Developed in the 1830s and 1840s by Samuel Morse (1791-1872) and other inventors, the telegraph revolutionized long-distance communication. The telegraph eliminated dependence on time and distance by connecting people through electricity and code.
Samuel Morse gets the credits for the invention of the telegraph but he is not the only one who worked on this new technology. Samuel Morse made the first demonstration of a single wire telegraph system in 1837. This was a new communication system that transmitted electric signals over wires, which were then translated into a coded message. Alfred Vail saw this demonstration and became fascinated with this technology. He wanted to improve the design and the technology itself. He than worked with Morse and created the Morse-Vail telegraph key.
The first Morse keys arrived at the very beginning of the Morse telegraph system in 1844. A few weeks before the demonstration of the first line between Washington and Baltimore in the USA, Vail used a system of opening and closing the sircuit using a simple switch. Vail described the operation of the device saying that it worked “in much the same manner as a key closes a door”. He built a very simple device with two contacts that needed to be pushed together to close the circuit. It was made using “springy” brass and was mounted on a wooden base. He called the device a “Correspondent”, a name that had been used for earlier sending devices. This key was used for the first demonstration, but within six months he had developed a new type of key using a lever and a fulcrum, and this same format is used for manual keys today. The name given to the new key was the “Lever Correspondent” reflecting its construction and the previous name for these keys.
Morse Code
Earliest idea of Samuel Morse for the code was a very complicated system, allocating numbers for each word, and having a codebook to look up each word according to the number which had been sent. Vail had the idea to improve the code and find a more efficient way.
The new code was made up of a set of “dots and dashes” that represented letters and numbers. Vail read thousands of newspapers to see the letter frequency and find out which letters of the English alphabet were used the most. The letter “E” was the most used letter, hence it got the simplest code, a dot, while those letters that were used infrequently, such as the letter “Q”, got a longer code.
Initially, the code, when transmitted over the telegraph system, was rendered as marks on a piece of paper that the telegraph operator would then translate back into English. Rather quickly, however, it became apparent that the operators were able to hear and understand the code just by listening to the clicking of the receiver, so the paper was replaced by a receiver that created more pronounced beeping sounds.
Morse patents the invention of the telegraph on June 20th, 1840. The patent details both codes. Vail’s name is not in the patent, so Morse gets all the credits.
In 1844, Morse sent his first telegraph message, from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore, Maryland; by 1866, a telegraph line had been laid across the Atlantic Ocean from the U.S. to Europe. Although the telegraph had fallen out of widespread use by the start of the 21st century, replaced by the telephone, fax machine and internet, it laid the groundwork for the communications revolution that led to those later innovations.
