From Cave Paintings to the Internet A Chronological and Thematic Database on the History of Information and Media Telegraph Timeline

According to Polybius, a Greek historian of the Hellenistic period, Aeneas Tacticus, one of the earliest Greek writers on the art of war, invented the hydraulic telegraph about this time. It was a semaphore system used during the First Punic War to send messages between Sicily and Carthage.

"The system involved identical containers on separate hills; each container would be filled with water, and a vertical rod floated within. The rods were inscribed with various predetermined codes.

"To send a message, the sending operator would use a torch to signal the receiving operator; once the two were synchronized, they would simultaneously open the spigots at the bottom of their containers. Water would drain out until the water level reached the desired code, at which point the sender would lower his torch, and the operators would simultaneously close their spigots."

Claude Chappe his brother send the first transmission over their optical telegraph: “si vous reussissez, vous serez bientôt couvert de gloire” (If you succeed, you will soon bask in glory).

The initial experimental line ran between Brulon and Parce, a distance of ten miles (16 km).

Having been appointed Ingénieur-Télégraphiste and charged with establishing a line of stations between Paris and Lille, a distance of 230 kilometres (about 143 miles), Claude Chappe succeeds in completing his first optical telegraph, or semaphore telegraph. 

The Chappe telegraph was used to carry dispatches for the war between France and Austria, and communicated  news of a French capture of Condé-sur-l'Escaut from the Austrians less than an hour after it occurred.

"The first symbol of a message to Lille would pass through 15 stations in only nine minutes. The speed of the line varied with the weather, but the line to Lille typically transferred 36 symbols, a complete message, in about 32 minutes. Paris to Strasbourg with 50 stations was the next line and others followed soon after."

Chappe's system was the first widely adopted system to transmit messages overland faster than a messager or horseback can carry a message over a good road system. That speed had remained essentially fixed since Roman times. (See Reading 5.1.)

The Chappe optical telegraph eventually covered France with "a network of 556 stations stretching a total distance of 4,800 kilometres." It was be used for military and national communications until the 1850s.

"By 1824, the Chappe brothers were promoting the semaphore lines for commercial use, especially to transmit the costs of commodities. Napoleon Bonaparte saw the military advantage in being able to transmit information between locations, and carried a portable semaphore with his headquarters. This allowed him to coordinate forces and logistics over longer distances than any other army of his time. However because stations had to be within sight of each other, and because the efficient operation of the network required well trained and disciplined operators, the costs of administration and wages were a continuous source of financial difficulties."

Francis Ronalds builds the first working electric telegraph.

This was the first "electric" medium for communication.

Samuel F. B. Morse invents a practical form of electromagnetic telegraph using an early version of his “Morse code.” (See Reading 5.2.)

Samuel F. B. Morse transmits the first message on a United States experimental telegraph line (Washington to Baltimore) using the “Morse code” that will become standard in the United States and Canada. The message, taken from the Bible, Numbers 23:23, and recorded on a paper tape, had been suggested to Morse by Annie Ellworth, the young daughter of a friend. It was “What hath God wrought?”

The Morse Code became the first widely used data code.

William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone perfect a single-needle telegraph apparatus, soon adopted throughout England.

Physicist Joseph Henry, first Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution (founded in 1846), and a pioneer in telegraphic research, realizes that storms in the United States generally move from west to east.

Henry wrote in the Smithsonian's 1847 annual report that "the extended lines of telegraph will furnish a ready means of warning the more northern and eastern observers to be on the watch for the first appearance of an advancing storm."

By 1849, Henry worked out an arrangement with a number of telegraph companies to allow free transmission of local weather data to the Smithsonian. He proposed to supply "the most important stations" with barometers and thermometers. By the end of the 1849 150 volunteers throughout the United States reported weather observations to the Smithsonian regularly by telegraph. This became the basis for the first national weather service where weather observations from distant points could be "rapidly" collected, plotted and analyzed at one location -- the beginnings of "surface weather analysis".

John and Jacob Brett lay the first telegraph cable between England and France.

After a French fisherman cut the cable, thinking it was a new kind of seaweed, they installed an armored cable in 1851 that lasted for many years.

Paul Julius Reuter founds the Reuters news agency in London using telegraph lines, and a fleet of carrier pigeons that grows to exceed 200.

Reuter opened an office in London’s financial center close to the main telegraph offices. He transmitted stock market quotations and news between London and Paris over the new Dover-Calais submarine telegraph cable, using his "telegraph expertise."

Paris and London are connected by telegraph.

