How Man Learned to Send Messages.

From the time when man had learned to protect himself from the beasts of the forest, and thus was able to move about more freely, and live by himself rather than remain with the tribe, he has found it necessary to send messages.

One of the most interesting of the early methods for sending messages was the Indian way of smoke signalling with the simple equipment of a fire with its rising column of smoke and a blanket or shield. Messages were sent, relayed, received and answered, at points hundreds of miles apart. Among savages still found in remote parts of the earth this and other primitive methods are still in use. In the wilds of Africa to-day at points where the electric telegraph service has not yet penetrated, the natives by the simple method of beating drums, which can be heard from one relay point to another, are able to send the “news of the day” across the country with marvellous rapidity. In some parts of South America, the natives long ago discovered that the ground is a good conductor of sound and send their messages almost at will, making their signals by tapping against poles which they have planted in the ground at various points and which constitute both their sending and receiving instruments.

The Signal Corps in the army uses flags for sending messages, where the telegraph is not available, the flags being of different colors, and the signals are produced by waving the flags in different ways. The army heliograph is also used as a telegraph line—a mirror which reflects the sun’s rays in a manner understood by a prearranged code. These and other similar methods are merely elaborations of devices developed and used by the savages as a solution of the ever present need of sending a message to some other point.

The great Marathon runner was nothing more or less than a telegraph messenger hastening with his written message, from the man who delivered it to him, to its destination, and his work was harder than that of the messenger boy to-day, for he not only had to deliver the message himself to its destination, but had to run fast all the way or lose his job.

The messenger on foot finally gave way to the Pony Telegraph, which not only shortened the time necessary to deliver a message, but marked the beginning of a system.

How Does a Telegram Get There?

The next time your daddy takes you down to the office, ask him to show you the telegraph call box. When you see it, you will perhaps not think that by merely pulling down the little lever you can so start things going that, if you wish, you can cause men who are on the other side of the earth to work for you in a few minutes, and to make little instruments all along the way which, with their other equipment, have cost millions of dollars, click, click, click at your will.

Sooner or later during the day your father will be wanting to send a telegram. He steps to the call box, pulls the little lever and goes back to his desk. In a few minutes, sometimes before you realize it, the little blue-coated messenger appears and says “Call?” Father hands him a telegraph blank on which he has written the message, the messenger takes off his cap, puts the message inside and the cap back on his head and away he goes on his bicycle as fast as his legs can pedal, to the central office, to which point you follow him to see what he does with the message.

If you had been at the telegraph office instead of your father’s office, you would have seen one of these boys start off on his wheel to get the message your father wished to send. When the little lever on the call box is pulled down, it is pulled back by a spring which sets some clock work going which sends a signal over the wire on a circuit which runs out from a register at the main office. The register has a paper tape running through it, and the signal from the call box appears as a series of dots on the tape. The clerk knows from the number and spacing of the dots that it was your father that called and not some other business man whose box might be on the same circuit.

The operators you have seen working in these pictures are Morse operators. They send the message by Morse Code in dots and dashes which are sent over the wire as electric impulses. At the other end the message is read by listening to the clicks the sounder makes as it receives these same electric impulses. This is the simplest way of telegraphing.

The number of messages sent between two big cities in a day is tremendous—many more than could be transmitted over one Morse wire. Many wires would be needed. But wire costs money, so ingenious men set to work to find some way to send more than one message over a single wire at the same time. They succeeded. There is now the duplex telegraph, which sends a message each way simultaneously over a single wire, the quadruplex, which sends two messages each way simultaneously over a single wire. Last but not least there is the multiplex, which sends four messages each way simultaneously over a single wire. This seems almost unbelievable, but it is done. In the case of the duplex and quadruplex, the different messages are sent by currents of different strength, and by changing the direction of the current. Receiving instruments are designed so as to separate the messages by being affected only by the currents of certain strength or polarity, as the direction of flow is termed. It can easily be seen that by these ingenious devices, the telegraph company saves many thousands of dollars in the miles and miles of wire, and hundreds of telegraph poles which would be required if all the messages had to be sent over a simple Morse wire, one message only upon the wire at a time.

