The Amazing Electric Telegraph

In Brief

Ben Franklin cooks turkeys with it, French scientists abuse clergymen with it, but no one has a brilliant use for electricity until Samuel Morse comes up with a scheme for keeping messages safe from prying European eyes. Voila, the telegraph is born, and with it an age of hype and disappointment! Part 1 in our series on the telegraph.

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In 1855, just a few months after the Charge of the Light Brigade would give Florence Nightingale's career a decided boost but fail to decide the deadly Crimean War, Samuel Morse prophesied that an eponymous, newfangled invention of his would "bind man to his fellow-man in such bonds of amity as to put an end to war."[1] 1858 found the first telegraph messages transmitted across the cold Atlantic depths from New York to London. Three sailings, two snapped cables, and an encounter with an ornery, Luddite whale could not stop the laying of an undersea telegraph Cable which, as New York City Alderman James Davis assured the gathered crowds, could "not fail to be the means of promoting peace on earth."[2]

The new cable was a smash hit. Tiffany's bought unlaid sections of it and sold them as souvenirs. Other bits were made into umbrellas. Giddy Americans and Brits believed that it would be "impossible that old prejudices and hostilities should longer exist, while such an instrument has been created for the exchange of thought between all the nations of the earth."[3] Bookstores filled with hurriedly penned paeans to those responsible for the "Victorian Miracle". Punters and farmers engaged in a speculative orgy -- stocks and bonds with the word "telegraph" on them couldn't rise in value fast enough.

Now-famous Morse didn't invent the telegraph, of course, much as he wished to become rich by its popularity. Various instant communication schemes had been tried for nearly a century. The French, in characteristic style, built a system that relied on weird metal contraptions atop towers, synchronized clocks, and line-of-sight. Belatedly, they noticed that enemies could see their military messages as well as they could, which was to say not to well, due to France's famous fog and rain. Napoleon immediately ordered scores of the towers.[4]

A Shocking Idea

Some clever folks decided that electricity, a mystery that truly sparked the popular imagination in a way that might be hard to imagine today, could be the answer. To say that the science of electricity was primitive would be to understate the matter. Right after helping to improve the battery in 1749, noted electrician Benjamin Franklin was entertaining party guests by killing their dinner (turkey) with "electrical shock" and roasting it "by the electric jack, before a fire kindled by the electrified bottle". He also slipped them pre-electrified shot glasses and presumably chuckled heartily when those among them who were "close shaved and [did] not breathe on the liquor" got a jolt from more than the alcohol.[5]

Around this time, an eager Frog scientist and court electrician, Jean-Antoine Nollet, designed an experiment for linking men holding wires in each hand across the span of a mile to figure just how fast electricity traveled. Recognizing both France's most plentiful source of men accustomed to obedience, harebrained schemes, and abuse, and the general spirit of the times, he gathered some two hundred monks on a sunny hillside, and applied a fantastic charge to one end of the line. The line of monks jumped, contorted and shouted quite unbiblical words simultaneously, convincing Nollet that electricity traveled at infinite speed. The incident supposedly gave the closet anti-clerical King Louis XV an amusing diversion from his program of imposing taxes on previously exempt church property to bankroll his fabulous lifestyle, and a giggle besides.[6] The stage was set for the amazing electric telegraph.

Morse the Pity

Samuel Morse didn't invent the telegraph because he was busy trying to be a painter. In 1812 He assured his parents that future biographers would write that his desires "always settled on painting," and set off for Europe to get some skills. Displaying the unpleasant nature he shared with fellow legend Noah Webster, he wrote that he hated the Europeans; railing against their culture he wrote: "By what law are we bound to consider ourselves inferior, because we have stamped folly upon the artificial and unjust grades of European systems, upon those antiquated remnants of feudal barbarisms?" When Americans found his cheap reproductions of famous European paintings uninteresting[7], he had harsher things to say about their "Philistinism,", finally grumbling that he "was born 100 years too soon for the arts in our country."[8]

On a return trip from a European art trip in 1832, after a wide-ranging dinner discussion, Morse retired to his cabin believing that he had just had the best idea in the world: an electric telegraph! Unaware that great men had bent their minds to this problem for the better part of a hundred years, he assumed that the only thing that needed solving was an encoding for messages[9]. Here we are fortunate, for had he been dissuaded by the practical difficulties of long distance electric telegraphy, the world may never have seen Morse's Code. Surprisingly, no one had yet developed a convenient code for transmission. Early telegraphs used multiple wires to trigger complex clocks to point at particular letters. Sending messages was slow and inconvenient. Morse's famous code would change the entire world.

