The Electric Telegraph
Although Samuel Morse is usually credited as the inventor of the electric telegraph, he neither invented it nor was the first to market it commercially. Numerous experimenters developed working electric telegraphs in the years before Morse, going back to the mid-eighteenth century. The first commercial electric telegraph was the Cooke and Wheatstone system, installed along the Great Western Railway from Paddington Station in London to West Drayton in 1838. As London’s rail system expanded, commercial telegraphs expanded with them. Morse did not demonstrate his system with the famous message “What hath God wrought” until 1844.
Once Morse did demonstrate his system and obtain a patent for it in the United States in 1840, followed by a contract to build a line from Washington to Baltimore over which he transmitted his 1844 message, the telegraph expanded quickly in the United States. The drive to connect cities along the coast with those of the interior led to a multitude of telegraph companies opening for business. A new feature appeared in the cities and along rural roads and railroads – overhead lines supported by poles. Communications across Europe and North America were reduced to a matter of minutes, but communications between the two was still a minimum of ten days for a one-way message.
England and France were connected by a submerged telegraph cable in 1850. Other underwater cables were used to connect islands with the mainland in several areas and by 1856 work was underway by the Atlantic Telegraph Company to install a telegraph cable across the Atlantic, connecting Ireland with Newfoundland. Several failures ensued, mostly of the cable itself, which broke on numerous occasions, but by August 1858 the cable was fully installed and connected, with the company sending test messages to configure the system. After a week of such activity the first official message was sent, from the British directors of the Atlantic Telegraph Company to their American counterparts.
After the self-congratulatory message between the company officers a message from Queen Victoria was sent to President Buchanan and returned. Both heads of state lauded the achievement and the new communication link between Europe and the United States. Celebrations were held in England and America, and the use of the cable began in earnest. In England, misuse of the cable by manipulating the voltages applied during the sending of messages led to rapid deterioration of the insulation, and in less than three weeks the cable failed, after gradually taking more and more time to transmit messages across the Atlantic.
During the American Civil War several cables were laid in the Mediterranean and other large bodies of water but serious efforts to restore transatlantic communication were impeded by the war and by the lack of public confidence in the project, which hindered investment. New cables were installed successfully by 1866, capable of transmitting about eight words per minute, and as technology advanced these cables were improved upon and replaced. Transmission of long messages remained relatively slow well into the twentieth century, though obviously far faster than a ship voyage. By the 1880s London was the telecommunications center of the world.