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Science Technology

Who Really Invented The Telegraph? 281

Posted by timothy 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.
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Who Really Invented The Telegraph? More

Who Really Invented The Telegraph?

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  • Had to be Al Gores great great great grandfather. (Score:4, Funny)

    by Typingsux ( 65623 ) on Monday February 03, 2003 @02:38PM (#5216531)
    Who else?

  • It could be none other than... (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Hedy Lamarr.

  • Uh-oh (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 03, 2003 @02:42PM (#5216568)
    How long before this site is slash-dot-dot-dot-dash-dot-dash-dotted?
  • I thought everyone knew it was Charles Moore.

  • I did (Score:4, Funny)

    by geekoid ( 135745 ) <dadinportland&yahoo,com> on Monday February 03, 2003 @02:43PM (#5216577) Homepage Journal
    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.
  • Someone work in a Microsoft slam, too. I need my fix.
    • "Someone work in a Microsoft slam, too. I need my fix."

      In other related news, MS sued Renfrew's descendents over patents relating to the point and click interface that they invented.

      Hmm... let's see, I involved Microsoft and a rather obvious abuse of patents, that should get me a +1 Funny, right? Damn, I wish I could think of a way to work AMD's overheating into it too, that would have been a slam dunk +1.

  • From the article.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Chester K ( 145560 ) on Monday February 03, 2003 @02:46PM (#5216600) Homepage
    ground-breaking paper was simply signed with the initials "CM, Renfrew"

    CM obviously stands for CowboyMeal, which is CowboyNeal's pen name.
    • Although cowbotkneel's penmenship is hard to read. CM actually stands for chief monkey. Yes, they had a thousand monkeys but no typewriters, so instead of shakespear they got electrical information transfer.

  • The Victorian Internet (Score:5, Informative)

    by Hanashi ( 93356 ) on Monday February 03, 2003 @02:46PM (#5216603) Homepage
    If you really want the reference for the technical and social history of the telegraph, check out Tom Standage's The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and Nineteenth Century's On-Line Pioneers.

    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.

  • I think I found him (Score:5, Funny)

    by long_john_stewart_mi ( 549153 ) on Monday February 03, 2003 @02:48PM (#5216624)
    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.

  • CM (Score:2, Funny)

    by freeb ( 614578 )
    Wow...Configuration Management actually accomplished something! :)

  • Morse invented the serial port :) (Score:5, Informative)

    by hpa ( 7948 ) on Monday February 03, 2003 @02:51PM (#5216646) Homepage
    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.

    • Re:Morse invented the serial port :) (Score:5, Interesting)

      by rgmoore ( 133276 ) <glandauer@charter.net> on Monday February 03, 2003 @03:18PM (#5216839) Homepage
      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.

    • this is the code which is invariably used even today.

      Not invariably. Last I heard there were still some amateur radio nets for people who enjoy using American Morse code. They're probably few and far between, though, and getting fewer and farther as time goes on.

      Elements of American Morse still pepper ham radio procedure today, actually. Probably the most widespread example is the signoff code "didididahdit daaaaaaaah", often incorrectly transliterated into International Morse as "SK" because those are the characters it sounds the most like. In reality that last dah is supposed to be a longer than normal one, and the symbol is American Morse for "30", which in early telegraph procedure meant "end of message. (This is also the origin of the mark "# # # 30 # # #" you often see at the bottom of press releases and similar documents.)
      • Actually the symbol ...-.- (written @ or ) is the recognized International Morse Code symbol for End of Text, equivalent to ASCII 04h .

        It might have a history from old American Morse, but it's nothing "incorrect" about it being used in International Morse Code.

        It is *not* ... -.- (SK), just as the I.M.C. distress call is the single symbol ...---... () and not the three letters ... --- ... (SOS).
        • ARGH... Slashdot butchered the <> in this message, even though I had it set to "Plain Old Text".

          It was supposed to say:

          Actually the symbol ...-.- (written @ or <SK>) is the recognized International Morse Code symbol for End of Text, equivalent to ASCII 04h .

          It might have a history from old American Morse, but it's nothing "incorrect" about it being used in International Morse Code.

          It is not ... -.- (SK), just as the I.M.C. distress call is the single symbol ...---... (<SOS>) and not the three letters ... --- ... (SOS).

    • Re:Morse invented the serial port :) (Score:4, Funny)

      by Anonvmous Coward ( 589068 ) on Monday February 03, 2003 @05:49PM (#5218257)
      " ...this is the code which is invariably used even today."

      Morse code was recently used by the United States on July 4, 1997 to mobilize the largest international airbattle of recorded history. Apple deserves some of the credit too, though.
      • "Morse code was recently used by the United States on July 4, 1997 to mobilize the largest international airbattle of recorded history. Apple deserves some of the credit too, though. "

        Psst: It was 1996. July 4th, 1997 is when the Americans recovered the galaxy on Orion's belt and returned it to an angry agressor.