Sammy Get your Gun

Morse's breakthrough was that his system used just two symbols: a dot and a dash.[10] Existing systems used arrays of lights, cumbersome 'arms' in semaphore-like configurations, and the aforementioned complicated pointer systems. The easy part of Morse's original code was the numbers -- based on the vaguely unary system of Roman numerals. A dot would signify 1, two dots 2, and so on up to five, which would get a dash. What of words? Easy -- words would be enumerated in a big book and referred to by number. Dog was 4291. Obviously.

Morse's idea was that the codes for English words would be a matter of top national security, to be held and protected by the full power of the US Government. This was necessary because there was an enormous international plot, led by damned papist European kings, to export Catholics (and what's worse, Jesuits) to the United States to overthrow the government. Obviously. Any who disagreed with this X-files rhetoric bewildered the great thinker. In 1835 he had complained to a friend:

My situation in regard to those who differ from me is somewhat singular... I have brought against the absolute government of Europe a charge of conspiracy against the liberties of the U.S. I support the charge by facts, and by reasonings from those facts which produce conviction... But those that dispute simply say, "I don't think there is a conspiracy," yet give no reasons![11]

He would later suggest a strict anti-immigration law which would permanently deny suffrage to all immigrants arriving after its passage. In virulently paranoid and xenophobic pamphlets worthy of latter-day tin-foil-hat lunatics, he demanded that citizens retreat to their guns, noting with alarm that "we are asleep, when every freeman should be awake, and look to his arms."

Calmer business partners prodded him towards a more practical solution -- a code for each letter. A controversy still exists as to who actually invented the code that bears Morse's name today. Many claim that it was his assistant Arthur Vail who suggested this all important change. Vail, who invented the telegraph key that made the whole operation practical in the first place, later denied creating the code itself and gave Morse the credit, but this was well after Morse's reputation was untouchable. Amos Kendall, a mutual business partner remarked that "[i]f justice be done, the name of Alfred Vail will forever stand associated with that of Samuel F. B. Morse in the history and introduction into public use of the electro-magnetic telegraph."[12] The controversy is still unresolved, but we here at History House must say that such a development would find us absolutely unsurprised.

Irrational Exuberance

And what came of the 1858 cable that was cause for such occasion in London and New York? The English sent a cable to Canada canceling orders for some army regiments (saving itself a tidy £50,000 in a day where a man could live comfortably on £50 per year), but the cable snapped before any more use could come of it[13]. Less than three years would pass before the effusive predictions of world peace dissolved into the color-coded fratricidal slaughter we now know as the American Civil War.

Next time: How the Internet was really a nineteenth century invention.

Footnotes

1. Lepore, p.140
2. Standage, pp.81-83
3. Such lofty ideas depended crucially on the assumption that the first users of the telegraph would not use it to send penis enlargement spam and pop-up ads, or use it to coordinate criminal activities. But more on that next time.
4. To be honest, even slightly reliable instantaenous communications were a lot more useful than mostly reliable slow communications. The optical telegraph system was important in establishing the dominance of Napoleon's armies. It also helped stock & horseracing speculators to no end.
5. Brands, pp.193-194
6. Standage, pp.2-3
7. His tour de force was to be a reproduction of famous paintings in the Louvre, meant to educate Americans in the great artists. Nothing more than miniature copies of several dozen paintings, Morse even painted James Fenimore Cooper & his family in the margins, hoping to sell it to him for a tidy profit. No such thing happened, but he did scrape out a living as an art professor and sometime portrait painter for a time.
8. Lepore, pp.143-144
9. Standage, p.28
10. To those of us raised in the digital age, this sort of idea is as obvious as selling E-Z Cheese next to the Triscuits, but recall that boolean pioneer George, er, Boole was but a precious 17 years old on the eve of Morse's epiphany and probably more concerned with ladies' girdles and petticoats than laying the foundations of twentieth century prosperity. Precocious computer pioneer Charles Babbage was indeed at the height of his career in 1832, but even after his death few people had even heard of him.
11. Lepore, p.148, originally from the papers of Samuel Morse in the Library of Congress.
12. Appleton's Cyclopedia. To be fair, this quote was spoken at a director's meeting held to determine what to do upon Vail's death.
13. Headrick, p.158

Bibliography

1. Daniel R Headrick. The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century. Oxford University Press, 1981.
2. Tom Standage. The Victorian Internet. Walker and Company, 1998.
3. Jill Lepore. A is for American: Letters and Other Characters in the Newly United States. Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.
4. H.W. Brands. The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin. Anchor Books, 2000.
5. James G. Wilson & John Fiske (Eds). Appleton's Cyclopaedia of American Biography. , 1888. [Out of Print]
6. Steven E. Schoenherr. Samuel Morse and the Telegraph. (referenced online at http://history.acusd.edu/gen/recording/morse99.html) Recording Technology History, 2002.

 
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