A Story of the Telegraph

A Story of the Telegraph

By

John Murray

A Story

OF THE TELEGRAPH

PREFACE.

The compiler of this little compendium of Telegraph History places it in the hands of the public in the hope that it may be received with favor.

The historical data is taken from leading standard authorities.

The biographical sketches of eminent scientists and inventors will enable the reader to form his own conclusions as to the merits of each.

The sketches of prominent pioneer telegraph men in Canada should be especially interesting to Canadians.

Many names worthy of mention have been reluctantly omitted, as it was thought desirable to confine this initial work into as narrow a compass as possible. A more extended edition may be forthcoming later should this venture prove successful.

The few reminiscent incidents in the Canadian section will lend a spice of variety to the narrative.

INTRODUCTION.

The Electric Telegraph is unquestionably one of our most valuable public utilities.

In commercial life the telegraph has revolutionized business methods. Transactions are now effected between New York, London and other financial centres in minutes, which formerly occupied weeks, and even months, to accomplish. In social life the advantages of telegraph communication are equally apparent; travel where we may, we are always within reach of friends or kindred at a distance by means of the telegraph wires.

The daily Press is now enabled to record the moving accidents on flood and field in all parts of the world, a few hours or even minutes after their occurrence.

The dreadful catastrophe at Martinique, with the loss of thousands of human lives; the fire in a Chicago theatre, and the loss of hundreds of women and children through culpable negligence; the shocking loss of life on the excursion steamer General Slocum through lack of life-saving appliances is gruesome reading, but the public demand it; the more pleasing event of King Edward’s visit to President Loubet, on his mission of Peace, and the return visit of the latter to London are a few examples of news carried over the wires, all within the purview of the humblest reader. There are few who cannot afford the price of a daily paper, and thus keep in touch with current events, but no very long time ago a daily newspaper was beyond the reach of all but the comparatively wealthy. The advent of the telegraph with its multifarious budget of news from every quarter of the Globe caused a large increase in circulation, and a decrease in price naturally followed.

During the Crimean war, when telegraph communication had been established with the army headquarters, the working men of a manufacturing concern near Glasgow, in which the writer was employed, clubbed together to defray the cost of a daily newspaper, the price then being four pence halfpenny, much beyond the means of a single individual. During the dinner hour he read to an interested and attentive audience the latest despatches from the seat of war, many of whom would forego dinner rather than miss the daily pabulum of war news. Now all this is changed, the poorest laboring man can afford the price of a daily paper, formerly only enjoyed by his more opulent countrymen.

Still earlier, Macaulay, in his History of England, tells us of the news letter, the predecessor of the modern newspaper, wherein he says: The news letter within a week after its arrival had been thumbed over by twenty families, and furnished the neighboring squires with matter for talk over their October, and the Rector with topics for sharp sermons.

The news letters were collated in London, for the benefit of provincial readers. The price was no doubt high, and the contents probably consisted of gossip or scandal in high life, details of a cocking main, an affair between my Lord Tomnoddy and a Captain of the Blues, or affairs of Church and State. Now the four quarters of the earth is ransacked daily and news collected at immense labor and enormous cost by the associated press, and retransmitted to all points of the compass.

Wireless telegraphy, the latest marvel in applied science, is surely and steadily forging ahead, and will cover areas of land and sea, where the land and cable wires do not operate.

The writer feels that no apology is necessary in publishing the following brief outline of telegraph history, a subject which he believes will interest both the old as well as younger readers.

The data of English telegraph history is largely derived from an early edition of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica, while that of the American is taken from a voluminous work published about a quarter of a century ago, by James D. Reid, a friend and associate of Professor Morse. The facts relating to Canadian history are taken from original records, while that of submarine and wireless telegraphy is from numerous sources of contemporary literature and personal knowledge.

While admitting there is nothing strikingly original in the work, the writer ventures to hope that the style will commend itself to those who prefer brevity to wearisome detail.

A The Telegraph in England.

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Telegraph History

Telegraph, a machine for communicating intelligence to a distance, usually by means of preconcerted signals to which some convenient meaning is attached.

The name Semiphore was also applied to some of the machines used for effecting telegraphic communication, which in an extended sense may be considered to embrace every means of conveying intelligence by gestures and visible signs, as flags, lanterns, rockets, blue lights, beacon fires, etc., or by audible signals as the firing of guns, the blowing of trumpets, the beating of drums or gongs, as well as by the machine specially provided for the purpose.

Although telegraph communication as a means of conveying any required intelligence is an invention of recent date, the use of signals for the speedy transmission of messages as might be previously arranged between persons is a practice derived from the most remote antiquity. The use of beacon fires for example, as a means of giving warning of the approach of an enemy, is alluded to by the Prophet Jeremiah, who wrote about six centuries before the Christian era, and who warns the Benjamites to set up a sign of fire in Beth-Haccerem, for evil appeareth out of the north and great destruction (Jeremiah VI., 1).

The fine description given by Acchylus in his Agamemnon, of the application of a line of fire signals to communicate the intelligence of the fall of Troy is often referred to as an early instance of this kind of telegraphic dispatch.

This simple means of spreading an alarm, or communicating intelligence, is described by Scott in the Lay of the Last Minstrel, and in a note he refers to an act of the Scottish Parliament in 1455, c. 48, which directs that one bale or faggot shall be the warning of the approach of the English in any manner, two bales, that they are coming indeed, and four bales blazing beside each other that the enemy are in great force.

