The Victorian Internet (3 page)

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LTIMATELY, the success of the optical telegraph designs inspired by Chappe was limited because they were so expensive to
run. They required shifts of skilled operators at each station and in volved building towers all over the place, so that only
governments could afford to run them; and their limited information-carrying capacity meant they were just used for official
business. Optical telegraphs had shown that complex messages could be sent using combinations of simple signs; but other than
noticing the appearance of a tower on top of the nearest hill, most people's lives were not directly affected. (Today, all
that is left of the original telegraph network is a few place-names; several hills are still known as Telegraph Hill.)

As well as being expensive, optical telegraphs suffered from the drawback of not working in the dark, despite various experimental
schemes that involved the use of colored lanterns on the end of the indicator arms. But at least the fall of darkness could
be predicted; fog and mist, on the other hand, could arise at any time. When choosing the locations for new telegraph towers,
one had to ensure that there were no marshes, rivers, or lakes along the line of sight between adjacent towers; local inhabitants
were often consulted to determine the likelihood of mists arising.

If it could ever be constructed, however, a practical electric telegraph would work over any terrain, in any kind of weather,
at any time of the day or night. It would be able to send messages around corners and over mountains. Yet for all its supposed
advantages, and despite the work of Ronalds and others, the electric telegraph was still widely believed to be nothing more
than an impossible dream.

2.

STRANGE, FIERCE FIRE

But one morning he made him a slender wire,

As an artist's vision took life and form,

While he drew from heaven the strange, fierce fire

That reddens the edge of the midnight storm;

And he carried it over the Mountain's crest,

And dropped it into the Ocean's breast;

And Science proclaimed, from shore to shore,

That Time and Space ruled man no more,

—from "The Victory," a poem written

in tribute to Samuel Morse, 1872

T
ODAY, EVEN A CHILD could build an electric telegraph. All you need is a battery, a bulb, and some wire to connect the two.
I hold on to the battery, while you sit, some distance away, by the bulb; I run connecting wires from one to the other? and
by making and breaking the circuit at my end, I can get the light to flash on and off at your end. Provided we have agreed
upon a suitable way to represent letters of the alphabet, I can send you messages. (One obvious but rather inefficient scheme
would be for one flash to signify "A," two to signify "B," and so on.)

In the early nineteenth century, of course, batteries and bulbs weren't readily available. Crude batteries like the one Nollet
used to shock the monks had given way to the voltaic cell, invented around 1800 by Alessandro Volta, which works on the same
principle as a modern battery. Rather than simply discharging to give one brief jolt of current, voltaic cells could drive
current in an orderly fashion around an electric circuit.

But it was another eighty years before the American inventor Thomas Edison would invent the lightbulb, so there was still
no easy way to detect the presence of electricity in a wire. Experimenters used electricity to cause pith balls to twitch,
to trigger chemical reactions, and cause sparks. But experimental telegraphs based on such cumbersome means of detecting current
(such as the one built by Ronalds) were unreliable and unwieldy, and never got very far.

The breakthrough came in 1820 when Hans Christian Oersted, a Danish physicist, observed that electric current flowing in a
wire gives rise to a magnetic field, a phenomenon known as electromagnetism. This magnetic field can then be detected through
its effect on another object: As Oersted discovered, it will cause a nearby compass needle to move. For the first time, there
was a reliable, repeatable, and practical way to detect electricity. (Ironically, it depended on magnetism—the principle that
had been the basis of the myth of the sympathetic needles.)

Two new inventions quickly followed: the galvanometer, which indicates the flow of current by the deflection of a rotating
needle, and the electromagnet, a coil of wire that behaves just like a permanent magnet—but only as long as current is flowing
through it. Together with the new voltaic battery, either could be used as the basis of an electric telegraph.

But those who tried to build telegraphs based on electromagnetic principles soon ran into a new problem. Even when equipped
with the latest batteries and electromagnets, some people seemed to have less success than others when they tried signaling
over long wires; and nobody could understand why.