The multiplex telegraph is truly a marvellous invention. It has been developed by the engineers of the Western Union Telegraph Co. working with the engineers of the Western Electric Company. The principle on which this instrument works is that if separate instruments are given connection with the wire one after the other during very short intervals of time, the effect is as though the wire were split up, and each instrument works just as if it alone were on the wire. Not only does the multiplex telegraph thus send four messages in one direction and four messages in the opposite direction, simultaneously over a single wire, thus keeping no less than sixteen operators employed on one wire, four sending and four receiving at each end, but each message instead of being sent by the ordinary Morse key, is written upon a typewriter keyboard at one end of the line and appears automatically typewritten at the other end.

If you live in a big city, go into one of the larger branch offices of the Western Union Telegraph Co. and ask to see printing telegraph. Most of the large branch offices communicate with the general operating department in the city by means of what they term “short line printers,” which are instruments on which the message is written upon a typewriter keyboard and appears typewritten at the other end.

Who Invented the Electric Telegraph?

It is hard to say just how the telegraph originated in the mind of men. We have already shown how the savages sent signals over distances by means of the smoke rising from his fire. Every boy and girl has used a little mirror, held in the sun to flash a bright spot here and there. This principle has been used by the army to signal at distances. The sun’s rays are flashed from a small mirror, long and short flashes indicating the dashes and dots of the Morse telegraph code.

Progress towards the perfection of the electric telegraph began with the first researches of scientists into the natural laws which govern that great natural agent, electricity. Clever, painstaking men, studying and experimenting for the love of the work, discovered bit by bit how to control the force. Stephen Gray with his Leyden jars, which stored up a charge of electricity, inspired Sir William Watson to experiment, and he sent current from one jar to another two miles away.

The First Suggestion of the Electric Telegraph.

For a long time no one thought that this opened the way for the making of a useful servant for man. In 1753 this thought occurred to an unknown man in Scotland, who wrote a letter to a newspaper suggesting that messages be sent by electric currents.

One of his schemes was that there should be a light ball at the receiving end of the wire which would strike a bell when it felt the electric impulse come over the wire from the Leyden jar, and by devising a code depending upon the number of strokes of the bell and the time between them, he suggested that messages could be sent and interpreted. Some believe this man to have been a doctor named Charles Morrison of Greenock, Scotland. Whoever he was, he suggested a method which comes very near to being that in use to-day.

The difficulty with proceeding on this suggestion was that the current from the Leyden jar was static electricity, which has not the strength nor can it be controlled as can the current of low potential which is used to-day. Volta discovered this new and more stable form of electricity and many different men labored investigating what could be accomplished with it. The names of Sir Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday are inseparably connected with this advance. It was Oersted’s and Faraday’s discovery of the connection between electricity and magnetism, and how an electric current may be made to magnetize a piece of iron at will, that really opened the way for the invention of the telegraph we know to-day.

The First Real Telegraph.

But before the much greater practical value of Volta’s current was discovered, one man developed a real telegraph which worked with electricity of the static kind, produced by friction. This man was named Sir Francis Ronalds. He worked along the lines laid down by the unknown Scotchman, whom we have supposed to be Charles Morrison. The machine he built and operated in his garden at Hammersmith utilized pith balls, which actuated by the charge of static electricity sent along the wire caused a letter to appear before an opening in the dial. When perfected he offered it to the British Government, who refused it. They were very stupid in their refusal, for they said “telegraphs are wholly unnecessary.” Sir Francis Ronalds’ invention cost him much care, anxiety and money. He lived to see the more practical voltaic current taken up by others and put to successful use. Being unselfish he rejoiced that others should succeed where he had failed.

