What Just Happened: A Chronicle From the Information Frontier

by James Gleick

  …

  Oh! the dabblers in lott’ries will grow rich as Jews:

  ’Stead of flying of pigeons, to bring them the news,

  They’ll a telegraph place upon Old Ormond Quay;

  Put another ’board ship, in the midst of the sea.

  …

  Adieu, penny-posts! mails and coaches, adieu;

  Your occupation’s gone, ’tis all over wid you:

  In your place, telegraphs on our houses we’ll see,

  To tell time, conduct lightning, dry shirts, and send news.♦

  The telegraph towers spread across Europe and beyond, and their ruins dot the countrysides today. Telegraph Hill, Telegrafberget, Telegraphen-Berg are vestigial place names. Sweden, Denmark, and Belgium were early to develop systems on the French model. Germany soon followed. A line between Calcutta and Chunar began operating in 1823; between Alexandria and Cairo in 1824; and in Russia, Nicholas I organized 220 stations from Warsaw to St. Petersburg and Moscow. They held dominion over the world’s communication and then, faster than they had arisen, went obsolete. Colonel Taliaferro Shaffner, a Kentucky inventor and historian, traveled to Russia in 1859 and was struck by the towers’ height and their beauty, the care taken with their painting and landscaping with flowers, and by their sudden, universal death.

  These stations are now silent. No movements of the indicators are to be seen. They are still upon their high positions, fast yielding to the wasting hand of time. The electric wire, though less grand in its appearance, traverses the empire, and with burning flames inscribes in the distance the will of the emperor to sixty-six millions of human beings scattered over his wide-spread dominions.♦

  In Shaffner’s mind this was a one-way conversation. The sixty-six millions were not talking back to the emperor, nor to one another.

  What was to be said, when writing in the air? Claude Chappe had proposed, “Anything that could be the subject of a correspondence.”♦ But his example—“Lukner has left for Mons to besiege that city, Bender is advancing for its defense”—made clear what he meant: dispatches of military and state import. Later Chappe proposed sending other types of information: shipping news, and financial quotations from bourses and stock exchanges. Napoleon would not allow it, though he did use the telegraph to proclaim the birth of his son, Napoleon II, in 1811. A communications infrastructure built with enormous government investment and capable of transmitting some hundreds of total words per day could hardly be used for private messaging. That was unimaginable—and when, in the next century, it became imaginable, some governments found it undesirable. No sooner did entrepreneurs begin to organize private telegraphy than France banned it outright: an 1837 law mandated imprisonment and fines for “anyone performing unauthorized transmissions of signals from one place to another, with the aid of telegraphic machines or by any other means.”♦ The idea of a global nervous system had to arise elsewhere. In the next year, 1838, the French authorities received a visit from an American with a proposal for a “telegraph” utilizing electrical wires: Samuel F. B. Morse. They turned him down flat. Compared to the majestic semaphore, electricity seemed gimcrack and insecure. No one could interfere with telegraph signals in the sky, but wire could be cut by saboteurs. Jules Guyot, a physician and scientist assigned to assess the technology, sniffed, “What can one expect of a few wretched wires?”♦ What indeed.

  THE TELEGRAPH AT MONTMARTRE

  The care and feeding of the delicate galvanic impulse presented a harsh set of technical challenges, and a different set appeared where electricity met language: where words had to be transmuted into a twinkling in the wire. The crossing point between electricity and language—also the interface between device and human—required new ingenuity. Many different schemes occurred to inventors. Virtually all were based in one way or another on the written alphabet, employing letters as an intermediate layer. This seemed so natural as to be not worth remarking. Telegraph meant “far writing,” after all. So in 1774 Georges-Louis Le Sage of Geneva arranged twenty-four separate wires to designate twenty-four letters, each wire conveying just enough current to stir a piece of gold leaf or a pith ball suspended in a glass jar or “other bodies that can be as easily attracted, and are, at the same time, easily visible.”♦ That was too many wires to be practicable. A Frenchman named Lomond in 1787 ran a single wire across his apartment and claimed to be able to signal different letters by making a pith ball dance in different directions. “It appears that he has formed an alphabet of motions,” reported a witness, but apparently only Lomond’s wife could understand the code. In 1809 a German, Samuel Thomas von Sömmerring, made a bubble telegraph. Current passing through wires in a vessel of water produced bubbles of hydrogen; each wire, and thus each jet of bubbles, could indicate a single letter. While he was at it, von Sömmerring managed to make electricity ring a bell: he balanced a spoon in the water, upside down, so that enough bubbles would make it tilt, releasing a weight, driving a lever, and ringing the bell. “This secondary object, the alarum,” he wrote in his diary, “cost me a great deal of reflection and many useless trials with wheelwork.”♦ Across the Atlantic, an American named Harrison Gray Dyer tried sending signals by making electric sparks form nitric acid that discolored litmus paper.♦ He strung a wire on trees and stakes around a Long Island race track. The litmus paper had to be moved by hand.