In 1824, for example, the British mathematician and physicist Peter Barlow considered the possibility of building an electric
telegraph that would send messages using an electromagnet that made a clicking sound as it was switched on and off. "There
is only one question which would render the result doubtful: is there any diminution of the effect [of electricity] by lengthening
the conducting wire?" he asked. "I found such a diminution with only two hundred feet of wire, as at once to convince me of
the impracticability of the scheme."

Barlow was not alone. In their own experiments, many other scientists had found that the longer the wire they used, the weaker
the effects of the electricity at the other end. To those working in the field, a practical electric telegraph seemed as far
away as ever.

S
AMUEL F. B. morse was born in Charles-town, Massachusetts, in 1791, the year of Chappe's first demonstration of an optical
telegraph. He was a johnny-come-lately to the field of electric telegraphy. Had he started building an electric telegraph
a little earlier, he might have got home in time for his wife's funeral.

Morse's wife, Lucretia, died suddenly at their home in New Haven, Connecticut, on the afternoon of February 7, 1825, while
her husband was away. He was starting to make progress in his chosen career as a painter and had gone to Washington to try
to break into the lucrative society portrait business. He had just been commissioned to paint a full-length portrait of the
marquis de Lafayette, a military hero, and his career finally seemed to be taking off. "I long to hear from you," he wrote
in a letter to his wife on February 10, unaware that she was already dead.

Washington was four days' travel from New Haven, so Morse received the letter from his father telling him of Lucretia's death
on February 11, the day before her funeral. Traveling as fast as he could, he arrived home the following week. His wife was
already buried. In the United States in 1825, messages could still only be conveyed as fast as a messenger could carry them.

Samuel F. B. Morse, one of the inventors of the electric telegraph.

Morse was forty-one when he caught the telegraph bug following a chance meeting on board a ship in the mid-Atlantic. In i832,
he was returning to the United States from Europe, where he had spent three years in Italy, Switzerland, and France improving
his painting skills and working on a rather harebrained scheme to bring the treasures of the Louvre in Paris to an American
audience. On a six-by-nine-foot canvas, he was painting miniature copies of thirty-eight of the Louvre's finest paintings,
which he collectively dubbed the
Gallery of the
Louvre.
The painting, still unfinished, accompanied Morse onto the sailing packet
Sully,
a fast ship that was carrying mail, together with a small number of well-to-do passengers, across the Atlantic.

His intention was to finish the
Gallery of the Louvre
when he got back to the United States, and then exhibit it and charge admission. It was a scheme typical of Morse: Since i823,
for example, he had been experimenting with a marble-cutting device that would supposedly make copies of any sculpture, with
a view to reproducing well-known works of art in large quantities for sale to the public. And as a young man, he had dabbled
with various other inventions, including a new kind of water pump, devised in 1817, which he sold to a local fire brigade.
But none of his schemes, which typically combined artistic ingenuity with public-spiritedness, had ever been successful; the
hapless Morse seems to have stumbled from one moneymaking idea to another as the mood took him.

As the
Sully
made its way across the ocean, the passengers on board got to know each other quite well, and, two weeks into the voyage,
a philosophical discussion at the dinner table one afternoon turned to the matter of electromagnetism. Dr. Charles Jackson
of Boston, one of the passengers, knew a good deal about the subject and even had an electromagnet and some other electrical
bits and bobs with him on board the ship. In the midst of an explanation, one of the passengers asked Jackson the very question
that Nollet's experiment had been trying to answer: How fast did electricity travel along a wire, and how far could it go?

