Who invented the telegraph machine?
Samuel Morse
In addition to the telegraph, Morse invented a marble-cutting machine that could carve three-dimensional sculptures in marble or stone. He could not patent it, however, because of an existing 1820 Thomas Blanchard design.
Signal Corps in the American Civil War
Telegraph trains were introduced by Myer to support telegraphy for mobile operations. The horse-drawn wagons carried the telegraph sets and supplies such as reels of insulated copper wire and iron lances, for stringing temporary field lines, a practice called "flying telegraph lines." Each train consisted of two wagons, equipped with 5 miles of wire and a telegraph instrument. The first model train was constructed by Henry J. Rogers, a telegraphic engineer from New York City who had worked with Samuel F.B. Morse in building the first commercial telegraph line between Washington and Baltimore in 1844. Rogers's original telegraph instrument for the train replaced the traditional sending key and sound receiver with a dial indicator, a circular index plate bearing the letters of the alphabet and a pointer that turned to the letter to be transmitted. A similar pointer spelled out the message at the receiving end. Rogers provided a galvanic battery that eliminated the danger of acid spills. This equipment eliminated the need for skilled operators who had to be trained in Morse code. Field trials in February 1862 found that it worked satisfactorily over a test circuit of 2 miles of wire. A board of three signal officers recommended that such a train would be of great use as an auxiliary to permanent telegraph lines.
International communication
In 1837, Samuel Morse invented telegraph. Given its speed and reliability in delivering information, telegraph offered opportunities for capital and military expansion. As showed in Table 1.1, the establishment of cable hardware signifies global power order in late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Electrical telegraph
The first system that didn't require skilled technicians to operate, was Charles Wheatstone's ABC system in 1840 where the letters of the alphabet were arranged around a clock-face, and the signal caused a needle to indicate the letter. This early system required the receiver to be present in real time to record the message and it reached speeds of up to 15 words a minute.
Silver Center
Samuel Colt developed the revolver and Samuel Morse invented the telegraph; John William Draper in 1840 took the first photograph in the United States in the original Main Building that the present structure replaced. Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman lived and taught and privately lectured there, Winslow Homer painted there, and architects Alexander Jackson Davis and Richard Morris Hunt had offices there.
Jozef Murgaš
Jozef Murgaš (English Joseph Murgas) (17 February 1864 – 11 May 1929) was a Slovak inventor, architect, botanist, painter and Roman Catholic priest. He contributed to wireless telegraphy and helped in the development of mobile communications and the wireless transmission of information and the human voice.
Patent infringement
Since the 1840s, the expression "patent pirate" has been used as a pejorative term to describe those that infringe a patent and refuse to acknowledge the priority of the inventor. Samuel F. B. Morse, inventor of the telegraph, for example, complained in a letter to friend in 1848
Telectroscope
The term "telectroscope" was used by the French writer and publisher Louis Figuier in 1878 to popularize an invention wrongly interpreted as real and incorrectly ascribed to Alexander Graham Bell. Figuier was probably misled by the article "The Electroscope" published in "The New York Sun" of 30 March 1877. Written under the pseudonym "Electrician", the New York Sun article claimed that "an eminent scientist", whose name had to be withheld, had invented a device whereby objects or people anywhere in the world "could be seen anywhere by anybody". According to the article, the device would allow merchants to transmit pictures of their wares to their customers, the contents of museum collections would be made available to scholars in distant cities, and (combined with the telephone) operas and plays could be broadcast into people's homes.
Edward Alfred Cowper
In 1879, Cowper invented the writing-telegraph; a device which allowed hand-written messages to be transmitted by telegraph. The exact position of the pencil of the operator at the sending-station was communicated to the writing-pen at the receiving-station through two wires, one giving the vertical and the other the horizontal position of the pencil.
Invention of radio
In the United States, Thomas Edison, in the mid-1880s, patented an electromagnetic induction system he called "grasshopper telegraphy", which allowed telegraphic signals to jump the short distance between a running train and telegraph wires running parallel to the tracks. In the United Kingdom, William Preece was able to develop an electromagnetic induction telegraph system that, with antenna wires many kilometers long, could transmit across gaps of about . Inventor Nathan Stubblefield, between 1885 and 1892, also worked on an induction transmission system.
Alexander Graham Bell
In 1875, Bell developed an acoustic telegraph and drew up a patent application for it. Since he had agreed to share U.S. profits with his investors Gardiner Hubbard and Thomas Sanders, Bell requested that an associate in Ontario, George Brown, attempt to patent it in Britain, instructing his lawyers to apply for a patent in the U.S. only after they received word from Britain (Britain would issue patents only for discoveries not previously patented elsewhere).
Donald Murray (inventor)
Donald Murray (1865–1945) was an electrical engineer and the inventor of a telegraphic typewriter system using an extended Baudot code that was a direct ancestor of the teleprinter (teletype machine). He can justifiably be called the "Father of the remote Typewriter".
Telegraphy
Contrary to the extensive definition used by Chappe, Morse argued that the term "telegraph" can strictly be applied only to systems that transmit "and" record messages at a distance. This is to be distinguished from "semaphore", which merely transmits messages. Smoke signals, for instance, are to be considered semaphore, not telegraph. According to Morse, telegraph dates only from 1832 when Pavel Schilling invented one of the earliest electrical telegraphs.
Heliograph
The German professor Carl Friedrich Gauss of the University of Göttingen developed and used a predecessor of the heliograph (the heliotrope) in 1821. His device directed a controlled beam of sunlight to a distant station to be used as a marker for geodetic survey work, and was suggested as a means of telegraphic communications. This is the first reliably documented heliographic device, despite much speculation about possible ancient incidents of sun-flash signalling, and the documented existence of other forms of ancient optical telegraphy.
Telegraphy
In 1843, Scottish inventor Alexander Bain invented a device that could be considered the first facsimile machine. He called his invention a "recording telegraph". Bain's telegraph was able to transmit images by electrical wires. Frederick Bakewell made several improvements on Bain's design and demonstrated a telefax machine. In 1855, an Italian abbot, Giovanni Caselli, also created an electric telegraph that could transmit images. Caselli called his invention "Pantelegraph". Pantelegraph was successfully tested and approved for a telegraph line between Paris and Lyon.