  • Give societies their due (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Autonymous Toaster ( 646656 ) on Monday February 03, 2003 @02:53PM (#5216667) Homepage

    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 [toaster.org] 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 [toaster.org] 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.

    • Re:Give societies their due (Score:4, Informative)

      by JAZ ( 13084 ) on Monday February 03, 2003 @03:39PM (#5217008)
      Reminds me of a great show a few years back called Connections (I think.) I should know the name of the host and find some links, but I don't have any and my first google attempt didn't help.

      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.

      Anyway it was a great show.

      • Re:Give societies their due (Score:4, Informative)

        by pubjames ( 468013 ) on Monday February 03, 2003 @04:57PM (#5217723)
        James Burke's connections:

        http://home.earthlink.net/~billotto/Connections. ht ml

        I remember it being very compelling to watch.
      • 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?
        • This is a nice idea, but continental Europe uses a different gauge. Again, some of the original road infrastructure was built by the Romans, but they have a slightly different width between the wheels. I can't imagine the Romans having different chariots for England than the rest of their conquests.
      • James somebody, writes a column for Scientific American, interesting and entertaining.
    • ... 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.
      Thousands?!? You'd think if this were true we'd be finding the bodies of dead electrocuted cavemen still clutching forks trying to get their burnt toast back from their early design attempts.

      Hell, my toaster is so dangerous I'm surprised the human race survived at all. We should have been wiped out in some sort of primordial toaster cataclysm. Maybe that's what killed the dinosaurs?

  • Other information on CM's identity (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 03, 2003 @02:53PM (#5216670)
    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.

    • No no no! (Score:3, Funny)

      by AndroidCat ( 229562 )
      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.
    • This link to an online book on the history of the Telegraph [tanaya.net] has a similar (identical?) account.

      More interesting (to me anyway), is the text of the actual letter to the Scots' Magazine which can be found here [it.kth.se].

      Both describe the system as using individual wires to which would be electrified using the spark from a Leyden jar, and depending on which wire you electrified, you would know which letter was being represented. Much of the decription could be used to credit CM with the invetnion of the telephone pole as well, since he/she describes how the wires would need to be suspended and insulated at the suspension points.

      Curious though, is that it was originally identified as means for transmitting intelligence, yet the plan for constructing it was published in a magazine - an early proponent of Open Source I guess.

      The second link also indicates that work on electric was performed as early as 1746 coinciding with the invention of the Leyden Jar itself, so I think the current Scotsman article may be a bit biased when it claims this CM is the real inventor of electric telegraphy. And that in the 1780's a system was proposed that would have used either a 5-bit or 6-bit 'binary' system for sending the signals over fewer wires - by having different combinations of wires signal each character (ie 00001 = A, 00010 = B, 00011 = C, etc.)

  • The answer is obvious (Score:5, Funny)

    by burgburgburg ( 574866 ) <splisken06NO@SPAMemail.com> on Monday February 03, 2003 @02:53PM (#5216671)
    It was Scotty. That's right: Captain Montgomery Scott. First he came back in time and invented transparent aluminum. Then, going further back in time and visiting the ancestral manse, he decided to invent the telephone/telegraph.

    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.

  • The way current IP laws are heading the guy would STILL have the patent on it!

  • who invented anything? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by g4dget ( 579145 ) on Monday February 03, 2003 @03:19PM (#5216854)
    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.

  • communication application, not telegraph (Score:3, Insightful)

    by fermion ( 181285 ) on Monday February 03, 2003 @03:23PM (#5216879) Homepage Journal
    The paper does not seem to refer to a telegraph as we know it. In fact claiming the 1753 paper "invented" the telegraph leaves said paper open to unfair criticism and minimizes the importance of the paper.

    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.

  • Reminds me of a dumb joke (Score:4, Funny)

    by Ugmo ( 36922 ) on Monday February 03, 2003 @03:27PM (#5216909)
    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.

  • Nikoli Tesla's grandfather (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ch-chuck ( 9622 ) on Monday February 03, 2003 @03:29PM (#5216920) Homepage
    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.
  • 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.
  • EXACTLY 250 years ago today, a Scottish inventor penned a theory that led to the electric telegraph and the mobile phone.
    It's only a matter of time before the Scots claim to have invented everything (which they usually did, but we English can invoke the 'British' clause to steal the glory - ha ha!). Shortly after that, the Americans claim to have invented everything (on the grounds that their ancestors were Scottish/Irish/English/Whatever suits them at the time [delete as applicable]).
    • EXACTLY 250 years ago today, a Scottish inventor penned a theory that led to the electric telegraph and the mobile phone.
      It's only a matter of time before the Scots claim to have invented everything (which they usually did, but we English can invoke the 'British' clause to steal the glory - ha ha!). Shortly after that, the Americans claim to have invented everything (on the grounds that their ancestors were Scottish/Irish/ English/Whatever suits them at the time [delete as applicable]).