As the electrified monks could have testified back in 1746, and as Dr. Jackson explained, electricity was believed to pass
through a circuit of any length instantaneously. Morse was thunderstruck. "If the presence of electricity can be made visible
in any desired part of the circuit," he is reputed to have said, "I see no reason why intelligence might not be instantaneously
transmitted by electricity to any distance." This, of course, was exactly the reason that so many scientists had spent the
best part of a century trying to harness electricity as a means of signaling, but Morse didn't know that. He left the table,
went up on deck, and started scribbling in his notebook. Convinced that he was the first to have had the idea, he instantly
became obsessed with a new scheme: building an electric telegraph.

Perhaps fortunately, Morse was unaware that other would-be telegraphers had failed after being unable to get signals to travel
over long wires. Assuming that the electric side of things would be fairly straightforward, he started thinking about the
other half of the problem: a signaling code.

The arms or shutters of an optical telegraph can be arranged in a large number of different combinations, but an electric
current can only be on or off. How could it be used to transmit an arbitrary message? As he paced the deck of the
Sully,
Morse swiftly rejected the approach of using a separate electrical circuit for each letter of the alphabet. Next, he considered
the possibility of using the clicking of an electromagnet to send numbers in the same way as a church bell, which indicates
the hour by the number of chimes. But with this system, it would take nine times as long to send a 9 (9 clicks) as it would
to send a 1 (1 click).

Before long, Morse had the idea of using short and long bursts of current—a "bi-signal" scheme that later evolved into the
dots and dashes of what we now know as Morse code. He decided upon a series of short and long bursts corresponding to each
of the digits from o to 9, and sketched them in his notebook. Sending a series of digits, he decided, could then be used to
indicate a word in a numbered codebook.

Next, Morse turned to the matter of creating a permanent record of an electric signal so that it could be translated from
dots and dashes back into the original message. Together with Jackson, he sketched out a way to record incoming signals on
paper automatically, by marking a paper tape with a moving pencil controlled by an electromagnet.

After six weeks at sea, Morse arrived in New York a changed man. He met his brothers Richard and Sidney on the dock and started
telling them about his new scheme almost immediately. "Hardly had the usual greetings passed between us three brothers, and
while on our way to my house, before he informed us that he had made, during his voyage, an important invention, which had
occupied almost all his attention on shipboard," Richard recalled. Sidney remembered that his brother was "full of the subject
of the telegraph during the walk from the ship, and for some days afterward could scarcely speak about anything else." Morse
immediately set to work building an electric telegraph.

F
OUR YEARS LATER, in 1836, a young Englishman experienced a similar epiphany. William Fothergill Cooke was the son of a professor
of anatomy who found himself at loose ends after resigning his commission in the Indian army, and took to making anatomical
wax models of dissected cadavers for use in medical training. While studying anatomy in Heidelberg, he happened to attend
a lecture about electricity, and before long he too had decided to try his hand at building an electric telegraph.

The lecture Cooke attended included a demonstration of an experimental telegraph system that had been invented by Baron Pavel
Lvovitch Schilling, a Russian diplomat, in the mid-1820S. Based on a galvanometer, it used combinations of the left and right
swings of the galvanometer needle to indicate letters and numbers. Just as Ron­alds had done in Britain, Schilling promoted
his invention to his superiors in government, and after many years of lobbying he managed to arrange a demonstration in i836
in the presence of Czar Nicholas, who was very impressed and gave his approval for the construction of an official network.
But Schilling died shortly afterward, and his telegraphic ambitions died with him.

William Fothergill Cooke, one of the British inventors of the electric telegraph.

However, Professor Muncke of Heidelberg University had a copy of one of Schilling's galvanometers, which he liked to use to
demonstrate the principle of electromagnetism. After attending such a demonstration, Cooke was "struck with the wonderful
power of electricity and strongly impressed with its applicability to the practical transmission of telegraphic intelligence."
Realizing that this phenomenon might, as he put it, "be made available to purposes of higher utility than the illustration
of a lec­ture," Cooke (who had been looking around for a way to make his fortune) immediately abandoned anatomy and decided
to build an electric telegraph based on an improved version of Schilling's apparatus.