Nayla Castillo Prieto Academy The Invention of the Telegram

May 17, 2011 314-Primes

The first telegram that was invented was the one invented by a Frenchman named Claude Chappe. His telegram was not electrical so it looked different and others and it was used in a different way. He developed a system using synchronized clocks and a wooden panel painted white on one side and black on the other side. In his system that he created in order to red messages you had to show one face of the wooden panel in coordination with the hands of the clock, by doing this you could encode a message with numbers and people looking at the panel with a telescope could see the message. This original design was destroyed by a angry French mob who thought he was using it for espionage. But eh just made an even better one with a new system which include 98 positions which each pertained a different word, letter, or phrase. The French government was impressed by it and made telegram towers and used them for communication of the military. But people started to compete with Claude that he became depressed and paranoid so he killed himself. In the 1830s, two men, one in the U.S. and one in England, were both trying at the same time to make an electrical telegraph but they were doing it independently. The U.S. man was Samuel F. B. Morse and the English man was named William Fothergill Cooke. They both invented electrical telegrams, much to the government officials skepticism, but they were different systems. Morses and his assistants Alfred Vails were that they used code of long and short bursts of electricity that caused a stylus to draw dots and dashed on paper. Williams system, along with Professor Charles Wheatstone, was that it used an array of electromagnetic needles, which combined to point at letters on a printed grid. To prove the officials wrong they made demonstrations, and when they finally believed them in 1845 they started to build electric telegram companies. From then on there were charges for the amount of writing there was and different transportations to get the message delivered. It is said that the last commercial Morse code message in North America was transmitted from a Globe Wireless station south of San Francisco on July 12, 1999. Western Union continued to hand-deliver telegrams until February of 1972, when the company began closing its local offices, but physical delivery of telegrams completely stopped in

2001.