The first electric telegraphs
When the electric telegraph finally arrived in the early 19th century, it was a real breakthrough.
The telegraph was the first form of telecommunication. Telegraph means writing from far away or distant writing and the word originally applied to semaphore systems.
But the search for ways of sending signals over long distances had been around for thousands of years.
It had needed three ingredients to make it reality: the science of electromagnetism, the ability to generate or store electricity and the Industrial Revolution to be able to produce the mechanical devices and wires needed.
But there was one more key - the creation of codes to turn electrical pulses into a kind of language. During the first decades of the 19th century, all the elements finally fell into place.
Early attempts to develop electric telegraph
In 1816 the British inventor Francis Ronalds, who was fascinated by electricity, developed an electric telegraph (using static high voltage electricity) and succeeded in sending messages through eight miles of iron wires. Most were suspended on frames above his garden at Hammersmith, west of London, but some ran underground.
Ronalds’ system was quite sophisticated, using clockwork-driven rotating dials, engraved with letters of the alphabet and numbers, synchronized with each other, at both ends of the circuit.
He offered to demonstrate it to the Admiralty. They declined, preferring to stick with their mechanical semaphore. Later, the scientific establishment realized just how far ahead of his time Ronalds had been and he was given a knighthood in 1871. It was a bit late... by then Ronalds was 83 years old and had but two years left to live.
In 1809 the Munich Academy of Science received a paper from an inventor called Samuel Thomas von Sommering that described a telegraph containing thirty-five wires, one for each letter of the (German) alphabet and one for each number. At the transmitting end, arrangements were provided for passing currents through any one of the wires. At the receiving end the electrodes were immersed in acidulated water.
Completing the circuit caused bubbles of hydrogen to form in tubes, each one corresponding to a letter or a number.
Schilling constructs early telegraph (1832): the swinging needle
When Baron Pavel Schilling first saw Sommering’s telegraph he was inspired by it and began to study electricity and its uses. Then a Russian diplomat working at the Munich embassy, Schilling became a regular visitor at Sommering’s house, and introduced friends from across Europe to the device.
He went on to apply electricity to military uses, including remotely exploding gunpowder. He also continued to follow his interest in the electric telegraph and by the early 1830s had shown that coiling electrical wire around a magnetized needle would make it swing one way or the other, depending on which way a current flowed through the coil.
He had also applied this principle in a simple form of telegraph, by making use of horizontally mounted indicator needles.
Baron Schilling’s needle telegraph was hardly noticed outside St. Petersburg, but two Germans - Carl Friedrich Gauss and Wilhelm Eduard Weber - saw Schilling’s 1832 demonstration. The following year they sent signals over a distance of more than two kilometers using a form of two-wire single-needle telegraph.