  Then came needles. The physicist André-Marie Ampère, a developer of the galvanometer, proposed using that as a signaling device: it was a needle deflected by electromagnetism—a compass pointing to a momentary artificial north. He, too, thought in terms of one needle for every letter. In Russia, Baron Pavel Schilling demonstrated a system with five needles and later reduced that to one: he assigned combinations of right and left signals to the letters and numerals. At Göttingen in 1833 the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, working with a physicist, Wilhelm Weber, organized a similar scheme with one needle. The first deflection of the needle gave two possible signals, left or right. Two deflections combined gave four more possibilities (right + right, right + left, left + right, and left + left). Three deflections gave eight combinations, and four gave sixteen, for a total of thirty distinct signals. An operator would use pauses to separate the signals. Gauss and Weber organized their alphabet of deflections logically, beginning with the vowels and otherwise taking letters and digits in order:

  right = a

  left = e

  right, right = i

  right, left = o

  left, right = u

  left, left = b

  right, right, right = c (and k)

  right, right, left = d

  etc.

  This scheme for encoding letters was binary, in a way. Each minimal unit, each little piece of signal, amounted to a choice between two possibilities, left or right. Each letter required a number of such choices, and that number was not predetermined. It could be one, as in right for a and left for e. It could be more, so the scheme was open-ended, allowing an alphabet of as many letters as needed. Gauss and Weber strung a doubled wire over a mile of houses and steeples between the Göttingen observatory and the physics institute. What they managed to say to each other has not been preserved.

  Far away from these inventors’ workrooms, the telegraph still meant towers, semaphores, shutters, and flags, but enthusiasm for new possibilities was beginning to build. Lecturing to the Boston Marine Society in 1833, a lawyer and philologist, John Pickering, declared, “It must be evident to the most common observer, that no means of conveying intelligence can ever be devised, that shall exceed or even equal the rapidity of the Telegraph, for, with the exception of the scarcely perceptible relay at each station, its rapidity may be compared with that of light itself.”♦ He was thinking particularly of the Telegraph on Central Wharf, a Chappe-like tower communicating shipping news with three other stations in a twelve-mile line across Boston Harbor. Meanwhile, dozens of young newspapers around the nation were modernistically calling themselves “The Telegraph.” They,
too, were in the far-writing business.

  “Telegraphy is an element of power and order,”♦ Abraham Chappe had said, but the rising financial and mercantile classes were the next to grasp the value of information leaping across distance. Only two hundred miles separated the Stock Exchange on Threadneedle Street in London from the Bourse at the Palais Brongniart, but two hundred miles meant days. Fortunes could be made by bridging that gap. For speculators a private telegraph would be as useful as a time machine. The Rothschild banking family was using pigeons as postal carriers and, more reliably, a small fleet of boats to carry messengers across the Channel. The phenomenon of fast information from a distance, having been discovered, generated a cascade of excitement. Pickering in Boston did the math: “If there are now essential advantages to business in obtaining intelligence from New York in two days, or less, or at the rate of eight or ten miles an hour, any man can perceive that there may be a proportionate benefit, when we can transmit the same information for that distance by telegraph at the rate of four miles in a minute, or in the space of a single hour, from New York to Boston.”♦ The interest of governments in receiving military bulletins and projecting authority was surpassed by the desires of capitalists and newspapers, railroads and shipping companies. Still, in the sprawling United States, even the pressure of commerce was not enough to make optical telegraphy a reality. Only one prototype succeeded in linking two cities: New York and Philadelphia, in 1840. It transmitted stock prices and then lottery numbers and then was obsolete.

