A D V E N T U R E S   in   C Y B E R S O U N D

A world famous message was sent over a telegraph line from the Capitol, at Washington, to Mount Clare Depot, in Baltimore. The precise date was May 24, 1844, and the message sent in the famous dot and dash alphabet by Prof. Morse contained the following words: "What hath God wrought!" The message was indited by Miss Ellsworth, the daughter of the then Commissioner of Patents, and was intended to express the wonder of the achievement of the telegraph.

For that edition of the Scientific American, marking, as it does, fifty years of the invention and progress of the scientific world, no more appropriate motto could be chosen, for it seems as if those fifty years definitely showed man's powers and proved adequate to measure his ability. For the first suggestions of the telegraph we can go far back to the days of Otto van Guericke, whose experiments of transmitting through a conductor an ell in length an electric disturbance from his frictional machine with its globe of sulphur excited by rubbing against the hand is well known.

Coming down later, however, we find attempts directly made in the line of telegraphy. In 1727, Stephen Gray, of the Charter House, London, transmitted electrification tbrough a wire 700 feet, suspended in the air by silk threads. Other experiments of the same sort were made by different investigators. Twenty years later a wire stretched across the Thames was use, and the length gradually increased until we find the same investigator using wire 10,000 feet long in his experiments. and a year later Benjamin Franklin experimented with a wire stretched across the Schuylkill River.

A letter in the Scot's Magazine in 1753, signed by C. M., suggests an electric telegram operated by a frictional electrical machine; and in 1774, at Geneva, Lesage erected a telegraph line of 24 insulated wires, each corresponding to a letter of the alphabet. Many other attempts were made and signals were transmitted by static excitation produced by frictional machines. At the beginning of the present century the voltaic battery was invented.

The investigators had at once an instrumentality for maintaining a current through a wire, by which the decomposition of water could be brought about, magnets attracted and other phenomena produced, and, in 1808, the Munich Academy of Science received from Sommering a communication describing a telegraph containing thirty-five wires, one for each letter of tile alphabet and one for each number. At the transmitting and arrangements were provided for passing currents through any one of the wires. At the receiving end the electros were immersed in acid, and, completing the circuit, caused the evolution of bubbles of hydrogen. Each tube corresponded to a letter or a number.

Passing by many other attempts, we find, in 1839, the Wheatstone telegraph, fairly effectual, producing its signal by means of what are practtically galvanometer needles. A bell alarm was used to call the operator. To produce a powerful enough sound Wheatstone used a relay circuit, the first one in the history of the art. Henry, in 1832, had, as one result of his experiments in electricity, used the electric magnet in a signaling telegraph, and for him is exclaimed the glory of being the inventor of the first electro-magnetic telegraph.

Samuel F. B. Morse was born in Charlestown, Mass., on the 27th of April, 1791, but a little over a mile from Franklin's birthplace. He was educated as an artist, and won high triumphs as such, but was marked as a lover of science from his earliest days. His life was subject to more than the usual vicissitudes of an artist's existence. After traveling extensively in Europe and studying there, we find him sailing on the packet ship Sully, for the harbor of New York, in 1832.

Philip Hone, in his interesting diary, states that among the passengers on his ship was S. F. B. Morse, the artist and president of the Nationa1 Aeademy of Design. On board the ship Morse had his interest excited by a conversation in which Dr. Charles T. Jackson was the leader, who spoke of some of the wonders of electricity and of the electrical magnet. This seems to have fixed firmly in Morse's mind the idea that an eleetrie telegraph could be constructed with the electric magnet as a basis.

It engrossed his mind throughout the voyage, and during the six weeks which it lasted be jotted down in his note book different sketches of a proposed system of electrical telegraphy. He practiced his art and experimented with the telegraph, the latter, during the next few years, gradually wooing him from his brush.

Prof. Daniel, of London, in 1835 invented the constant current battery, which proved a powerful adjunct to Morse's work. He was confronted at once with the difficulty that the current became enfeebled on too long a line, and used the relay circuit to overcome this trouble. In 1837 he explained his invention to Professor Leonard D. Gale, of the University of the City of New York, who assisted him by his scientific counsel, and in the same year he interested in it, Alfred Vail, a son of Judge Stephen Vail, proprietor of the Speedwell Iron Works, Morristown, N. J. An agreement was entered into between them, Vail supplying the money. The American patent was obtained on October 3, 1837, and Vail in secret quarters at the iron factory worked upon the invention.

Morse's first model pendulum instrument of 1837

The recording receiver (1), the portrule (2), type (3), and an example of characters produced (4 and 5)

In 1839 Morse began the hardest period of his life. He was dependent for his living upon what he could earn as a professor of art. At one time he went twenty four hours without food. Toward the close of 1841, he writes that he has not a cent in the world, but affirms that he will not run in debt. In the next year he submerged in the New York Harbor between Castle Garden and Governor's Island a wire which he had insulated and sent signals through it.

The experiments were repeated at Washington in a canal, in December of the same year, and Morse. in describing his experiments in 1844 announced his belief that signals could and would be sent across the Atlantic Ocean by electromagnetic telegraph. Sick, and tired at heart, agitating for an appropriation from Congress to test his invention. Morse found himself in December 1842 with his personal funds reduced to 37 cents and feeling ready to abandon the whole subject indefinitely. Aid from the government was at hand, however, and a bill recommending the appropriation of $30,000 in aid of the telegraph was passed by Congress.

Soon after this work was begun on a line between Baltimore and Washington, and among those concerned in its erection was Ezra Cornell, the founder of the Cornell University. An attempt was made to lay the wire underground, and after an expenditure of nearly all the appropriation, this plan was abandoned and an aerial line was started. ln seven weeks the work was completed, and the famous message was sent. It was written upon a strip of paper with an embossing point which simply indented the paper with dots and dashes.

