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.

Comments

Re:Morse invented the serial port :)

[rgmoore]

Morse certainly didn't invent the first electrical telegraph; he just invented the most practical one.

This is, of course, true of a lot of classic inventions. The person who is given popular credit for inventing them isn't necessarily somebody who built the thing from scratch, or even the first person who made one that really worked. It's usually the person who made the final few tweaks that pushed an invention from being an interesting curiosity or a minor but useful device into something that had widespread applicability. In many cases there's something of a tipping point. Until a key technological hurdle is crossed, the device is so impractical that nobody is willing to invest a lot of time, effort, and money into improving it. But when it crosses some threshold of practicality, it starts attracting capital investment that causes it to improve and spread into more and more applications, which draws more investment, and so on.

A classic case is James Watt and the steam engine. Steam engines had been in use long before Watt came along, but they were fuel hogs that were limited to use at coal mines where there was plenty of fuel just sitting around. Watt figured out a way of radically improving their efficiency (by using an external condenser) and thus pushed them from being an isolated curiosity to being a major industrial workhorse.

who invented anything?

[g4dget]

I think we should really stop being so obsessed with attributing inventions to individual people. Morse's combination of single wire and serial code was clearly very practical and made the telegraph successful. But if it hadn't been Morse, someone else would have done the same thing within a few years: all the general ideas had been around. On the other hand, while the insight that electricity can be used for long distance signaling is great, it in itself does not lead to a viable and practical telegraph system.

The same is true for most of the "great" inventions or ideas we celebrate. It is very rare indeed that a ground breaking new idea appears out of the mainstream, and when it does, it usually doesn't catch on until the mainstream catches up with it and someone else gets the credit.

who really invented the wireless ?

[Anonymous Coward]

In the same light "who invented wireless ?"

The most common answer would be Marconi.
This is completely incorrect.
The first wireless communication was invented by an Indian scientist named Jagadish Chandra Bose in 1899 (recognised now by IEEE). Of course he wasn't savvy enough to get patents and all and as in those times it was easy to suppress a scientific achievement from a thirld world colonial rules state. He is very respected in part of the country who studied science as a gift to mankind.

see some information here
http://www.minhas.net/culture/indianpeople/j cbose. htm
http://www.tuc.nrao.edu/~demerson/bose/bose.h tml

or otherwise google on "jagadish chandra bose".

As a further information he was the first scientist to discover and prove that plants have life.

An effort to claim Scots invented everything?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Scotsman story does contain an interesting error, claiming that the steam engine had not been invented in 1753. Truth was two Englishmen Thomas Savery and then Thomas Newcomen had built successful steam engines before 1753, which were being used to pump water out of mines.

In 1765 James Watt, a Scot, figgured out why Thomas Newcomen's steam engine didn't work well, and came up with a much better design.

Still, between telegraph and steam engine do we have a plot to claim Scotland is the source of all good things (ok, so it is often true, but...).

Re:Give societies their due

[Gumshoe]

Basically it followed the flow of technology backwards. Like "The space shuttle would not have been possible with out an ancient egyptian plow." and then documents key technologies that make up a modern civilization.

Found in my email archives...

The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet 8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge used? Because that's the way they built them in England, and English expatriates built the US railroads.

Why did the English build them like that? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used.

Why did 'they' use that gauge then? Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.

Okay! Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on some of the old, long distance roads in England, because that's the spacing of the wheel ruts.

So who built those old rutted roads? The first long distance roads in Europe (and England) were built by Imperial Rome for their legions. The roads have been used ever since. And the ruts? Roman war chariots first made the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels and wagons. Since the chariots were made for, or by Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing.

Thus, we have the answer to the original question. The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches derives from the original specification for an Imperial Roman war chariot.

Specifications and bureaucracies live forever. So, the next time you are handed a specification and wonder which horse's rear came up with it, you may be exactly right. Because the Imperial Roman war chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of two war-horses.

And now, the twist to the story...

There's an interesting extension to the story about railroad gauges and horses' behinds. When we see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. Thiokol makes the SRBs at their factory in Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory had to run through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track is about as wide as two horse behinds.

So, a major design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined by the width of a horse's rear! Are we stuck in a rut?

Heroes of the Telegraph by John Munro

[uglyMood]

I stumbled accross this book on Project Gutenberg: Heroes of the Telegraph by John Munro. It's a fascinating account of the various inventions that led up to the telegraph. Oddly enough, the book was written when the telephone and phonograph were pretty new, so the author's speculations as to the future of these devices is interesting.