Electrical telegraph
With the invention of the teletypewriter, telegraphic encoding became fully automated. Early teletypewriters used the ITA-1 Baudot code, a five-bit code. This yielded only thirty-two codes, so it was over-defined into two "shifts", "letters" and "figures". An explicit, unshared shift code prefaced each set of letters and figures. In 1901, Baudot's code was modified by Donald Murray.
Marvin Hughitt
Marvin Hughitt was born in Genoa, New York, on August 9, 1837. He was raised on the family farm and attended mostly public schools with some schooling in a seminary. Hughitt was interested in the telegraph when it was invented and moved to Auburn, New York to seek a position related to the field. He picked up the trade quickly and was considered a local expert within a year.
Telautograph
The telautograph, an analog precursor to the modern fax machine, transmits electrical impulses recorded by potentiometers at the sending station to servomechanisms attached to a pen at the receiving station, thus reproducing at the receiving station a drawing or signature made by the sender. It was the first such device to transmit drawings to a stationary sheet of paper; previous inventions in Europe had used rotating drums to make such transmissions.
Samuel Morse
In an 1848 letter to a friend, Morse describes how vigorously he fought to be called the sole inventor of the electromagnetic telegraph despite the previous inventions.
Werner von Siemens
Upon returning home from war, he chose to work on perfecting technologies that had already been established and eventually became known worldwide for his advances in various technologies. In 1843 he sold the rights to his first invention to Elkington of Birmingham. Siemens invented a telegraph that used a needle to point to the right letter, instead of using Morse code. Based on this invention, he founded the company "Telegraphen-Bauanstalt von Siemens & Halske" on 1 October 1847, with the company opening a workshop on 12 October.
Alexander Bain (inventor)
Bain's and Bakewell's laboratory mechanisms reproduced poor quality images and were not viable systems because the transmitter and receiver were never truly synchronized. In 1861, the first practical operating electro-mechanical commercially exploited telefax machine, the Pantelegraph, was invented by the Italian physicist Giovanni Caselli. He introduced the first commercial telefax service between Paris and Lyon at least 11 years before the invention of workable telephones.
Second Industrial Revolution
The first commercial telegraph system was installed by Sir William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone in May 1837 between Euston railway station and Camden Town in London.
Charles Cros
Cros is perhaps most famous as the man who almost, but not quite, invented the phonograph. As far as is known, no one before him had thought of a practical way to reproduce sound from a recording of airborne sound waves. He gave the Greek name 'Paleophone' ('voix du passé', tr. 'voice of the past') to his invention. On April 30, 1877 he submitted a sealed envelope containing a letter to the Academy of Sciences in Paris explaining his proposed method. The letter stated in French, "Un index léger est solidaire du centre de figure d'une membrane vibrante ; il se termine par une pointe [...] qui repose sur une surface noircie à la flamme." The English translation is one close to this: "A lightweight armature is fixed to the center of the face of a vibrating membrane; it ends with a sharp point [...] which rests on a lamp-blacked surface." This surface is integral with a disc driven by a double movement of rotation and linear progression. The system is reversible: when the tip follows the furrow the membrane restores the original acoustic signal. The letter was read in public on December 3 following. In his letter, after having shown that his method consisted of detecting an oscillation of a membrane and using the tracing to reproduce the oscillation with respect to its duration and intensity, Cros added that a cylindrical form for the receiving apparatus seemed to him to be the most practical, as it allowed for the graphic inscription of the vibrations by means of a very fine-threaded screw. An article on the Paleophone was published in "la semaine du Clergé" on October 10, 1877, written by l'Abbé Leblanc. Cros proposed metal for both engraving tool attached to the diaphragm and receiving material for durability.
History of the telephone
Another electrical telegraph was independently developed and patented in the United States in 1837 by Samuel Morse. His assistant, Alfred Vail, developed the Morse code signaling alphabet with Morse. America's first telegram was sent by Morse on January 6, 1838, across of wiring.
Joseph Nathan Kane
Kane received a handsome amount from Simon & Schuster in 1921 to write a book on the history of inventions. He was to write on things like the Wright brothers and their first aeroplane, Thomas Edison and his electric light bulb invention, Alexander Graham Bell and the telephone, and Samuel F. B. Morse's invention of the telegraph. Starting in 1922 and lasting until 1932, Kane spent about eleven months out of every year traveling around the United States as a freelance, self-syndicated journalist. Kane sought out who invented what in the United States. He did much research on this project only to realize that often a lot of people appeared responsible for the same invention.
Electrical telegraph
Gauss was convinced that this communication would be a help to his kingdom's towns. Later in the same year, instead of a Voltaic pile, Gauss used an induction pulse, enabling him to transmit seven letters a minute instead of two. The inventors and university were too poor to develop the telegraph on their own, but they received funding from Alexander von Humboldt. Carl August Steinheil in Munich was able to build a telegraph network within the city in 1835-6. He installed a telegraph line along the first German railroad in 1835.
The Cooke and Wheatstone telegraph, was co-developed by William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone. In May 1837 they patented a telegraph system which used a number of needles on a board that could be moved to point to letters of the alphabet. Any number of needles could be used, depending on the number of characters it was required to code. The patent recommended five needles.
Samuel Morse independently developed and patented a recording electric telegraph in 1837. Morse's assistant Alfred Vail developed an instrument that was called the register for recording the received messages. It embossed dots and dashes on a moving paper tape by a stylus which was operated by an electromagnet. Morse and Vail developed the Morse code signalling alphabet. The first telegram in the United States was sent by Morse on 11 January 1838, across of wire at Speedwell Ironworks near Morristown, New Jersey, although it was only later, in 1844, that he sent the message "WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT" over the from the Capitol in Washington to the old Mt. Clare Depot in Baltimore.