  All the would-be inventors of the electrical telegraph—and there were many—worked from the same toolkit. They had their wires, and they had magnetic needles. They had batteries: galvanic cells, linked together, producing electricity from the reaction of metal strips immersed in acid baths. They did not have lights. They did not have motors. They had whatever mechanisms they could construct from wood and brass: pins, screws, wheels, springs, and levers. In the end they had the shared target at which they all aimed: the letters of the alphabet. (Edward Davy thought it was necessary to explain, in 1836, how and why the letters would suffice: “A single letter may be indicated at a time, each letter being taken down by the attendant as it arrives, so as to form words and sentences; but it will be easy to see that, from the infinite changes upon a number of letters, a great number of ordinary communications may be conveyed.”♦) Along with this common stock list, in Vienna, Paris, London, Göttingen, St. Petersburg, and the United States, these pioneers shared a sense of their excited, competitive landscape, but no one knew clearly what anyone else was doing. They could not keep up with the relevant science; crucial advances in the science of electricity remained unknown to the people who most needed them. Every inventor ached to understand what happened to current flowing through wires of different lengths and thickness, and they continued to struggle for more than a decade after Georg Ohm, in Germany, worked out a precise mathematical theory for current, voltage, and resistance. Such news traveled slowly.

  It was in this context that Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail, in the United States, and, in England, William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone made the electric telegraph a reality and a business. In one way or another, all of them later claimed to have “invented” the telegraph, though none of them had done so—certainly not Morse. Their partnerships were destined to end in brutal, turbulent, and bitter patent disputes embroiling most of the leading electrical scientists on two continents. The trail of invention, leading through so many countries, had been poorly recorded and even more poorly communicated.

  In England, Cooke was a young entrepreneur—he saw a prototype needle telegraph while traveling in Heidelberg—and Wheatstone a King’s College, London, physicist with whom Cooke formed a partnership in 1837. Wheatstone had performed experiments on the velocity of sound and of electricity, and once again the real problem lay in connecting the physics with language. They consulted England’s authority on electricity, Michael Faraday, and Peter Roget, author of a Treatise on Electro-Magnetism as well as the system of verbal classification he called the Thesaurus. The Cooke-Wheatstone telegraph went through a series of prototypes. One used six wires to form three circuits, each controlling a magnetic needle. “I worked out every possible permutation and practical combination of the signals given by the three needles, and I thus obtained an alphabet of twenty-six signals,”♦ noted Cooke, somewhat obscurely. There was also an alarm, in case the operator’s attention wandered from the apparatus; Cooke said he had been inspired by the only mechanical device he knew well: a musical snuffbox. In the next version, a synchronized pair of rotating clockwork disks displayed the letters of the alphabet through a slot. More ingenious still, and just as awkward, was a five-needle design: twenty letters were arranged on a diamond-shaped grid and an operator, by depressing numbered buttons, would cause two of five needles to point, uniquely, to the desired letter. This Cooke-Wheatstone telegraph managed to do without C, J, Q, U, X, and Z. Their American competitor, Vail, later described the operation as follows:

  Suppose the message to be sent from the Paddington station to the Slough station, is this, “We have met the enemy and they are ours.” The operator at Paddington presses down the buttons, 11 and 18, for signalizing upon the dial of the Slough station, the letter W. The operator there, who is supposed to be constantly on watch, observes the two needles pointing at W. He writes it down, or calls it aloud, to another, who records it, taking, according to a calculation given in a recent account, two seconds at least for each signal.♦

  Vail considered this inefficient. He was in a position to be smug.

