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Who Really Invented The Telegraph?
Fat Boy unslim writes "It's been 250 years since the publication of a paper describing the theory behind sending messages down a wire using electricity. Unfortunately, no one knows who wrote it." If you thought the answer was as simple as "Morse," this article may come as a surprise.
The article was next to useless. They do know who wrote the first paper about "how electricity could be applied to a wire to create a communication device", they even name the person (CM Renfrew). From that, they go on to say that because they know nothing other then how the person signed their name, they do not know who wrote the paper, and then they follow up by saying that said paper lead to the invention of the internet, and the mobile phone.
Can anyone provide more information on whether or not The Scots Magazine was widely distributed? Did the people who later moved CM Renfews ideas beyond the theoretical ever reference his work?
I suspect the question of "who invented this first" is often the wrong one to ask. It's natural to seek a simple, contained explanation for these things, but in reality almost anything that's more than trivial has a longer history to follow than just the inspiration of one person (or intelligence).
For instance just as another example, the question of who invented the toaster seems like it might have a short answer, but the truth is that this pinnacle of culinary automation is the result of thousands of years of refinement.
I certainly don't want to play down the importance of any one individual in inventing toasters or telegraphs, but that also means we can't play down all the others before them. So instead we might ask "what process was involved in creating X". The answer will probably be more interesting too.
Could I interest anyone in some toast?
Edison wasn't a thief, but he certaintly wasn't a "creator." He was an "adaptor." He took other people's ideas that were half-baked and unfinished and actually made them work. The ancient Greeks created lots of stuff, but the Romans perfected many of them.
It wasn't an American.
Couldn't have been, either. The U.S. didn't exist in 1753. I think it's more remarkable that this article predated the battery... this guy was really thinking ahead of his time.
The true relevance can be seen from this quote
because other scientists experimenting with electricity at the time could not see any use for it in communications.
In other words, this CM was the first to imagine and publish this application for electricity. It was a great leap of intuitiveness. I do not believe it was, however, the telegraph, which needed other leaps of intuitiveness.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
After seeing so many of these "who's on first" discussions break down into unresolvable claims and counter claims, usually along nationalistic lines, we start to see that many 'inventions' actually look like state of the art 'waves' involving MANY, MANY people working in varying degress of interinvolvment, and that any one particular person just bob's up and down on the wave crest - if that one person wasn't there at the right place at the right time any one of the others could have easily taken his or her place. You might as well be saying someting like "Neil Armstrong invented moon walking!" which overlooks the talents and dedicated efforts of a huge number of people over a very long time, from the ancient Chinese to Robert Goddard to Werner Von Braun and a large cast of others who helped put him there.
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What the hell does the second sentence have to do with the first? Columbus was a Spaniard, not an American (as there were no "Americans" at the time).
Besides, the first person to "discover" America was wandered over a land bridge from eastern Siberia some 10,000 - 15,000 years ago.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
There is such a thing as multiple discovery. The reason that Columbus is given credit for discovering the New World is because his discovery was the historically significant one. The response to previous discoveries of America was minor and historically unimportant; none of those other travelers started significant, long lasting communication between the New and Old World. That's why Columbus was able to re-discover it independently. The previous discoverers' knowledge quickly died out. Columbus's voyage, OTOH, quickly lead to large scale trips between Europe and America, so that the two of them became socially, politically, and economically tied together. After Columbus, you couldn't discover America again because knowledge of it was too widespread for it to count as a discovery.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Try to imagine a history text in which all of the names have been replaced with labels like "person x". Putting names to the people who made history is important for all sorts of reasons. Here are some of them:
(1) Reading history would be tedious if it ceased to be about particular individuals.
(2) Historians need to know identities so that they can make connections. Was CM a woman, poor, rich, a prolific scientist, or someone who had one good idea? What else did CM do in life? We will not know until we identify the person.
(3) Honouring the dead may not serve a useful purpose but it is the right thing to do. What sort of person goes through life thinking "gee its nice that I enjoy all these benefits produced by people in the past, but I really couldn't give toss about the people who produced them, and certainly won't waste my time even trying to remember their names, let alone anything else about them". If you have children do you want them to remember that they had parents, and never mind who they were, or do you want them to remember you?
These arguments about who invented what might seem tedious, but they arise because we value the people who have contributed to the world that we live in. The day we stop having arguments like this is the day we stop carring about those people.
Morse didn't invent the telegraph. He invented the Morse Code. Anyone who ever read a child's biography of Morse knows that. To claim anyone believed otherwise is the silliest form of revisionism ever. Of course if you go "Jaywalking" you can find people who believe anything, but to be a real "revisionist historian" you ought to revise a misunderstanding a bit more widespread than this.