Telegraph by Towers

Telegraph by Towers 
from "The Information" by James Gleick

// 1793 \\

The Chappe Telegraph visual telegraphy:

in 1793. He persuaded the Convention to appropriate six thousand francs for 
the construction of three telegraph towers in a line north of Paris, seven to 
nine miles apart. The Chappe brothers moved rapidly now and by the end of 
summer arranged a triumphant demonstration for the watching deputies. The 
deputies liked what they saw: a means of receiving news from the military 
frontier and transmitting their orders and decrees. They gave Chappe a salary, 
the use of a government horse, and an official appointment to the post of 
ingénieur télégraphe. He began work on a line of stations 120 miles long, from 
the Louvre in Paris to Lille, on the northern border. In less than a year he had 
eighteen in operation, and the first messages arrived from Lille: happily, news 
of victories over the Prussians and Austrians. The Convention was ecstatic. One 
deputy named a pantheon of four great human inventions: printing, gunpow
der, the compass, and “the language of telegraph signs.”
Construction began on stations in branches extending east to Strasbourg, west 
to Brest, and south to Lyon. When Napoleon Bonaparte seized power in 1799, 
he ordered a message sent in every direction—“Paris est tranquille et les bons 
citoyens sont contents” (“Paris is quiet and the good citizens are happy”)—and 
soon commissioned a line of new stations all the way to Milan. The telegraph 
system was setting a new standard for speed of communication, since the only 
real competition was a rider on horseback.

          If you’ll only just promise you’ll none of you laugh,
          I’ll be after explaining the French telegraph!
          A machine that’s endow’d with such wonderful pow’r,
          It writes, reads, and sends news fifty miles in an hour.
          …
          Oh! the dabblers in lott’ries will grow rich as Jews:
          ’Stead of flying of pigeons, to bring them the news,
          They’ll a telegraph place upon Old Ormond Quay;
          Put another ’board ship, in the midst of the sea.
          …
          Adieu, penny-posts! mails and coaches, adieu;
          Your occupation’s gone, ’tis all over wid you:
          In your place, telegraphs on our houses we’ll see,
          To tell time, conduct lightning, dry shirts, and send news.

\\ song 1794 //



//1823 - 1859 \\

Chappe dies , distraught over copyright.

Ghappe sank into a deep depression and became increasingly paranoid,even going as
far as to accuse his rivals of having slipped something into his food when he suffered from a bout of food poisoning.  Finally,on January28,1805,he killed himself by jumping into the well outside the Telegraph Administration buildingin Paris. He was buried under a tombstone decorated with a telegraph tower showing the sign for "at rest."

The telegraph towers spread across Europe and beyond, and their ruins dot the 
countrysides today. Telegraph Hill, Telegrafberget, Telegraphen-Berg are 
vestigial place names. Sweden, Denmark, and Belgium were early to develop 
systems on the French model. Germany soon followed. A line between Calcutta 
and Chunar began operating in 1823; between Alexandria and Cairo in 1824; 
and in Russia, Nicholas I organized 220 stations from Warsaw to St. Petersburg 
and Moscow. They held dominion over the world’s communication and then, 
faster than they had arisen, went obsolete. Colonel Taliaferro Shaffner, a 
Kentucky inventor and historian, travelled to Russia in 1859 and was struck by 
the towers’ height and their beauty, the care taken with their painting and 
landscaping with flowers, and by their sudden, universal death.

What was to be said, when writing in the air? Claude Chappe had proposed, 
“Anything that could be the subject of a correspondence.” But his example—
“Lukner has left for Mons to besiege that city, Bender is advancing for its 
defense”—made clear what he meant: dispatches of military and state import. 
Later Chappe proposed sending other types of information: shipping news, and 
financial quotations from bourses and stock exchanges. Napoleon would not 
allow it, though he did use the telegraph to proclaim the birth of his son, 
Napoleon II, in 1811. A communications infrastructure built with enormous 
government investment and capable of transmitting some hundreds of total 
words per day could hardly be used for private messaging. 
That was unimaginable —and when, in the next century, it became imaginable, 
some governments found it it undesirable. No sooner did entrepreneurs begin 
to organize private telegraphy than France banned it outright: an 1837 law 
mandated imprisonment and fines for “anyone performing unauthorized 
transmissions of signals from one place to another, with the aid of telegraphic 
machines or by any other means.” The idea of a global nervous system had to 
arise elsewhere. 

In the next year, 1838, the French authorities received a visit from an American 
with a proposal for a “telegraph” utilizing electrical wires: Samuel F. B. Morse. 
They turned him down flat. Compared to the majestic semaphore, electricity 
seemed gimcrack and insecure. No one could interfere with telegraph signals 
in the sky, but wire could be cut by saboteurs. Jules Guyot, a physician and 
scientist assigned to assess the technology, sniffed, “What can one expect of a 
few wretched wires?” 


Samuel F.B. Morse was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts, in 1791, the year of Chappe's first demonstration of an optical telegraph.  He was  a johnny-come-lately to the field of electric telegraphy.  Had he started building an electric telegraph a little earlier, he might have got home in time for his wife's funeral.
Morse's wife, Lucretia, died suddenly at their home in New Haven, Connecticut, on the afternoon of February 7, 1825, white her husband was away.  He was starting to make
progress in his chosen career as a painter and had gone to Washington to try to break into the lucrative society portrait business. He had just been commissioned to paint a full-length portrait of the marquis de Lafayette, a military hero, and his career finally seemed to be taking
off.  "I long to hear from you,"he wrote in a letter to his wife on February10, unaware that she was already dead.  Washington was four days travel from New Haven, so Morse received the letter from his father telling him of Lucretia's death on February 11, the day before her funeral. Travelling as fast as he could, he arrived home the following week. His wife was already buried. 