Morse had conceived the idea of the relay circuit and had used in the early telegraphs a relay either as an extension of the line or as a local circuit. His great idea was to produce marks making a record of every message sent, and this idea seems to have been at the base of his work. One of his troubles consisted in accurately opening and closing the circuit in order to produce his alphabet. He used metallic type for the purpose with indented faces so shaped as to open and close the circuit at proper times and for proper periods, for the production of the desired markings.

Each letter constituted a separate type, which was mounted on a portrule. When this was filled with type representing the message, it was drawn under the contact point. Then, as a simplification of this, two contact points close together were used, between which a wedge was thrust by hand, so as to open and close the circuit.

Again, a keyboard was devised with a separate key like a piano, for each letter, but eventually, about 1844, the plain key, such as used today, was adopted. After the sending of the famous message in 1844, on April 1, 1845, the line between Baltimore and Washington was opened for public business under the auspices of the Post Offiee. One cent for every four eharaeters was charged, and during the first four days one cent was received. After a week the receipts had risen to one dollar.

Telegraph lines were slowly put up, but in 1846 the system was still experimental. In 1845 New York and Philadelphia were connected, in 1846 Philadelphia and Baltimore were connected. The government had rejected the purchasing of the Morse invention, so everything had to be done by private enterprise.

The first ten years following 1846 were devoted to the exploitation of the the new invention, and gradually more and more lines were added until, in 1856, what has been described as a straggling web of lines under the control of thirty or forty rival companies, working different apparatus under different patents, covered the more populous area of the country. Dividends were not paid except by one or two of the companies and the prospects were anything but bright.

During these ten years inventors had not been idle. Morse's system required but little; the relay, the hand key and the alphabet and mechanism for reproducing the alphabet were all in existence in 1846, and since then little has been done with the Morse system proper in the way of addition. In the way of suppression the most important thing of all has been done. Various marking devices had been tried, pencil, embossing point, and inking wheel. Morse's apparatus was adapted for any of these devices, but after a while the clerks and attendants on instruments learned to read them by the sound made by the marking the marking lever, and, in spite of threat of instant dismissal, they persisted in doing so when not watched.

Morse was violently opposed to it, naturally regarding the recording device as the very soul of his instrument. Vail, who throughout figures as the entirely disinterested, self-sacrificing coadjutor of Morse, and who by many is considered as much the inventor of the Morse system as Morse himself, was the first to yield and devise, by simple suppression of parts, the well known sounder, converting the Morse telegraph to an aIl acoustic one.

Alfred Vail's Sounder

Royal House devoted his energies to the development of a printing telegraph, but was estopped by Morse from the use of a relay. He performed the heavy work of his printing apparatus by pneumatic power, which was simply controlled by the telegraph line, and most curiously, in his attempt to produce a sensitive sounder, he described in one of his patents, long antedating Bell's invention, what is to all intents and purposes a Bell telephone, only, he never imagined for a moment that it could be made to speak, and the microphone was still lacking to make it a practical invention.

We have seen that the early Baltimore and Washington line had Ezra Cornell as one of its constructors. In 1856 the algamation of the many companies then in existence was proposed and carried out through the agency of Hiram Sibley, the founder of the Sibley School of Science at Cornell University. Thus we find this great university intimately connected with the early days of the telegraph. The scheme was termed a crazy one; it was said to be like collecting all the paupers in the State and arranging them into a union so as to make rich men of them; but it was done.

The records of the business of the Western Union, originally so named because it was intended to be a union of Western telegraph companies, have been tabulated since 1867. It had, in that year, 46,270 miles of poles and cables and 85,291 miles of wire were in use; and 5,879,282 messages were transmitted. The receipts were $6,568,925.36. Its profits were $2,624,919.73. In 1895, with 189,714 miles of poles and cables, and 802,651 miles of wire, with 58,307,315 messages sent, receipts of $22,218,019.18 were shown, with a profit of $6,141,389.21. Since 1868 to 1896 the average tolls per message had fallen from $1.047 to $0.307 per message.

The Western Union represented about seven-eighths of the business of the United States, and by its wires, cables and connections any part of the world could be reached. Next to it in importance came the other great American company- the Postal Telegraph. This and the Western Union did almost all the telegraphic business of the United States.

lt would be too great a task to attempt to catalogue, much less describe, the many inventions in telegraphy. The genius of Edison, Delaney, Stearns and others has made it possible to send a number of messages simultaneously in both directions on the same wire.

The British Postmaster-General stated in a 1895 report that on a line on which in 1870 the highest speed by Wheatstone automatic was 60 to 80 words a minute, 600 words a minute was possible. The old Bain principle of electric decomposition and the use of a perforated ribbon drawn between contact points to produce the dot and dash making contacts have reappeared in various instruments. Even the old Morse pendulum, giving its zigzag line, is the prototype of the siphon recorder used in ocean telegraphy.

In that year of 1896, construction was receiving more and more attention. The Western Union Company was putting in hard drawn copper wire in place of iron on trunk lines, with the most satisfactory results. Over 10,000 miles of such wire was then in use. It relieved the strain on the poles, owing to its lightness, and its electrical superiority makes it work under very adverse meteorological conditions.

In the production of current, dynamos were in some eases substituted for batteries with the best results. Time service was carried on throughout the United States from the Washington Naval Observatory. The telegraph business in this country, in spite of the sparsely settled districts and long distances of transmission, were made to show a profit. In England, where it was run by the government, and where it was calculated that of 70,000,000 messages per annum, some two-thirds were sent from or to London, a large annual deficit was shown.

Information from...   Scientific American,  July 25, 1896,  page 58

Source: http://home.naviso ft.com/horn/articles/morse96.htm

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