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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 above post is an editorial, the poster cannot and will not be held responsible for all or in part for it's contents
How long before this site is slash-dot-dot-dot-dash-dot-dash-dotted?
and thanks for finding that. you all own me 1 penny per sine wave ever sent down a wire, however I will generously give you the amplitude under a GPL liscense.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Someone work in a Microsoft slam, too. I need my fix.
ground-breaking paper was simply signed with the initials "CM, Renfrew"
CM obviously stands for CowboyMeal, which is CowboyNeal's pen name.
NO CARRIER
I read this book shortly after it came out in paperback, and I have to say that it's fascinating. It discusses various early telegraph systems in detail, including those not using electricity at al. More importantly, it draws startling parallels between the telegraph's influence on 19th century society and the Internet's influence today, especially during the dotcom boom. This is a must-read for the true geek.
Check out my eclectic infosec blog at InfoSecPotpou
EXACTLY 250 years ago today, a Scottish inventor penned a theory that led to the electric telegraph and the mobile phone.
I have a neighbor that looks about that age, maybe it was him.
...oOOo..'(_)'..oOOo...
Wow...Configuration Management actually accomplished something! :)
Morse certainly didn't invent the first electrical telegraph; he just invented the most practical one. Most of the previous electrical telegraphs had been either analog and highly unreliable or required multiple wires; some were even both.
The Morse telegraph required only one wire (the return went through the Earth), which was a huge cost savings in the time before cheap insulation, and yet was a binary on/off transmission with the associated reliability advantages. The original Morse code (sometimes called "railway Morse") used four symbol lengths; once the Morse telegraph spread and eventually went wireless the "international Morse code" simplified this to only two symbol lengths; this is the code which is invariably used even today.
I'm not sure who invented it but I think I know what one of the first messages was:
Dear Sir
I am calling to help you lower your long distance calling rates
Please respond
me karma am bad
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?
Pasted From: http://www.globusz.com/ebooks/Telegraph/00000011.h tm
The identity of 'C. M.,' who dated his letter from Renfrew, has not been established beyond a doubt. There is a tradition of a clever man living in Renfrew at that time, and afterwards in Paisley, who could 'licht a room wi' coal reek (smoke), and mak' lichtnin' speak and write upon the wa'.' By some he was thought to be a certain Charles Marshall, from Aberdeen; but it seems likelier that he was a Charles Morrison, of Greenock, who was trained as a surgeon, and became connected with the tobacco trade of Glasgow. In Renfrew he was regarded as a kind of wizard, and he is said to have emigrated to Virginia, where he died.
But what of the signature "CM Renfrew"? Captain Montgomery from Renfrew. Why no S for Scott? Unnecessary. Everyone from Renfrew (in those days) was a Scott. It was the ancestral home. It's so obvious, it's silly.
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.
Renfew is the name of the town, not the person. All they have is a paper signed with the initials "C.M." and a location of Renfew, which is a far cry from knowing who the paper was written by.
I say it was a Tesla. According to this here slashdot thingy Tesla is responsible for everything that ever was and will be invented. All Hail Nikola Tesla!
Al Gores [sic] great great great grandfather
Ah. Must have been before the invention of the apostrophe.
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
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.
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
There are two (English|Scottish) Lords bragging about who's family was more important.
The first Lord says that while doing renovations on their family castle they found a buried copper cable 2 miles long put down in the 1500's. This, he says, proves his family invented the telegraph hundreds of years before any one else.
The second Lord says that while doing renovations on HIS castle they found NO cable. THIS proves, he says, that his family was using WIRELESS, hundreds of years before the first Lord's family was using telegraph.
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); }
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.
If I remember right -- and no, I wasn't around back then! -- Henry invented the idea of an electromagnetic "sounder" and an interrupted circuit as a method of signalling. Morse (who was an artist by trade) invented the code that bears his name (though what we call "Morse code" today is not much like his original encoding, just as EBCDIC isn't ASCII insn't UNICODE). Originally, Morse code was a VISUAL medium -- the telegraph was supposed to output as short and long marks on a moving paper tape (which method -- Kleinschmidt?? -- was used by the military in WWII, though I forget what the details were). But the telegraph operators soon learned to decode the clicks and gaps without bothering to refill the messy, balky inking devices.
In case you didn't know, Radio Shack no longer sells morse code training tapes. You'll have to buy them from the ARRL.
Beep. Boop. Beep. You have questions. I have answers and your home address.
Finally, he really did try to work on a machine to see if there was life after death, but no model or plans were found in any of his labs.
I guess you really can take it with you...
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.
Yeah! Next thing you know, the Brits'll say that THEY were the first ones to capture an Enigma from the Nazis, and not a team of Americans like was portrayed in U-571... oh, wait. :-)
~Philly
In the same light "who invented wireless ?"
j cbose. htmh tml
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/
http://www.tuc.nrao.edu/~demerson/bose/bose.
or otherwise google on "jagadish chandra bose".
As a further information he was the first scientist to discover and prove that plants have life.
A random thought that occurred to me while reading the article: If the telegraph were invented for the first time today, would it have a chance of being successful?
Naturally there would be the big patent fight, with various people and corporations suing back and forth, claiming credit for the invention. But even if that were settled, think of the resistance that there would be to the (new) idea of setting poles with wires strung between them:
Environmental groups: "Birds will be tangled in the wires.. and what about the effects of EMF on children?"
Religous groups: "God didn't mean for man to be able to communicate with other men in an instant fashion. The telegraph is an instrument of the devil!"
Rich people: "I don't want those ugly poles and wires in my neighborhood. They'll lower my property values!"
Poor people: "It's only rich people who can afford to send telegraphs, but they run all the wires through our neighborhoods. It's discrimination!"
...I resent all this talk about my ancestor not being the innovative pioneer that he was. And I resent all those royalties that...oh, wait, I've never actually received a royalty. Nevermind.
"You done taken a wrong turn."
-Bill McKinney, in Deliverance
Afterwards, his older brother, Samuel, beat the living daylights out of him for playing with his stuff.
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
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...).
Columbus was a Spaniard
Columbus was Genovese! He was only working for the Spanish.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
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.
In "CM, Renfrew", Renfrew isn't a place name, it's the name of CM's asistant who was taking dictation of the paper. CM is obviously the infamous Scottish vampire, Count MacCula.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
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.
"No matter where you go, there you probably are." -- Buckaroo Heisenberg
..IT'S CRAP!!!"
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.