Two Men who Invented our Telegraph almost Simultaneously.

The telegraph, working on the electro-magnetic principle, as used to-day, was developed almost simultaneously on the two sides of the Atlantic Ocean. In England Sir Charles Wheatstone and Sir William Fothergill Cooke worked out a practical method and instruments, which with few changes, are in use to-day. Cooke was a doctor and had served with the British army in India. Wheatstone was the son of a Gloucester musical instrument maker. The latter was fond of science and experimented continually with electricity and wrote about it and other scientific subjects. As a result of his work he was made a professor at King’s College. There he conducted important researches and tests, among which was one which measured the speed at which electricity travels along a wire. So Cooke, who was a doctor and a good business man, entered into partnership with the scientist Wheatstone, and together they completed their invention. It was first used in 1838 on the London and Blackwall Railway. At first it was expensive and cumbersome, using five lines of wire. Later this number was reduced to two, and in 1845, an instrument was devised which required but one wire. This instrument, with a few minor changes, is the one in use to-day in England.

While these two men were working in England, an American artist, S. F. B. Morse, was studying and experimenting in the United States along his own lines but with the same end in view, namely to produce instruments which would satisfactorily send messages over a wire by electricity.

An American, however, is given the honor of First by Slight Margin.

Morse was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts, in 1791. He was gifted as an artist, both in painting and sculpture, and in 1811 went abroad to England to study. While on a voyage from Havre to America in 1832 he met on board ship a Dr. Jackson, who told him of the latest scientific discoveries in regard to the electric current and the electro-magnet. This set Morse to thinking and after three years’ hard work on the problem he produced a telegraph which worked on the principle of the electro-magnet. With the apparatus devised by Morse and his partner Alfred Vail, a message was sent from Washington to Baltimore in 1844.

There has been some question as to whether Morse or Wheatstone first invented a workable telegraph. As will be evident from this history, the telegraph in principle was a gradual development, to which many minds contributed. To Morse, however, the high authority of the Supreme Court of the United States has given the credit of being the first to perfect a practical instrument, saying that the Morse invention “preceded the three European inventions” and that it would be impossible to examine the latter without perceiving at once “the decided superiority of the one invented by Professor Morse.”

Uncle Sam Helped Build the First Telegraph Line.

At the time Morse’s Recording Telegraph was invented there were, of course, no telegraph lines in any part of the world, with the exception of the short lines of wire put up by investigators for experimental purposes. To remove the obscurity as to the purpose to be served by the telegraph was the first problem which presented itself to Morse and his backers. In 1843 an appropriation was secured of $30,000 from the U. S. Government, with which a line was built from Washington to Baltimore. This was built and operated by the Government for about two years, but the Government refused to purchase the patent rights. So the owners of the patents endeavored to get the general public interested in the telegraph as a commercial undertaking and gradually companies were founded and licensed to use the invention.

By 1851 there were as many as fifty different telegraph companies in operation in different parts of the United States. A few of these used the devices of a man named Alexander Bain, which were afterwards adjudged to infringe the Morse patents, and one or two used an instrument invented by Royal E. House of Vermont, which printed the messages received in plain Roman letters on a ribbon of paper. This at first seemed to have an advantage over that of Morse, which received the message in dots and dashes, in the Morse Code, and these had to be translated and written out by an operator before they could be delivered. However, as time went on, the operators came to read the Morse messages by the sound of the dots and dashes, instead of waiting to read the paper tape having the dots and dashes marked on it, and finally the recording feature was given up and the sounder, or instrument which simply clicks out the message, came into general use.

In the early days, the possibility of the business were little understood and many telegraph companies failed. April 8, 1851, papers were filed in Albany for the incorporation of the New York and Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Co. This company, which soon afterwards changed its name to Western Union, was destined to absorb the various companies throughout the country until it, in time, operated the telegraph lines over practically the entire United States, and has its blue sign in nearly every town and hamlet in the country.