Cyrus Field organizes the New York, Newfoundland, and London Electric Telegraph Company with the intention of laying an Atlantic Cable.

David Edward Hughes invents the first perfected mechanism for printing telegraph messages, using a keyboard in which each key causes the corresponding letter to be printed at a distant receiver.

Hughes's printing mechanism worked something like a "golfball" typewriter, but it was produced before the typewriter was invented.

The Atlantic Telegraph Company is formed by Cyrus Field in the United States and Charles Bright, John Brett, and Jacob Brett in England.

The first attempt to lay the Atlantic Cable using the American sailing ship Niagara and the British sailing ship Agamemnon fails.

Reuters opens offices all over Europe, following telegraph lines.

The second attempt to lay the first Atlantic Cable using the American sailing ship Niagara and the British sailing ship Agamemnon initially succeeds.

Communication is established on the Atlantic Cable but it fails within three weeks.

Telegraph lines connect New York and San Francisco.

Using the Great Eastern steamship, the attempt to lay the second Atlantic Cable takes place.

The cable snapped after twelve hundred miles.

The Great Eastern lays the third and successful Atlantic Cable, connecting the cable at Heart’s Content, a fishing village in Newfoundland.

Communication by electric telegraph between Europe and America was finally established. The first message sent over the cable was “A treaty of peace has been signed between Austria and Prussia."

9,158,000,000 telegraph messages are sent in the United States.

British telegraph systems are nationalized.

The New York Tribune publishes a series of 36 relief blocks on its front page showing the targets at an International Rifle Match in Dublin, Ireland.

The blocks were produced in New York from target coordinates transmitted over the Atlantic telegraph. These were the first significant series of illustrations published in a daily newspaper.

The telegraph now connects most of the civilized world.

William D. Weaver publishes Catalogue of the Wheeler Gift of Books, Pamphlets, and Periodicals in the Library of the American Institute of Engineers. With Introduction, Descriptive and Critical Notes by Brother Potamian.

This 2-volume work described primarily the library of Latimer Clark, an electrical engineer and inventor who, in partnership with Sir Charles Tilson Bright, was responsible for laying many of the first submarine telegraphic cables. While pursuing a remarkably successful and creative scientific and entrepeneurial career, Clark also found time to build one of the most complete collections ever formed of early books and manuscripts on the history of electricity and magnetism, including virtually every known publication in English on these subjects prior to 1886.

In 1901 Clark's library was purchased by the American engineer, Schulyer Skaats Wheeler, and donated by him to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers in New York. The extensively annotated and illustrated catalogue of the collection of 5,966 items, edited by William Weaver and annotated by Brother Potamian, was financed by Andrew Carnegie. Though the title page of the catalogue takes no notice of it, a high percentage of the items in Clark's library, particularly the final 2000 items, concern telegraphy.

♦ Problematic Management of the Latimer Clark Library in the Twentieth Century:

"In 1913 the Engineering Societies Library was established in New York City, a joint venture of the AIEE, the ASME (Mechanical Engineers), and the AIME (Mining Engineers), funded by a $1.5 million gift from Andrew Carnegie. The AIEE’s main contribution to the Library was the Wheeler Gift Collection. For many years the collection was accessible according to the terms above, but in the 1990s the ESL decided that it could no longer maintain its Manhattan premises and closed the library there.

"By that time the Wheeler Gift Collection had been merged with other works at the library, and had suffered from neglect over the years, much of the material being kept in poor physical conditions. A 1985 survey of the collection showed about 9% (532 items) were missing, and it seems unlikely that the situation improved in the following ten years, prior to the dispersion of the collection.

"Constrained by the terms of the Gift to keep the collection in New York City, the ESL boxed up whatever could be definitely identified as part of the original Wheeler Gift and in 1995 sent 205 cartons of books and papers to the Humanities and Social Sciences division of the New York Public Library at 42nd Street. The rest of the collection, including items in the 1909 catalog that were part of the Wheeler Gift but did not have identifying labels, went to Linda Hall Library in Kansas City, MO"(http://atlantic-cable.com/CablePioneers/LatimerClark.htm, accessed 07-31-2009).

Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace (2001) no. 211.

George Stibitz's Complex Number Calculator, an electromechanical relay machine located in New York, is demonstrated via a remote teletype terminal at the American Mathematical Association Meeting in Dartmouth, New Hampshire.

Norbert Wiener and John Mauchly spent a lot of time experimenting with the system. This was the first demonstration of remote computing.

Use of telegraphy peaks in the United States with the transmission of "236,169,000,000" messages during this year.