Charles Wheatstone
In 1841 a difference arose between Cooke and Wheatstone as to the share of each in the honour of inventing the telegraph. The question was submitted to the arbitration of the famous engineer, Marc Isambard Brunel, on behalf of Cooke, and Professor Daniell, of King's College, the inventor of the Daniell battery, on the part of Wheatstone. They awarded to Cooke the credit of having introduced the telegraph as a useful undertaking which promised to be of national importance, and to Wheatstone that of having by his researches prepared the public to receive it. They concluded with the words: 'It is to the united labours of two gentlemen so well qualified for mutual assistance that we must attribute the rapid progress which this important invention has made during five years since they have been associated.' The decision, however vague, pronounces the needle telegraph a joint production. If it had mainly been invented by Wheatstone, it was chiefly introduced by Cooke. Their respective shares in the undertaking might be compared to that of an author and his publisher, but for the fact that Cooke himself had a share in the actual work of invention.
Harrison Gray Dyar
Dyar erected the first telegraph line and dispatched over it the first telegraph message ever sent in America — as determined by Levi Woodbury of the Supreme Court of the United States. Dyar had used over half a mile of bare electrical wire to transmit the message. He employed mechanical and electrical means that Samuel Morse used many years later for the telegraph system he patented in 1847. The author Munroe explains that Dyar made his telegraph line at least eighteen years before the actual materialization of the first practical Morse telegraph line that was made between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, Maryland.
Ground (electricity)
Long-distance electromagnetic telegraph systems from 1820 onwards used two or more wires to carry the signal and return currents. It was then discovered, probably by the German scientist Carl August Steinheil in 1836–1837, that the ground could be used as the return path to complete the circuit, making the return wire unnecessary. However, there were problems with this system, exemplified by the transcontinental telegraph line constructed in 1861 by the Western Union Company between St. Joseph, Missouri, and Sacramento, California. During dry weather, the ground connection often developed a high resistance, requiring water to be poured on the ground rod to enable the telegraph to work or phones to ring.
Georges-Louis Le Sage
Georges-Louis Le Sage (; 13 June 1724 – 9 November 1803) was a Genevan physicist and is most known for his theory of gravitation, for his invention of an electric telegraph and his anticipation of the kinetic theory of gases. Furthermore, he was a contributor to the Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers".
Phonograph
The phonograph was invented in 1877 by Thomas Edison. While other inventors had produced devices that could record sounds, Edison's phonograph was the first to be able to reproduce the recorded sound. His phonograph originally recorded sound onto a tinfoil sheet wrapped around a rotating cylinder. A stylus responding to sound vibrations produced an up and down or hill-and-dale groove in the foil. Alexander Graham Bell's Volta Laboratory made several improvements in the 1880s and introduced the "graphophone", including the use of wax-coated cardboard cylinders and a cutting stylus that moved from side to side in a zigzag groove around the record. In the 1890s, Emile Berliner initiated the transition from phonograph cylinders to flat discs with a spiral groove running from the periphery to near the center, coining the term "gramophone" for disc record players, which is predominantly used in many languages. Later improvements through the years included modifications to the turntable and its drive system, the stylus or needle, and the sound and equalization systems.
Thomas Edison
The key to Edison's fortunes was telegraphy. With knowledge gained from years of working as a telegraph operator, he learned the basics of electricity. This allowed him to make his early fortune with the stock ticker, the first electricity-based broadcast system. On August 9, 1892, Edison received a patent for a two-way telegraph.
Thomas Tommasina
Tommasina invented a telephonic receiver system which he adapted as a weather forecasting system in 1901. Called the "Electro-radiophone" it picked up electric discharges in the atmosphere and transmitted them over wires to where it could be heard in the form of sound. The receiver made use of the Branly effect. It may have been one of the earliest ideas on using wireless telegraphy in meteorology. Tommasina's device had also been of interest to Guglielmo Marconi. When Marconi claimed a patent there were several counter-claims and it was suggested that the true inventor of the so-called "mercury-coherer" used in the first transatlantic telegraphy was Tommasina. Tommasina did not however use it for the purpose of wireless-telegraphy nor did he claim to be its inventor.
Telectroscope
In reality, the imagined "telectroscopes" described in the articles had nothing to do with the device being developed by Dr. Bell and his assistant Charles Sumner Tainter which was christened with the ambiguous name "photophone". The photophone was actually a wireless optical telephone that conveyed audio conversations on modulated lightbeams, the precursor for today's fiber-optic communications. Bell and Tainter would receive several patents in 1880/1881 for their then cutting-edge invention (master ), which ironically used the same selenium materials in its receivers that created the initial excitement surrounding the telectroscope's proposals.
David Brooks (inventor)
Prior to the invention, Brooks worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad, which in the 1850s received permission to build its own telegraph line, having bought necessary patents. Brooks was the railroad's first superintendent of telegraphs, appointed in 1852.
Samuel Thomas von Sömmerring
In addition, Sömmerring was a very creative inventor, having designed a telescope for astronomical observations and an electrical telegraph in 1809. He worked on the refinement of wines, sunspots and many diverse other things. In 1811 he developed the first telegraphic system in Bavaria, which is housed today in the German Museum of Science in Munich. In 1823, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Abdulmejid I
Samuel Morse received his first ever patent for the telegraph in 1847, at the old Beylerbeyi Palace (the present Beylerbeyi Palace was built in 1861–1865 on the same location) in Istanbul, which was issued by Sultan Abulmejid who personally tested the new invention.
Amos Dolbear
Amos Emerson Dolbear (November 10, 1837 – February 23, 1910) was an American physicist and inventor. Dolbear researched electrical spark conversion into sound waves and electrical impulses. He was a professor at University of Kentucky in Lexington from 1868 until 1874. In 1874 he became the chair of the physics department at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. He is known for his 1882 invention of a system for transmitting telegraph signals without wires. In 1899 his patent for it was purchased in an unsuccessful attempt to interfere with Guglielmo Marconi's wireless telegraphy patents in the United States.
George May Phelps
George May Phelps (March 19, 1820 – May 18, 1888) was a 19th-century American inventor of automated telegraphy equipment. He is credited with synthesizing the designs of several existing printers into his line of devices which became the dominant apparatus for automated reception and transmission of telegraph messages.
