Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
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.