No. 1393: Inventing the Telegraph

Today, we look at ninety years of electric
telegraphy before Morse. The University of
Houston’s College of Engineering presents this
series about the machines that make our
civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity
created them.

Historians of technology are cautious
about naming the first person to invent anything,
because someone else has always thought up at least
a part of it first. Great ideas always flow from
more than one inventive mind, and the telegraph is
no exception. The noted American painter Samuel F.
B. Morse put together a telegraph system in 1837.
But the most original part of that system was the
code that bears his name.

The seed for the electric telegraph had been sown
ninety years earlier. In 1747 an Englishman named
William Watson showed how to send
electrostatically-generated signals long distances
through a wire, with the circuit completed through
the earth. Seven years later an anonymous writer
published an article in the Scots Magazine
showing how to send messages with an array of
twenty-six such wires (one for each letter of the
alphabet.) Various multiple-wire systems were built
in Switzerland, France, and Spain before 1800.

The idea of sending all the letters on a single
wire, and using a code to distinguish them, was
introduced about sixty years before Morse by the
French inventor LeSage. Still, multiple-wire
systems lingered for several more decades.

The whole business got a big boost with the
invention of the storage battery. Battery power let
people drive all kinds of output signals — like
magnets and marks on litmus paper. Between 1800 and
Morse’s work, many telegraph systems were
developed, and many were not bad.

So how did Morse get all the credit? Well, for one
thing, since he was American, he’s the only
telegraph inventor that American schools tell
children about. British children learn about the
earlier system of Cooke and Wheatstone. But two
other things were also important: Morse’s code was
the one that caught on. And, although few features
of Morse’s system were unique, taken together they
were the right arrangement for a commercial
success.

Then, too, Morse was involved in a remarkable range
of self-expressive activities — art, invention,
politics, photography — the list goes on. He was
combative, and he got into controversies in all
those fields. When it came to fighting for
telegraph patent priority, he was very effective.
In 1854 he won a Supreme Court decision that gave
him most of the telegraph royalties. (To his
credit, he died a wealthy philanthropist.)

But the idea of the telegraph came from that
anonymous writer in 1753, after Watson showed how
to close a circuit through the ground. The person
who can most nearly be called the inventor of the
telegraph was someone having fun dreaming up a new
idea. That says volumes about the nature of
invention. We actually got the telegraph from an
anonymous inventor whose only reward was knowing
that he (or she) had given a great idea away to the
world.

I’m John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we’re interested in the way inventive minds
work.

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