Émile Baudot
On 17 June 1874 Baudot patented his first printing telegraph (Patent no. 103,898 "Système de télégraphie rapide"), in which the signals were translated automatically into typographic characters. Baudot's hardware had three main parts: the keyboard, the distributor, and a paper tape.
Wireless telegraphy
Both electrostatic and electromagnetic induction were used to develop wireless telegraph systems that saw limited commercial application. In the United States, Thomas Edison, in the mid-1880s, patented an electromagnetic induction system he called "grasshopper telegraphy", which allowed telegraphic signals to jump the short distance between a running train and telegraph wires running parallel to the tracks. This system was successful technically but not economically, as there turned out to be little interest by train travelers in the use of an on-board telegraph service. During the Great Blizzard of 1888, this system was used to send and receive wireless messages from trains buried in snowdrifts. The disabled trains were able to maintain communications via their Edison induction wireless telegraph systems, perhaps the first successful use of wireless telegraphy to send distress calls. Edison would also help to patent a ship-to-shore communication system based on electrostatic induction.
Telegraphy
The word "telegraph" was first coined by the French inventor of the Semaphore telegraph, Claude Chappe, who also coined the word "semaphore".
Invention of the telephone
Elisha Gray, of Highland Park, Illinois (near Chicago) also devised a tone telegraph of this kind about the same time as La Cour. In Gray's tone telegraph, several vibrating steel reeds tuned to different frequencies interrupted the current, which at the other end of the line passed through electromagnets and vibrated matching tuned steel reeds near the electromagnet poles. Gray's 'harmonic telegraph,' with vibrating reeds, was used by the Western Union Telegraph Company. Since more than one set of vibration frequencies – that is to say, more than one musical tone – can be sent over the same wire simultaneously, the harmonic telegraph can be utilized as a 'multiplex' or many-ply telegraph, conveying several messages through the same wire at the same time. Each message can either be read by an operator by the sound, or from different tones read by different operators, or a permanent record can be made by the marks drawn on a ribbon of traveling paper by a Morse recorder. On July 27, 1875, Gray was granted U.S. patent 166,096 for "Electric Telegraph for Transmitting Musical Tones" (the harmonic)
Typewriter
The next step in the development of the electric typewriter came in 1910, when Charles and Howard Krum filed a patent for the first practical teletypewriter. The Krums' machine, named the Morkrum Printing Telegraph, used a typewheel rather than individual typebars. This machine was used for the first commercial teletypewriter system on Postal Telegraph Company lines between Boston and New York City in 1910.
Charles Wheatstone
In 1840 Wheatstone had patented an alphabetical telegraph, or, 'Wheatstone A B C instrument,' which moved with a step-by-step motion, and showed the letters of the message upon a dial. The same principle was used in his type-printing telegraph, patented in 1841. This was the first apparatus which printed a telegram in type. It was worked by two circuits, and as the type revolved a hammer, actuated by the current, pressed the required letter on the paper.
Telautograph
The telautograph's invention is attributed to Elisha Gray, who patented it on July 31, 1888. Gray's patent stated that the telautograph would allow "one to transmit his own handwriting to a distant point over a two-wire circuit." It was the first facsimile machine in which the stylus was controlled by horizontal and vertical bars. The telautograph was first publicly exhibited at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition held in Chicago.
George Parker Bidder
He was "one of the first to recognize the value of the electric telegraph." That invention was in its infancy when, in 1837, jointly with R. Stephenson, he recommended its introduction on a portion of the London & Birmingham and on the Blackwall lines, while three years later he advised that it should be adopted to facilitate the working of the single line between Norwich and Yarmouth. He was also one of the founders of the Electric Telegraph Company, which enabled the public generally to enjoy the benefits of telegraphic communication.
History of the telephone
The telephone emerged from the making and successive improvements of the electrical telegraph. In 1804, Spanish polymath and scientist Francisco Salva Campillo constructed an electrochemical telegraph. The first working telegraph was built by the English inventor Francis Ronalds in 1816 and used static electricity. An electromagnetic telegraph was created by Baron Schilling in 1832. Carl Friedrich Gauss and Wilhelm Weber built another electromagnetic telegraph in 1833 in Göttingen.
William Francis Channing
Samuel Morse invented the telegraph in 1837 and commercial usage was begun in 1844.
Channing spun off this technology to create a citywide fire alarm system. With the assistance of Professor Farmer, an electrical engineer, they developed a fire-alarm telegraph. They talked the officials of Boston into financing the construction of a citywide fire alarm system. The first central office was located at 21 Court Square. The city owned the building. The system began testing on 28 April 1852. The first fire alert was received the very next night. Channing and Moses obtained a patent on this electrical telegraph system on 19 May 1857. It was US Patent #17,355 and known as the American fire-alarm telegraph or the "city system."
Theodore Newton Vail
Theodore Newton Vail was a first cousin to Alfred Vail instrumental in developing the first telegraph.
Algernon Fuller
Born on 30 March 1885, Algernon Fuller was educated at Bedford School and at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich. He received his first commission in the Royal Engineers in 1904. He served during the First World War and, in 1916, he invented the Fullerphone, which enabled telephony and telegraphy to be used simultaneously on the same line, rendering the telegraphy secret. It was used widely during the First World War and thereafter, and Fuller was appointed as Experimental Officer at the Signals Experimental Establishment, Woolwich, between 1916 and 1920. He was Deputy Director of Mechanisation at the War Office, between 1938 and 1940, Director of Engineer and Signals Equipments at the Ministry of Supply, between 1940 and 1941, and Deputy Director-General of the Ministry of Supply, in 1941.
Decline and modernization of the Ottoman Empire
Samuel Morse received his first ever patent for the telegraph in 1847, at the old Beylerbeyi Palace (the present Beylerbeyi Palace was built in 1861–1865 on the same location) in Istanbul, which was issued by Sultan Abdülmecid who personally tested the new invention. Following this successful test, installation works of the first telegraph line (Istanbul-Adrianople–Şumnu) began on 9 August 1847.
