him time to react to events as they unfurled. An industrialist could expand his operations to new cities and states. Distributors could more efficiently track sales and inventory.
The telegraph had a huge impact on government as well. The 1815 Battle of New Orleans, which made Andrew Jackson a military hero, famously happened after the War of 1812 officially ended. (Whoops!) Thanks to the telegraph, no one was going to make a mistake like that again. In the coming Civil War, the telegraph would transform military strategy and command, with President Lincoln constantly sitting by the White House telegraph, waiting on news from the front.
News for public consumption spread faster than ever. Telegraph wire services (like the Associated Press and Reuters) were created, quickly moving information across the country to local newspapers (which were also now being printed at higher quantities for lower costs than ever before).
But perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that this stressed people out too. There seemed to be a sudden information overload. It was just honest news – gossip, rumors, and hoaxes spread faster than ever too.
The telegraph also strengthened the existing power structures. Some governments began using telegraph technology for surveillance, tracking political dissidents. Similarly, industrialists would use it to monitor the activities of suspected labor union sympathizers. Law enforcement was better able to find and capture fugitives.
The first known case was in 1845. An English pharmacist and occasional criminal, John Tawell, murdered his mistress. He hopped on a train from Slough to Paddington Station. The police tracked his trail to Slough, realized he was on the train into London, and got on the telegraph wires to send a description of the suspect and his clothing. When Tawell arrived at Paddington Station, the railway police were waiting for him.
Of course, ultimately, the telegraph was not a technology that would last forever. It’s not exactly a tool we still use today. And when it came to electricity, the pace of scientific progress would soon enough illuminate the world. But not right away. In the meantime, people would need to find other ways to light up the streets and factories – next time, on the Industrial Revolutions.
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