      You have obviously not spent enough time around soc.culture.greek [google.com] .... Didn't you know that everything was invented by Greeks, including America? Just ask Agamemnon. ;P

  • Morse Code (Score:2, Informative)

    by Radio Shack Robot ( 640478 )
    In case you didn't know, Radio Shack no longer sells morse code training tapes. You'll have to buy them from the ARRL [arrl.org].
  • ...invented the sandwich.

    Samuel Morser invented Morse Code.

    Plato invented the plate.

    that is all

  • who really invented the wireless ? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 03, 2003 @03:50PM (#5217119)
    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.
    • First to discover and prove that plants have life???

      I'm not sure what you mean by this, but this "discovery" predates Bose by, oh, say, thirty or forty thousand years?

      (Not to detract from Bose, nor from any of the other great Boses, like physicist Satyendra Nath Bose, after whom the Boson is named.)

      .
    • 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.

      As all good Southerners know, you and others are wrong. Nathan B. Stubblefield invented radio. [wfmu.org]

      (Being from the south, I just love blind siding people with that one, even if it really was only induction and not radio.)
    • So you're suggesting that Nathan Stubblefield stole Jagadish Chandra Bose's invention 30 years before Jagadish was born?

  • Could the telegraph be invented today? (Score:5, Funny)

    by ThinkingGuy ( 551764 ) on Monday February 03, 2003 @03:51PM (#5217125) Homepage
    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!"

    • Sane people: "Someone just invented a laborious system of sending simple text messages? Why not just use e-mail?"
    • 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:

      There has always been opposition to new ideas and new technologies. The Luddites are the most famous example because they violently opposed the introduction of steam engines. The explorer who introduced the raincoat to England was executed for possessing "Devil's Fabric". And innoculation - one of the great medical discoveries which eventually led to vaccination - was opposed by religious groups and medical doctors.

  • As a Morse... (Score:5, Funny)

    by jmorse ( 90107 ) <joe_w_morse@nosp ... m ['am.' in gap]> on Monday February 03, 2003 @03:51PM (#5217129) Homepage Journal
    ...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.

  • An effort to claim Scots invented everything? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by 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...).

  • dididida di didadi dadidada didi dadi da di didadi di dididi da didi dadi dadadi


    (Change "di" to "." and "da" to "-" before decoding it here [cyberscout.org]. Sorry - it was the only way to get this post past /.'s lameness filter)
  • ...my first thought was that CM was a woman. Ada Lovelace not withstanding, female intellectuals had a hard time being taken seriously until just recently (perhaps up to the 1940s.) I don't know if that was more or less the case in ascestral Scotland, but it was not uncommon for women and girls to publish their writings anonymously or pseudonymously, thus to remain utterly unknown even if their ideas did go on to have lives of their own.

    Of course, nobody knows either way regarding CM and likely never will know. But it is worth pausing for a moment and reflecting on not only the random nature of fame and recognition, but also how many great discoveries we certainly have lost over the centuries because someone was not allowed to write, or speak or even to dream.

    I don't know if things have changed much even now, but it has always been my greatest hope that the ubiquitous Internet would serve to unlock some of that untapped and otherwise lost human potential. IP laws, software patents, and the thugs seeking to control the flow of information aside, there are surely a lot of new voices out there to be heard, and new ideas they can share with us to help take us to the next great era of discovery and global progress. In the shadow of looming wars and unrest, AIDS and WMDs, and all the other noise of our discontent it is comforting to think that this might indeed be so.
  • Batteries were found in ancient Arabia, used for electroplating. Ancient Greeks used batteries for medicinal purposes.

    More Info [discovery.com]

    Some More Info [answersingenesis.org]

  • I stumbled accross this book on Project Gutenberg: Heroes of the Telegraph [upenn.edu] 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.

  • "If it's not Scotish... (Score:4, Funny)

    by SuperMario666 ( 588666 ) on Monday February 03, 2003 @05:47PM (#5218240)
    ..IT'S CRAP!!!"

  • Morse Code (Score:2, Insightful)

    by feenberg ( 201582 )
    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.
  • I think that this is an excellent example for school teachers. There's always that one student in the class who always forgets to write his name at the top of the papers. Now the teacher can hold it against him...

    "Do you want to be like that guy who invented the telegraph? Hmmm? Nobody knows his name because he didn't put it on his paper either..."

    It ought to work better than my moms "Eat your breakfast! Don't you know kids are starving in China?!"

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