Samuel Morse
Morse received a patent for the telegraph in 1847, at the old Beylerbeyi Palace (the present Beylerbeyi Palace was built in 1861–1865 on the same location) in Istanbul, which was issued by Sultan Abdülmecid, who personally tested the new invention. He was elected an Associate Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1849. The original patent went to the Breese side of the family after the death of Samuel Morse.
David Alter
In 1836 Elderton, David Alter invented the electric telegraph, one year before the popular Morse telegraph was invented. David rigged the telegraph between his house and his barn. He was interviewed about the discovery going unobserved by other inventors and said: "I may say that there is no connection at all between the telegraph of Morse and others and that of myself...Professor Morse most probably never heard of me or my Elderton telegraph."
Francis Ronalds
Sir Francis Ronalds FRS (21 February 1788 – 8 August 1873) was an English scientist and inventor, and arguably the first electrical engineer. He was knighted for creating the first working electric telegraph.
James O. Clephane
James Ogilvie Clephane (February 21, 1842 – November 30, 1910) was an American court reporter and venture capitalist who was involved in improving, promoting and supporting several inventions of his age, including the typewriter, the graphophone, and the linotype machine. He has been called the "father of the linotype machine", and the development of mechanical typesetting was largely due to his initiative.
Needle telegraph
A needle telegraph is an electrical telegraph that uses indicating needles moved electromagnetically as its means of displaying messages. It is one of the two main types of electromagnetic telegraph, the other being the armature system as exemplified by the telegraph of Samuel Morse in the United States. The principal needle system was the Cooke and Wheatstone telegraph, a system widely used in Britain and the British Empire in the 19th and early-20th centuries. However, the earliest needle telegraph was a binary coded multi-wire, multi-needle system invented by Pavel Schilling and demonstrated in St. Petersburg in 1832. Charles Wheatstone may have demonstrated one of Schilling's instruments in 1835 (that is, prior to his collaboration with Cooke to build a telegraph). Cooke definitely saw Schilling's needle instrument at a lecture of Georg Wilhelm Muncke in Heidelberg. It was this lecture that inspired Cooke to attempt building a telegraph, although he did not use needle instruments until Wheatstone came on board and suggested it.
Alexander Bain (inventor)
On 12 December 1846, Bain, who was then living in Edinburgh, patented a chemical telegraph. He had seen that the Morse and other telegraphs then in use were comparatively slow, due to the mechanical inertia of their moving parts, and realized that the signal current could be used to make a readable mark on a moving paper tape soaked in a mixture of ammonium nitrate and potassium ferrocyanide, which gave a blue mark when a current was passed through it.
Telegraphy
In 1881, English inventor Shelford Bidwell constructed the "scanning phototelegraph" that was the first telefax machine to scan any two-dimensional original, not requiring manual plotting or drawing. Around 1900, German physicist Arthur Korn invented the "" widespread in continental Europe especially since a widely noticed transmission of a wanted-person photograph from Paris to London in 1908 used until the wider distribution of the radiofax. Its main competitors were the "Bélinographe" by Édouard Belin first, then since the 1930s, the "Hellschreiber", invented in 1929 by German inventor Rudolf Hell, a pioneer in mechanical image scanning and transmission.
Wilhelm Eduard Weber
Wilhelm Eduard Weber (; ; 24 October 1804 – 23 June 1891) was a German physicist and, together with Carl Friedrich Gauss, inventor of the first electromagnetic telegraph.
Donald Murray (inventor)
It was during his time with the "Sydney Morning Herald" that Murray got the idea for the telegraphic typewriter. At the time, telegrams were transmitted by telegraphists using Morse code, then typed onto a telegram form which was then delivered by pushbike or on foot. Murray's idea was to use a typewriter to drive a device that translated each character of the text into a modified Baudot code. On the receiving end, another mechanism would print the coded characters on a paper tape, and/or make a perforated copy of the message. This system allowed the transmission of messages without need of operators trained in Morse code. At the time typists were being trained in great numbers using the QWERTY keyboard layout.
Phonograph
Edison presented his own account of inventing the phonograph. "I was experimenting," he said, "on an automatic method of recording telegraph messages on a disk of paper laid on a revolving platen, exactly the same as the disk talking-machine of to-day. The platen had a spiral groove on its surface, like the disk. Over this was placed a circular disk of paper; an electromagnet with the embossing point connected to an arm traveled over the disk; and any signals given through the magnets were embossed on the disk of paper. If this disc was removed from the machine and put on a similar machine provided with a contact point, the embossed record would cause the signals to be repeated into another wire. The ordinary speed of telegraphic signals is thirty-five to forty words a minute; but with this machine several hundred words were possible."
Electrification
William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone developed a telegraph around 1838-40. In 1840 Wheatstone was using a magneto that he developed to power the telegraph. Wheatstone and Cooke made an important improvement in electrical generation by using a battery-powered electromagnet in place of a permanent magnet, which they patented in 1845. The self-excited magnetic field dynamo did away with the battery to power electromagnets. This type of dynamo was made by several people in 1866.
Electrical telegraph
The first commercial electrical telegraph, was the Cooke and Wheatstone telegraph. A demonstration four-needle system was installed on the Euston to Camden Town section of Robert Stephenson's London and Birmingham Railway in 1837 for signalling rope-hauling of locomotives. It was rejected in favour of pneumatic whistles. Cooke and Wheatstone had their first commercial success with a system installed on the Great Western Railway over the from Paddington station to West Drayton in 1838. This was a five-needle, six-wire system. This system suffered from failing insulation on the underground cables. When the line was extended to Slough in 1843, the telegraph was converted to a one-needle, two-wire system with uninsulated wires on poles. The one-needle telegraph proved highly successful on British railways, and 15,000 sets were still in use at the end of the nineteenth century. Some remained in service in the 1930s. The Electric Telegraph Company, the world's first public telegraphy company was formed in 1845 by financier John Lewis Ricardo and Cooke.
