[GreenKeys] World's first telegraph message

[Richard Knoppow]

    Thank you so much for the bibliography. Amazon may be a good 
source for these.

On 5/23/2020 7:31 PM, Jim Haynes wrote:
> Well actually Morse didn't invent the Morse code either.  He 
> had proposed
> a code based on numbers, where you would have to look up in a 
> code book
> what numbers represented, until you had memorized it.  
> Invention of the
> code is usually attributed to Morse's assistant, Alfred Vail.  
> He being
> the one who went to a print shop and counted the pieces of type 
> in each
> compartment to determine the frequency of letters in the 
> language, and
> then assigned the shortest codes to the most frequent letters.
>
> But I think we have to cut Morse some slack.
>
> He realized you could make a telegraph based on 
> electromagnetism. He
> may have learned this on his return trip to the U.S. from France.
> Others had tried telegraphs based on static electricity, or on 
> electrical
> effects on chemicals.  Joseph Henry had already discovered 
> electromagnetism, but I don't believe he had carried the idea 
> forward
> to a system for transmitting information.
>
> Morse realized the system would have to operate over a single 
> wire.
> Anybody could invent a telegraph using 26 wires, and there were
> telegraphs in England using six wires, but that was not economical
> or sustainable over long distances.
>
> He knew that information had to be efficiently encoded for the 
> telegraph
> to be practical.  It wouldn't do if the process was so 
> cumbersome that
> a horse could outrun the message.
>
> Morse realized there was a market for the service - that people 
> would
> be willing to pay for rapid communication.  This may have come 
> to him
> from his work as an itinerant portrait painter, when postal 
> mail never
> caught up with him in his travels.  His wife died while he was 
> on one
> of these trips, and he didn't learn about it until he got home.
>
> With all due credit to the scientist Joseph Henry, I don't 
> believe he
> was thinking like an entreprenuer.
>
> Now there is the matter of Morse's name being on all the 
> patents, even
> for things that others like Alfred Vail had invented.  We have 
> to remember than in the 1840s the whole system of patents and 
> intellectual
> property and corporate invention was in a very rudimentary form.
> You didn't start a company, hire engineers, and require them to 
> assign
> their inventions to the company.  The business arrangements 
> were messy.
> So it was probably necessary to make Morse the owner of all the 
> patents
> to keep them from getting even more messy.
>
> The way Alfred Vail got into working with Morse was that the 
> Vail family
> owned an iron works, and if the telegraph succeeded Morse would 
> need
> a lot of iron wire, as well as money.  (Copper in those days 
> was costly
> and of poor strength, so was unsuitable for use as long 
> distance line
> wire.)
>
> I've read that Morse perhaps suffered from bipolar disorder, 
> and then
> it is stereotypical that artists are odd critters.  It was said 
> there
> were days when he was just bubbling over with enthusiasm, and 
> other
> days when he would hardly get out of bed.
>
> Some references:
>
> The Story of Telecommunications by George P. Oslin.  Oslin was the
> public relations man for Western Union and wrote the book when he
> was in his 90s after retiring.
>
> The Telegraph : a History of Morse's Invention and Its 
> Predecessors
> in the United States by Lewis Coe.  This book complements 
> Oslin's in
> that it appears to have been written from the view of Postal 
> Telegraph
> Co., Western Union's competitor until 1942.
>
> The American Telegrapher : A Social History by Edwin Gabler  
> This is
> basically about labor relations in the telegraph industry, but 
> includes
> wonderful stories about the lives and times of telegraphers.
>
> Old Wires and New Waves; The History of the Telegraph, 
> Telephone and
> Wireless by Alvin F. Harlow   Status of all the above from the 
> beginning
> until the late 1930s
>
> Lightning Man: The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse by Kenneth
> Silverman.  I haven't read this one yet.
>
> Jim W6JVE
>     ---
>
>     "Ya can argue all ya wanna, but it's dif'rent than it was."
>     "No it ain't! No it ain't!  But ya gotta know the territory."
>         Meredith Willson, The Music Man

-- 
Richard Knoppow
1oldlens1 at ix.netcom.com
WB6KBL