\\\\\\ 1844  The Electric Telegraph Arrives \\\\\\\

The turning point came in 1844, both in England and the United States. Cooke 
and Wheatstone had their first line up and running along the railway from the 
Paddington station. Morse and Vail (Vail invented the telegraph key) had theirs 
from Washington to the Pratt Street railway station in Baltimore, on wires 
wrapped in yarn and tar, suspended from twenty-foot wooden posts. 
The communications traffic was light at first, but Morse was able to report 
proudly to Congress that an instrument could transmit thirty characters 
per minute and that the lines had “remained undisturbed from the wantonness 
or evil disposition of any one.” 
From the outset the communications content diverged sharply—comically—
from the martial and official dispatches familiar to French telegraphists. In 
England the first messages recorded in the telegraph book at Paddington 
concerned lost luggage and retail transactions. “Send a messenger to Mr Harris, 
Duke-street, Manchester-square, and request him to send 6 lbs of white bait 
and 4 lbs of sausages by the 5.30 train to Mr Finch of Windsor; they must be 
sent by 5.30 down train, or not at all.” 

// 1848 \\

The social consequences could not have been predicted, but some were 
observed and appreciated almost immediately. People’s sense of the weather 
began to change—weather, that is, as a generalization, an abstraction. Simple 
weather reports began crossing the wires on behalf of corn speculators: Derby, 
very dull; York, fine; Leeds, fine; Nottingham, no rain but dull and cold. The 
very idea of a “weather report” was new. It required some approximation of 
instant knowledge of a distant place. The telegraph enabled people to think of 
weather as a widespread and interconnected affair, rather than an assortment 
of local surprises. “The phenomena of the atmosphere, the mysteries of 
meteors, the cause and effect of skiey combinations, are no longer matters of 
superstition or of panic to the husbandman, the sailor or the shepherd,” noted 
an enthusiastic commentator in 1848:

The telegraph comes in to tell him, for his every-day uses and observances, not 
only that “fair weather cometh out of the north,” but the electric wire can tell 
him in a moment the character of the weather simultaneously in all quarters of 
our island.… 

In this manner, the telegraph may be made a vast national barometer, 
electricity becoming the handmaid of the mercury.
This was a transformative idea. 

// 1854 Weather Forecasts Invented \\

In 1854 the government established a Meteorological Office in the Board of 
Trade. The department’s chief, Admiral Robert FitzRoy, formerly a captain of HM
S Beagle, moved into an office on King Street, furnished it with barometers, 
aneroids, and stormglasses, and dispatched observers equipped with the same 
instruments to ports all around the coastline. They telegraphed their cloud and 
wind reports twice daily. 

// 1860 \\

FitzRoy began issuing weather predictions, which he dubbed “forecasts,” and in 
1860 The Times began publishing these daily. Meteorologists began to 
understand that all great winds, when seen in the large, were circular, or at 
least “highly curved.”

The most fundamental concepts were now in play as a consequence of 
instantaneous communication between widely separated points. Cultural 
observers began to say that the telegraph was “annihilating” time and space. It 
“enables us to send communications, by means of the mysterious fluid, with the 
quickness of thought, and to annihilate time as well as space,” announced an 
American telegraph official in 1860. This was an exaggeration that soon 
became a cliché

Copyright James Gleick reproduced without permission. modified by MM

Some Notes on the Electrical Telegraph and Timeline


1843 First message sent between Washington and Baltimore.

1846 First commercial telegraph line completed. from New York to Washington.

1848 Associated Press formed to pool telegraph traffic.

1849 Bain's Electro-Chemical patent approved.

1851 Hiram Sibley and associates incorporate New York and Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Company. Later became Western Union.

1851 Telegraph first used to coordinate train departures.

1857 Treaty of Six Nations is signed, creating a national cartel

1859 First transatlantic cable is laid from Newfoundland to Valentia, Ireland. Fails after 23 days, having been used to send a total of 4,359 words. Total cost of laying the line was $1.2 million.

1861 First Transcontinental telegraph completed.

1866 First successful transatlantic telegraph laid Western Union merges with  rivals.
Subsequent attempts in 1865 and 1866 with the world's largest steamship, the SS Great Eastern, used a more advanced technology and produced the first successful transatlantic cable. The Great Eastern later went on to lay the first cable reaching to India from Aden, Yemen, in 1870.

1867 Stock ticker service inaugurated.

1870 Western Union introduces the money order service. first cable reaching to India from Aden

1876 Alexander Graham Bell patents the telephone.

1908 AT&T gains control of Western Union. Divests itself of Western Union in 1913.

1924 AT&T offers Teletype system.

1926 Inauguration of the direct stock ticker circuit from New York to San Francisco.

1930 High-speed tickers can print 500 words per minute.

1945 Western Union and Postal Telegraph Company merge.

1948 Peak year for use of the telegraph for messages before the telephone replaces it.

1962 Western Union offers Telex for international teleprinting.

1974 Western Union places Westar satellite in operation. 

1988 Western Union Telegraph Company reorganized as Western Union Corporation. The telecommunications assets were divested and Western Union focuses on money transfers and loan services.