Telecommunication
A revolution in wireless communication began in the first decade of the 20th century with the pioneering developments in radio communications by Guglielmo Marconi, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1909, and other notable pioneering inventors and developers in the field of electrical and electronic telecommunications. These included Charles Wheatstone and Samuel Morse (inventors of the telegraph), Alexander Graham Bell (inventor of the telephone), Edwin Armstrong and Lee de Forest (inventors of radio), as well as Vladimir K. Zworykin, John Logie Baird and Philo Farnsworth (some of the inventors of television).
Giovanni Caselli
Father Giovanni Caselli (8 June 1815 – 25 April 1891) was an Italian physicist, inventor and priest. He is the inventor of the pantelegraph (a.k.a. Universal Telegraph or "all-purpose telegraph"), the predecessor of the modern fax machine. The world's first practical operating facsimile machine ("fax") system put into use was by Caselli.
Charles Sumner Tainter
In 1886, he married Lila R. Munro, and over the next years worked in Washington, perfecting his graphophone and founding a company trying to market the Graphophone as a dictation machine: the first Dictaphone. In 1887 Tainter invented the helically wound paper tube as an improved graphophone cylinder. This design was light and strong, and came to be widely used in applications far removed from its original intent, such as mailing tubes and product containers.
Semaphore telegraph
The word "semaphore" was coined in 1801 by the French inventor of the semaphore line itself, Claude Chappe. He composed it from the Greek elements σῆμα (sêma, "sign"); and from φορός (phorós, "carrying"), or φορά (phorá, "a carrying") from φέρειν (phérein, "to bear"). Chappe also coined the word "tachygraph", meaning "fast writer". However, the French Army preferred to call Chappe's semaphore system the "telegraph", meaning "far writer", which was coined by French statesman André François Miot de Mélito. The word "semaphoric" was first printed in English in 1808: "The newly constructed Semaphoric telegraphs", referring to the destruction of telegraphs in France. The word "semaphore" was first printed in English in 1816: "The improved Semaphore has been erected on the top of the Admiralty", referring to the installation of a simpler telegraph invented by Sir Home Popham. Semaphore telegraphs are also called "optical telegraphs", "shutter telegraph chains", "Chappe telegraphs" or "Napoleonic semaphore".
Quadruplex telegraph
The technology was invented by American inventor Thomas Edison, who sold the rights to Western Union in 1874 for the sum of $10,000.
Electrical telegraph
Royal Earl House developed and patented a letter-printing telegraph system in 1846 which employed an alphabetic keyboard for the transmitter and automatically printed the letters on paper at the receiver, and followed this up with a steam-powered version in 1852. Advocates of printing telegraphy said it would eliminate Morse operators' errors. The House machine was used on four main American telegraph lines by 1852. The speed of the House machine was announced as 2600 words an hour.
David Edward Hughes invented the printing telegraph in 1855; it used a keyboard of 26 keys for the alphabet and a spinning type wheel that determined the letter being transmitted by the length of time that had elapsed since the previous transmission. The system allowed for automatic recording on the receiving end. The system was very stable and accurate and became accepted around the world.
Compagnie générale de la télégraphie sans fil
From the mid-19th century the world was connected with an increasingly dense network of telegraph wires and submarine cables.
In 1887 Heinrich Hertz of Germany conclusively proved the existence of electromagnetic waves.
Alexander Stepanovich Popov of Russia developed antennas to transmit and receive radio waves.
Scientists such as Édouard Branly and Nikola Tesla also contributed to development of the concepts.
In 1895 Guglielmo Marconi, a student at the University of Bologna, invented wireless telegraphy.
In 1897 he founded the Wireless Telegraph & Signal Company in England.
Its subsidiary the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America was formed in the US in 1899.
The Telefunken company was created in Germany in 1903 as a joint venture of Siemens and AEG.
Jeremiah Pearson Hardy
Hardy was born in Pelham, New Hampshire but moved to Hampden, Maine, with his parents in 1811. He first studied painting in Boston under David Brown, and then in New York under Samuel F.B. Morse, who was also the inventor of the telegraph. By 1826 Hardy had moved to Bangor, then a booming lumber port, and stayed for the rest of his life, painting portraits of not only the local elite but Penobscot Indians, the black barber Abraham Hanson, and members of his own family.
Ticker tape
Although telegraphic printing systems were first invented by Royal Earl House in 1846, early models were fragile, required hand-cranked power, frequently went out of synchronization between sender and receiver, and did not become popular in widespread commercial use. David E. Hughes improved the printing telegraph design with clockwork weight power in 1856, and his design was further improved and became viable for commercial use when George M. Phelps devised a resynchronization system in 1858. The first stock price ticker system using a telegraphic printer was invented by Edward A. Calahan in 1863; he unveiled his device in New York City on November 15, 1867. Early versions of stock tickers provided the first mechanical means of conveying stock prices ("quotes"), over a long distance over telegraph wiring. In its infancy, the ticker used the same symbols as Morse code as a medium for conveying messages. One of the earliest practical stock ticker machines, the Universal Stock Ticker developed by Thomas Edison in 1869, used alphanumeric characters with a printing speed of approximately one character per second.
Hellschreiber
The Hellschreiber, Feldhellschreiber or Typenbildfeldfernschreiber (also Hell-Schreiber named after its inventor Rudolf Hell) is a facsimile-based teleprinter invented by Rudolf Hell. Compared to contemporary teleprinters that were based on typewriter systems and were mechanically complex and expensive, the Hellschreiber was much simpler and more robust, with only two moving parts. It has the added advantage of being capable of providing intelligible communication even over very poor quality radio or cable links, where voice or other teledata would be unintelligible.
Printing telegraph
Teleprinter
Alfred Vail
Alfred Lewis Vail (September 25, 1807 – January 18, 1859) was an American machinist and inventor. Along with Samuel Morse, Vail was central in developing and commercializing American telegraphy between 1837 and 1844.
Printing telegraph
The printing telegraph was invented by Royal Earl House in 1846. House's equipment could transmit around 40 instantly readable words per minute, but was difficult to manufacture in bulk. The printer could copy and print out up to 2,000 words per hour. This invention was first put in operation and exhibited at the Mechanics Institute in New York in 1844.
