The First Instantaneous
Communications System
Every day a couple of former colleagues of mine, both
expatriate Canadians (one in Tokyo, the other in New York), share a ritual: they listen to
CBC Radio news on the Internet. Whenever I tell someone that, I usually receive an answer
something like "that's really interesting. Did you watch the game last night?"
So many seemingly impossible things have become commonplace in recent years that we've
lost some of our ability to be amazed.
When I was a kid at the middle of the last century, people
used to say that the previous 50 years had seen more technical advances than the 1000 that
had gone before, or perhaps more than in all of history prior to the 20th Century. They
were talking about the development of powered flight, of radio and movies and television,
of the ubiquity of telephones and automobiles, and they were probably not wrong.
But the second half of the century made the earlier 50
years seem like the Middle Ages in comparison. Look around the room you are sitting in and
count the things that wouldn't have been there in 1950: television set; VCR;
satellite/cable box; cassette deck; CD player; DVD player; FM tuner; digital clock;
calculator; computer; microwave oven; cordless phone; cell phone.
All of these use recent technology, but in reality they
just let us do a little more easily what we've always done. A microwave oven cooks in a
new way, but it's still cooking. We can walk around with our cell phones, but we're just
making a phone call, as we've always done. Jets get us places faster than before, but
people have always traveled. Rarely has a technological advance fundamentally changed the
way the world works.
There's one notable exception: the telegraph.
Prior to the middle of the 19th Century, the fastest you
could get a message to someone at a distance was the speed at which a person could carry
it. There were curiosities such as smoke signals and carrier pigeons, which sped things up
somewhat under very specialized conditions, but for the most part you either had to carry
a message yourself or give it to someone else to deliver. On land, the maximum speed was
that of the horse -- or series of horses -- you rode; at sea you were at the mercy of the
winds and the design of the vessel you sailed in.
That was the way it had always been, of course, and the way
the world was structured. Canada has provinces -- and the U.S. has states -- in part
because communications were so difficult that the British found it better to divide the
territories they ruled into small units, each with its own governor.
One of the most famous incidents created by this slowness
was the Battle of New Orleans, the last engagement in what North Americans call the War of
1812 (but which was really a minor sideshow in the much wider Napoleonic conflict). The
war was actually over when the battle was fought, and the various countries involved had
signed the treaty in Europe as part of the settlement of the bigger war, but word had not
yet reached the troops when the battle broke out.
By the early years of the 19th Century, there had been
quite a lot of interest in a new form of power: electricity. It was now known that it
could be conducted over fairly long distances by metal wires, and a number of
investigators were looking into a way that it could be harnessed to convey information.
Many of these were based on cables made up of bundles of wire, one for each letter,
although there were simpler methods as well.
In 1832, Samuel F. B. Morse, an artist by profession and
training but an electrical experimenter by avocation, figured out a scheme that could
convey information on a single wire, and by 1837 he had a prototype to demonstrate to the
U.S. Congress. The British are inclined to give as much credit for the invention to Sir
Charles Wheatstone, who patented a form of telegraph in the same year. But, although the
apparatus was important, it was Morse's alphabet of long and short pulses -- Morse Code --
that made the whole thing work.
By 1844, the first long-distance line had been built,
between Washington D.C and Baltimore, and over the next two decades North America was
crisscrossed by a network of telegraph lines that reached into virtually every town. There
was some urgency about this, as the telegraph was considered a vital safety tool by the
booming rail industry.
Today, the effect of this new system can hardly be
appreciated, but it was the first-ever form of instantaneous communication. For the first
time, a message generated in New York could be received in San Francisco within seconds.
The newspapers could now report on events across the country the day they happened.
By the 1860s, efforts were underway to join up the
continents by means of long cables under the oceans. This was no easy task, and the
earliest versions tended to break while being laid, or fail shortly thereafter. By the end
of the 1860s, the first permanent cable was in operation, between Ireland and
Newfoundland, and by the height of the cable era, the late 1920s, the world was girdled by
an astonishing 3500 separate undersea cables, stretching some 500,000 kilometers, or
300,000 miles.
This newfound ease of communication on land was a spur to
the developers trying to perfect radio, and early last century Guglielmo Marconi succeeded
in sending a radiotelegraph message across the Atlantic. From that point on, ships and
aircraft would be included in the growing web of instantaneous global communications; now,
no point on earth need be isolated.
Throughout, it was the distinctive dots and dashes of Morse
Code that were used, although there were slight variations. Operators learned to recognize
the letters by their rhythmic patterns, not by counting pulses, just as everybody
recognizes the "shave-and-a-haircut" cadence without hearing the words. To the
uninitiated, watching someone glean meaning from such incomprehensible clicks or beeps was
magic.
Terrestrial telegraph service was terminated in North
America several decades ago, in the face of competition from cheap telephone and fax
messages. The last official message was the same as Morse's first, on his original
Washington-Baltimore circuit: "What hath God wrought?"
But Morse Code was retained until surprisingly recently as
one of the official languages of radio telegraphy; all operators in ocean-going ships, for
instance, had to be able to handle Morse, in spite of whatever more sophisticated tracking
and warning devices they might have. But the last Morse distress call went out more about
eight years ago.
Morse is still very strong with amateur radio buffs, who
will probably never let it die. But as an official emergency language of the airwaves,
Morse Code died five years ago, in February 1999, with very little fanfare. At the time,
that seemed odd to me because, for my money, the telegraph represented the single biggest
communications breakthrough of all time. It served us well.
...Ian G. Masters
ian@mastersonaudio.com
|