Such signals though best adapted to give information by night, were also available in day time, when they appeared as dense columns of smoke.

Torches held in the hand and moved in any particular manner, or alternately displayed and hidden behind a screen, were also used in ancient times as signals.

A night telegraph contrived by the Rev. James Bremner, of the Shetland Islands, and rewarded by the Society of Arts in 1816.

A single light constitutes the whole apparatus and the whole operation consists in its alternate exhibition and concealment. This plan had been found suitable for distances of twenty miles and upwards, and had been successfully put in operation between the light-house on Copeland Island and Port Patrick, on the opposite side of the Irish Channel.

Telegraph Electric

The attempts to render one or other of the phenomena of electricity subservient to the purposes of telegraphy have been numerous. From the earliest date, which we can assign to the existence of an electric telegraph, its essential parts have been the same. There are: 1st, the source of electrical power; 2nd, the conducting material by which this power is enabled to travel to the required locality; and, 3rd, the apparatus by which at the distant end of the line the existence of this power, its amount or the direction of its action is made known to the observer.

In the earlier stages of the invention, the investigations of its promoters were confined to the last of these three essentials, and, so long as the illustration of the idea was confined to the lecture table, this part claimed pre-eminence, but with the proposed application to purposes of general utility there arose the necessity for an equal degree of attention to the two former requisites.

The experiments of Dr. Watson, in England, in 1747, and of Franklin, in 1748, on the banks of the Schuylkill river may have suggested the conveyance of information by means of electricity.

The earliest authenticated instance of any attempt to reduce this to practice appears to have been that of Lesage, of Geneva, in 1774, and of Lomond, in France, in 1787, they employed as an indicator a pair of pith balls suspended from one end of an insulated wire, and at the other end of which was the operator provided with an electric machine, on charging the wire with electricity, the pith balls would exercise mutual repulsion and divergence from one another, but on removing the electrical charge from the wire by the contact of some conductor the balls would collapse.

It is evident that certain numbers of successive divergences might be made to denote particular preconcerted signals.

Subsequently to this the phenomena of the spark, as seen on the passage of electricity through an uninterrupted conductor, was used for the transmission of signals, were the various letters of the alphabet formed in this manner upon a table and connected with each one with a distinct and insulated wire and a particular letter might be rendered visible in a darkened room by passing an electric charge through the appropriate wire, this in fact constituted the telegraph of Reusser or Reiser invented in 1794.

Retancourt and Dr. Salva, in 1798, appear to have made experiments on the transmission of the charge through wires of great length.

A somewhat similar form of apparatus involving the same principle was constructed by arranging the several wires in succession with a single break in each. The various wires bore the names of the different letters or figures, and any required signal was indicated by passing the charge through the proper wire, when the spark visible at the interruption of the circuit would denote the letter to the observer at the farther end. This was the point to which invention had advanced at the commencement of the nineteenth century.

The discovery of Volta in 1800, of the Pile, which bears his name forms the commencement of a new era in electric telegraphs. Although there was no immediate application of the phenomena of the galvanic current to the purpose, indeed several important discoveries had to be made before an electric telegraph of any value was possible.

In 1807 Sommering, at Munich, proposed to construct an electric telegraph on the principle of the decomposition of water, by the Voltaic current discovered in 1800, by Nicholson and Carlisle. The form of apparatus was the following:

In a glass trough containing water, thirty-five gold pegs or pins were arranged vertically, this number of pegs corresponding to the letters of the alphabet together with the nine digits; each of those pins was connected by a wire which extended to the place whence the signal was to be transmitted; at this point they terminated in brass strips arranged in a frame side by side, but like the wires and pins insulated from each other, each brass strip bore the name of the letter or figure which belonged to the pin to which it was connected. The operator, when wishing to send any communication, connected the two poles of the battery with the brass strips bearing the names of the two first letters required—decomposition of the water in the trough at the distant end was instantly indicated by the evolution of bubbles of gas from the two gold pins which thus became the two electrodes or poles of the battery. The letters forming any communication were to be in this manner denoted in pairs, the inventor ingeniously availing himself of the different quantities of the two gases, evolved to point out the relative position of the letters in each pair, the hydrogen being employed to indicate the first letter.

Schweigger proposed to add to this system a plan for calling the attention of the correspondent at the distant station by the discharge by the current of a pistol charged with the mixed gases.

In 1816 Mr. Ronalds, of Hammersmith, invented an electric telegraph in which the use of frictional electricity was recurred to.

This telegraph, which was shown to several scientific men at the date above given, was fully described by the inventor by a work published by him in 1823.

Mr. Ronalds employed the divergence and collapse of a pair of pith balls as the telegraphic indication in which respect the principle was the same as that adopted by Mr. Lomond, but to this simple apparatus a distinct contrivance was appended in order to render the communication more rapid and easy.

A single wire, perfectly insulated by being suspended by silken strings, or buried in glass tubes, surrounded by pitch and protected by wooden troughs, was extended between the stations; from the end of this wire was suspended in front of the dial of a clock, a pair of pith balls so that whilst the wire was charged the balls would remain divergent, but would instantly collapse when the wire by contact with the earth, or with the hand of the operator was discharged.

A person at one end having, therefore, an electrical machine, by which he could maintain the wire in an electrified state and the pith balls at the other extremity, consequently, in a state of divergence, had it, of course, in his power to give an instantaneous indication to the observer at that farther extremity by touching the wire with the hand, which, discharging the electricity, would allow the balls to collapse for an instant; but instead of merely employing the successive movements of the pith balls