John P. Kennedy
While serving in the United States Congress, John Pendleton Kennedy was the primary and decisive force in Congress in securing 30,000 dollars (an enormous sum at the time) for testing Samuel Morse's telegraph communications system. This was the first electronic means of long distance communication in human history. The government tests corroborated Morse's invention and led to federal adoption of the technology and the subsequent establishment of the American telegraph communications system, which revolutionized communications and the economic development of the United States. Federal acceptance of the telegraph had a major impact on Abraham Lincoln's management of the Civil War as well.
Siemens family
Werner Siemens, a former artillery and engineering officer in the Prussian army, invented a telegraph that used a needle to point to the right letter, instead of using Morse code. Based on this invention, he founded the company "Telegraphen-Bauanstalt von Siemens & Halske" on 1 October 1847, with the company taking occupation of its workshop on 12 October. His business partner Johann Georg Halske, a master mechanic, was particularly involved in the construction and design of electrical equipment such as the press which enabled wires to be insulated with a seamless coat of gutta-percha, the pointer telegraph, the morse telegraph and measuring instruments. The company was internationalised soon after its founding. One brother of Werner represented him in England (Sir William Siemens) and another in St.Petersburg, Russia (Carl von Siemens), each earning recognition. In 1867 Mr Halske withdrew from the company because his more conservative views on company policy diverged from those of the rather venturous Siemens brothers.
Georges-Louis Le Sage
In 1774 he realised an early electric telegraph. The telegraph had a separate wire for each of the 26 letters of the alphabet and its range was only between two rooms of his home.
Stock market data systems
In 1863 Edward A. Calahan of the American Telegraph Company invented a stock telegraph printing instrument which allowed data on stocks, bonds, and commodities to be sent directly from exchanges to broker offices around the country. It printed the data on wide paper tape wound on large reels. The sound it made while printing earned it the name "stock ticker". Other inventors improved on this device, and ultimately Thomas Edison patented a "universal stock ticker", selling over 5,000 in the late 19th century.
Teleprinter
In 1835 Samuel Morse devised a recording telegraph, and Morse code was born.
Electrical telegraph
By this point reception had been automated, but the speed and accuracy of the transmission was still limited to the skill of the human operator. The first practical automated system was patented by Charles Wheatstone, the original inventor of the telegraph. The message (in Morse code) was typed onto a piece of perforated tape using a keyboard-like device called the 'Stick Punch'. The transmitter automatically ran the tape through and transmitted the message at the then exceptionally high speed of 70 words per minute.
History of telecommunication
The first working telegraph was built by Francis Ronalds in 1816 and used static electricity.
History of electrochemistry
In 1809, Samuel Thomas von Soemmering developed the first telegraph. He used a device with 26 wires (1 wire for each letter of the German alphabet) terminating in a container of acid. At the sending station, a key, which completed a circuit with a battery, was connected as required to each of the line wires. The passage of current caused the acid to decompose chemically, and the message was read by observing at which of the terminals the bubbles of gas appeared. This is how he was able to send messages, one letter at a time.
Printing telegraph
Printing Telegraphs were quite temperamental and suffered frequent breakdowns. Transmission speed was also much slower than the Morse system. The complexity of the original House device meant that production was limited. An improved version was designed by George Phelps. The Globotype was invented by David McCallum as a response to problems with the printing telegraph.
Samuel F.B. Morse School
The Samuel F.B. Morse School at 2418 Sarah Street in the South Side Flats neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was built in 1874. It was named in honor of Samuel Morse, who is commonly called the inventor of the telegraph. Today, it is an apartment building known as "Morse Gardens".
Semaphore telegraph
At the same time as Chappe, the Swedish inventor Abraham Niclas Edelcrantz experimented with the optical telegraph in Sweden. In 1794 he inaugurated his telegraph with a poem dedicated to the Swedish King on his birthday. The message went from the Palace in Stockholm to the King at Drottningholm. Edelcrantz eventually developed his own system which was quite different from its French counterpart and nearly twice as fast. The system was based on ten collapsible iron shutters. The various positions of the shutters formed combinations of numbers which were translated into letters, words or phrases via codebooks. The telegraph network consisted of telegraph stations positioned at about from one another.
Soon telegraph circuits linking castles and fortresses in the neighbourhood of Stockholm were set up and the system was extended to Grisslehamn and Åland. Subsequently, telegraph circuits were introduced between Gothenburg and Marstrand, at Helsingborg and between Karlskrona and its fortresses. Sweden was the second country in the world, after France, to introduce an optical telegraph network. The Swedish optical telegraph network was restricted to the archipelagoes of Stockholm, Gothenburg and Karlskrona. Like its French counterpart, it was mainly used for military purposes.
Timeline of United States inventions (before 1890)
The telautograph, an analog precursor to the modern fax machine, transmits electrical impulses recorded by potentiometers at the sending station to stepping motors attached to a pen at the receiving station, thus reproducing at the receiving station a drawing or signature made by sender. It was the first such device to transmit drawings to a stationary sheet of paper. The telautograph's invention is attributed to Elisha Gray, who patented it in 1888.
O'Reilly v. Morse
While the case concerned a number of other issues, such as whether Morse was indeed first to invent the telegraph, the issue of lasting importance concerned Morse's eighth claim, which was directed to a method of communicating intelligible information to any distance by means of exploiting the electro-magnetic force:
Eighth. I do not propose to limit myself to the specific machinery or parts of machinery described in the foregoing specification and claims; the essence of my invention being the use of the motive power of the electric or galvanic current, which I call electro-magnetism, however developed for marking or printing intelligible characters, signs, or letters, at any distances, being a new application of that power of which I claim to be the first inventor or discoverer.
As Justice Taney, speaking for the majority of the Court, explained it, "He claims the exclusive right to every improvement where the motive power is the electric or galvanic current, and the result is the marking or printing intelligible characters, signs, or letters at a distance." Although "it required the highest order of mechanical skill to execute and adjust the nice and delicate work necessary to put the telegraph into operation," Morse did not "invent" what he claimed: "Professor Morse has not discovered that the electric or galvanic current will always print at a distance, no matter what may be the form of the machinery or mechanical contrivances through which it passes." Morse did not enable others to do more than make the repeater system that he described. Other persons may discover and disclose to the public other ways to use electromagnetic force to transmit messages, and the other ways may be cheaper or work better. "In fine, he claims an exclusive right to use a manner and process which he has not described and indeed had not invented, and therefore could not describe when he obtained his patent. The court is of opinion that the claim is too broad, and not warranted by law."
