The invention of the telegraph

Thèmes abordés

Invention, telegraph, information transmission, communication, coded messages, Samuel Morse

Résumé du document

Today, I'm going to tell you more about the invention of the telegraph.

For ages, people has always tried to find ways to communicate. The point was to accelerate the information transmission to remote places. The first methods as the distance increased were probably the human shout, then the mail with horse or pigeons. Today, we have the telephone and the Internet. But between these two moments, multiple other media have been used.

Extraits

[...] The telegraph Today, I'm going to tell you more about the invention of the telegraph. For ages, people has always tried to find ways to communicate. The point was to accelerate the information transmission to remote places. The first methods as the distance increased were probably the human shout, then the mail with horse or pigeons. Today, we have the telephone and the Internet. But between these two moments, multiple other media have been used. The communication medium, which allowed to transmit information much faster, was the telegraph. [...]

[...] This inventor also devised a very simple code combining short and long signals : the Morse code. This code allowed the transcription of a series of dots and dashes representing the letters of the alphabet, the numbers and the common punctuation. Each dot corresponded to a short impulse and each dash to a long impulse. The invention, up to there reserved for the government, was made available to the public. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the telephone stopped the use of this communication medium. [...]

[...] The operator observed the signals emitted by the previous relay and retransmitted it to the next one. This transmission system allowed to transmit messages from Paris to Marseilles in only a few hours, by using a code to accelerate the transmission and guarantee a certain confidentiality. However, this system had two major drawbacks : it couldn't be used nightly or when the weather showed lack of visibility (rain or fog). Besides everybody could see the messages. Fifty years later, the American Samuel Morse developed the first electric telegraph. [...]