To talk more about the telegraph and its role in society we interviewed Dr. Bernard Finn, who is Curator Emeritus of the Electricity Collections at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. He was Curator from 1962 through 2005 and for several years was chairman of the Department of History of Science and Technology. He studied cable history as a visiting scholar at the Science Museum in London in 1972-73, and was guest curator of the exhibition Submarine Telegraphy, The Grand Victorian Technology. In 1976, Dr. Finn published Growing Pains at the Crossroads of the World: A Submarine Cable Station in the 1870s, based on records from Heart’s Content. He was editor of a source book on cables and co-author (in 1979 with Vary Coates) of A Retrospective Technology Assessment: Submarine Telegraphy.
Video Transcript
Dr. Finn: So we have… You see (pressing the knob of the Morse Key) I hear that better than that one down there(pressing the knob of the Morse Key) … and this one.
Dr. Finn: Well.. I came to Smithsonian in 1962. Can you believe that?
Dr. Finn: My responsibilities here are electrical, they were from the beginning.
Dr.Finn: So Telegraphy was the electrical technology of the early.. Of the nineteenth century up until power which came in the late 70s and beyond. So it set the stage really for everything that followed. So it’s a very interesting, very simple technology.
Dr. Finn: Morse’s idea of code was, you have this short amount of pulses. And then they spell numbers, so a dot would be one, two dots would be two. So he spend a lot of time making up a dictionary. You got from A to B to C to D, and you know all the dictionary..You would have words associated with numbers. And then somebody whether it was Morse or Vail said well..why don’t we use letters instead of words? And so we can spell letters with…( dots and dashes). Dot for E then, dashes, so forth so on.
Dr. Finn: One thing is interesting, you say why do we collect all these things, they are all the same. And one reason is because they are.. they are all so different.
Linda: Different variations.
Dr. Finn: Yeah. And the reason why they are different, not in principle, but in manufacture is that they are being made by whole bunch of different instrument makers.
Linda: Was it(the telegraph) only used by the businesses or the general people could just go and use it quite often as well?
Dr. Finn: It was.. The practical use, the really practical use of the telegraph in the early years were things like stock tickers become very important you know for uses in business and communications. Newspapers very important and initial users. Public services, police, fire department, all we talked in the 1850s and so on. Railroad, boy, really important to have a telegraph to let you know that the train has left the station and is coming the other way …You better wait for it to come by. And so all these uses.
Was it used for personal thing? Yes.It’s expensive, not something you would use without thinking about it first. But even for cross town, you know, I am late for my appointment, and I can send a message to you, but I can also send the telegraph or whatever else. These are.. I’d say for the individual, it’s not so much for personal use of the telegraph except for people who might have business.. reasons for it( for use).
Linda: This technology in concept had this huge impact in our society. And if we can relate it to the communication technologies that we use today.
Dr. Finn: Politically, there is a reason for it. In this country, the importance of keeping Washington in touch with New Orleans, and Chicago and so forth. It’s just, you know, some importance to the country. News, I means, newspapers were for ages consumers of information of the telegraph because…. And it was expensive in the early days but the newspapers can afford it. And the others, the finance, and stocks, and so forth. To be able to know the price of wool in New Orleans when you’re in Britain. Makes a big differences.
I think perhaps the best thing is it’s easy to draw all the wonderful things that the telegraph did. And the.. Certainly as I mentioned to you before that, especially, it’s clear to everybody that, when the prospects came for the underwater cables in the 60s and the prospects of linking Britain and America, all sort. This was very exciting, people could understand that much more, I think, just because now they know what the telegraph is. When the telegraph first proposed, there were some excitement and so forth. But not the way the cable was. The cable has been now a dozen, ten years, people understood the telegraph, and all the sudden I can communicate personally or by newspapers, across the world, it’s very exciting.