Henry Leavitt Ellsworth
In today's world Ellsworth would be described as an early technology adapter. He became so interested, for instance, in a new-fangled invention by Samuel Morse called the telegraph that Ellsworth petitioned Congress for a $30,000 grant to test the possibilities of the technology.
Wireless telegraphy
The original telegraph lines used two wires between the two stations to form a complete electrical circuit or "loop". In 1837, however, Carl August von Steinheil of Munich, Germany, found that by connecting one leg of the apparatus at each station to metal plates buried in the ground, he could eliminate one wire and use a single wire for telegraphic communication. This led to speculation that it might be possible to eliminate both wires and therefore transmit telegraph signals through the ground without any wires connecting the stations. Other attempts were made to send the electric current through bodies of water, in order to span rivers, for example. Prominent experimenters along these lines included Samuel F. B. Morse in the United States and James Bowman Lindsay in Great Britain, who in August 1854, was able to demonstrate transmission across a mill dam at a distance of .
Teleprinter
In 1855, David Edward Hughes introduced an improved machine built on the work of Royal Earl House. In less than two years, a number of small telegraph companies, including Western Union in early stages of development, united to form one large corporation – Western Union Telegraph Co. – to carry on the business of telegraphy on the Hughes system.
Syphon recorder
The syphon or siphon recorder is an obsolete electromechanical device used as a receiver for submarine telegraph cables invented by William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin in 1867. It automatically records an incoming telegraph message as a wiggling ink line on a roll of paper tape. Later a trained telegrapher would read the tape, translating the pulses representing the "dots" and "dashes" of the Morse code to characters of the text message.
Claude Chappe
Chappe first called his invention the "tachygraph", meaning "fast writer". However, the Army preferred to use the word "telegraph", meaning "far writer", which was coined by French statesman André François Miot de Mélito. Today, in order to distinguish it from subsequent telegraph systems, the French name for Chappe's semaphore telegraph system is named after him, and thus is known as a "". Alternatively, Chappe coined the phrase "semaphore", from the Greek elements σῆμα (sêma, "sign"); and from φορός (phorós, "carrying"), or φορά (phorá, "a carrying") from φέρειν (phérein, "to bear").
Samuel Morse
Samuel Finley Breese Morse, OIC (April 27, 1791 – April 2, 1872) was an American painter and inventor. After having established his reputation as a portrait painter, in his middle age Morse contributed to the invention of a single-wire telegraph system based on European telegraphs. He was a co-developer of the Morse code and helped to develop the commercial use of telegraphy.
Wireless telegraphy
Radiotelegraphy was the first means of radio communication; the first practical radio transmitters and receivers invented in 1894-5 by Guglielmo Marconi used radiotelegraphy. It continued to be the only type of radio transmission during the first three decades of radio, called the "wireless telegraphy era" up until World War I, when the development of amplitude modulation (AM) radiotelephony allowed sound (audio) to be transmitted by radio. In radiotelegraphy, information is transmitted by pulses of radio waves of two different lengths called "dots" and "dashes", which spell out text messages, usually in Morse code. In a manual system, the sending operator taps on a switch called a telegraph key which turns the transmitter on and off, producing the pulses of radio waves. At the receiver the pulses are audible in the receiver's speaker as beeps, which are translated back to text by an operator who knows Morse code.
Arthur Korn
Arthur Korn (May 20, 1870, Breslau, Germany – December 21/December 22, 1945, Jersey City, New Jersey) was a German physicist, mathematician and inventor. He was involved in the development of the fax machine, specifically the transmission of photographs or telephotography, known as the Bildtelegraph, related to early attempts at developing a practical mechanical television system.
Royal Earl House
Royal Earl House (9 September 181425 February 1895) was the inventor of the first printing telegraph, which is now kept in the Smithsonian Institution. His nephew Henry Alonzo House is also a noted early American inventor.
Phonograph
Thomas Alva Edison conceived the principle of recording and reproducing sound between May and July 1877 as a byproduct of his efforts to "play back" recorded telegraph messages and to automate speech sounds for transmission by telephone.
He announced his invention of the first "phonograph", a device for recording and replaying sound, on November 21, 1877 (early reports appear in Scientific American and several newspapers in the beginning of November, and an even earlier announcement of Edison working on a 'talking-machine' can be found in the Chicago Daily Tribune on May 9), and he demonstrated the device for the first time on November 29 (it was patented on February 19, 1878 as US Patent 200,521). "In December, 1877, a young man came into the office of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, and placed before the editors a small, simple machine about which very few preliminary remarks were offered. The visitor without any ceremony whatever turned the crank, and to the astonishment of all present the machine said: "Good morning. How do you do? How do you like the phonograph?" The machine thus spoke for itself, and made known the fact that it was the phonograph..."
Technological and industrial history of the United States
The ability to quickly transmit information over long distances would prove to have an enormous impact on many diverse fields like journalism, banking, and diplomacy. Between 1837 and 1844, Samuel F.B. Morse and Alfred Vail developed a transmitter that could send "short" or "long" electric currents which would move an electromagnetic receiver to record the signal as dots and dashes. Morse established the first telegraph line (between Baltimore and Washington D.C.) in 1844 and by 1849 almost every state east of the Mississippi had telegraph service. Between 1850 and 1865, the telegraph business became progressively more consolidated and the 1866 incorporation of Western Union emerged with a near-monopoly over 22,000 telegraph offices and of cable throughout the country. The telegraph was used to dispatch news from the fronts of the Mexican–American War, coordinate Union troop movements during the Civil War, relay stock and commodity prices and orders between markets on ticker tape, and conduct diplomatic negotiations after the Transatlantic telegraph cable was laid in 1866.