  As for Samuel Finley Breese Morse, his later recollections came in the context of controversy—what his son called “the wordy battles waged in the scientific world over the questions of priority, exclusive discovery or invention, indebtedness to others, and conscious or unconscious plagiarism.”♦ All these thrived on failures of communication and record-keeping. Educated at Yale College, the son of a Massachusetts preacher, Morse was an artist, not a scientist. In the 1820s and 1830s he spent much of his time traveling in England, France, Switzerland, and Italy to study painting. It was on one of these trips that he first heard about electric telegraphy or, in the terms of his memoirs, had his sudden insight: “like a flash of the subtle fluid which afterwards became his servant,” as his son put it. Morse told a friend who was rooming with him in Paris: “The mails in our country are too slow; this French telegraph is better, and would do even better in our clear atmosphere than here, where half the time fogs obscure the skies. But this will not be fast enough—the lightning would serve us better.”♦ As he described his epiphany, it was an insight not about lightning but about signs: “It would not be difficult to construct a system of signs by which intelligence could be instantaneously transmitted.”♦

  TELEGRAPHIC WRITING BY MORSE’S FIRST INSTRUMENT

  ALFRED VAIL’S TELEGRAPH “KEY”

  Morse had a great insight from which all the rest flowed. Knowing nothing about pith balls, bubbles, or litmus paper, he saw that a sign could be made from something simpler, more fundamental, and less tangible—the most minimal event, the closing and opening of a circuit. Never mind needles. The electric current flowed and was interrupted, and the interruptions could be organized to create meaning. The idea was simple, but Morse’s first devices were convoluted, involving clockwork, wooden pendulums, pencils, ribbons of paper, rollers, and cranks. Vail, an experienced machinist, cut all this back. For the sending end, Vail devised what became an iconic piece of user interface: a simple spring-loaded lever, with which an operator could control the circuit by the touch of a finger. First he called this lever a “correspondent”; then just a “key.” Its simplicity made it at least an order of magnitude faster than the buttons and cranks employed by Wheatstone and Cooke. With the telegraph key, an operator could send signals—which were, after all, mere interruptions of the current—at a rate of hundreds per minute.

  So at one end they had a lever, for closing and opening
the circuit, and at the other end the current controlled an electromagnet. One of them, probably Vail, thought of putting the two together. The magnet could operate the lever. This combination (invented more or less simultaneously by Joseph Henry at Princeton and Edward Davy in England) was named the “relay,” from the word for a fresh horse that replaced an exhausted one. It removed the greatest obstacle standing in the way of long-distance electrical telegraphy: the weakening of currents as they passed through lengths of wire. A weakened current could still operate a relay, enabling a new circuit, powered by a new battery. The relay had greater potential than its inventors realized. Besides letting a signal propagate itself, a relay might reverse the signal. And relays might combine signals from more than one source. But that was for later.

  The turning point came in 1844, both in England and the United States. Cooke and Wheatstone had their first line up and running along the railway from the Paddington station. Morse and Vail had theirs from Washington to the Pratt Street railway station in Baltimore, on wires wrapped in yarn and tar, suspended from twenty-foot wooden posts. The communications traffic was light at first, but Morse was able to report proudly to Congress that an instrument could transmit thirty characters per minute and that the lines had “remained undisturbed from the wantonness or evil disposition of any one.” From the outset the communications content diverged sharply—comically—from the martial and official dispatches familiar to French telegraphists. In England the first messages recorded in the telegraph book at Paddington concerned lost luggage and retail transactions. “Send a messenger to Mr Harris, Duke-street, Manchester-square, and request him to send 6 lbs of white bait and 4 lbs of sausages by the 5.30 train to Mr Finch of Windsor; they must be sent by 5.30 down train, or not at all.”♦ At the stroke of the new year, the superintendent at Paddington sent salutations to his counterpart in Slough and received a reply that the wish was a half-minute early; midnight had not yet arrived there.♦ That morning, a druggist in Slough named John Tawell poisoned his mistress, Sarah Hart, and ran for the train to Paddington. A telegraph message outraced him with his description (“in the garb of a kwaker, with a brown great coat on”♦—no Q’s in the English system); he was captured in London and hanged in March. The drama filled the newspapers for months. It was later said of the telegraph wires, “Them’s the cords that hung John Tawell.” In April, a Captain Kennedy, at the South-Western Railway terminus, played a game of chess with a Mr. Staunton, at Gosport; it was reported that “in conveying the moves, the electricity travelled backward and forward during the game upwards of 10,000 miles.”♦ The newspapers loved that story, too—and, more and more, they valued any story revealing the marvels of the electric telegraph.