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Who Really Invented The Telegraph?

Posted by timothy on from the trick-question dept.

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.

2 of 281 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Morse invented the serial port :) by rgmoore · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.

    --

    There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.

  2. who really invented the wireless ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.