Looking back from today, we know that conceptually the inventors looking to find a way to use electricity to create the equivalent of a semaphore telegraph line were on the right track… but their fixation with visual signaling made their progress slow. One reason was that “electrical fluid,” as it was called at that time, was poorly understood, with the result that converting the changes that took place in electrical fluid into visual signals proved difficult.

The problem they faced was the same one early developers of the first computer had: how do you build an “input–output” device that let the user tell the computer what to do, and then allow him to read the result of the computer’s processing of the task he just gave it. In the case of the semaphore telegraph line the question became how do you convert the electrical fluid’s energy into “input–output” signals of a kind that a person receiving the signals at a remote location can understand? Today computer input–output devices come in the form of key boards, printers, touch pads and the like. Back in the 1800s these things didn’t exist, and so finding a way to convert the incoming signal from a far away electrically based semaphore station into a signal that the receiving party could “read” proved quite the problem.

To solve the problem designers and inventors turned to gauges. More simple than today’s voltage, ampere or resistance measuring gauges, but based on the same principle, the gauges invented back then allowed someone to “read” the status or condition of the wires connecting two semaphore sites. In essence, each pair of wires was attached to a needle that moved with the level of electrical fluid sent to it (through it, in the case of current, and to it, in the case of voltage). Thus, via this “gauge” a signal man could tell when a pair of wires had an electrical voltage applied to it, and when it did not. By calibrating the needle of the gauge to point in a specific direction when it sensed voltage, this basic, unexciting voltage gauge became the world’s first input–output device… and in the process allowed Signaleers to send signals by electrical current along wires, in a nearly instantaneous manner, over great distances, in all kinds of weather.

Note again however, this form of signaling was based on visual signals… the movement of the needle of the voltmeter signaled the existence of a current on the wire. In this regard, the very first electrically driven communication transmission system was in all manner of speaking truly a “semaphore telegraph line.” A bunch of guys standing around with flags it was not, but it wasn’t far from that either.

Now how’s that for trivia?

As to who invented this first bit of electrical wonderment, credit goes to Charles Wheatstone (1802-1875) and William Fothergill Cooke (1806-1879), who in 1837 perfected a design using this technique and patented what they called the “five-needle telegraph.” Make a note of this point, for this was the first successful electric telecommunication device.[1]

Operationally, the system used a diamond shaped grid of 20 letters out of the 26 that comprise our alphabet. The idea was that the deflection of any two needles at a time could cause any one of the 20 letters to be “pointed to.” Using this technique, nearly any message could be spelled out… provided that the Signaleers made allowance for the six missing letters. Structurally, the five needles were arranged across the middle of the device. As the graphic at right shows, the deflection of any two needles to the left or right would point to a specific letter (the letter "V" in the case at right). As a unit, the device was relatively simple to use, although over time it proved a problem to keep the 5 wires needed to make the device work in good repair. To be fair to the inventors, this was more a matter of the poor quality of the manufactured wire that was available in those days than the design of the device.

With the basic concept, science and technology out of the way it was now time for someone to find a way to commercialize what had been invented. Cooke and Wheatstone took this task on too, selling the rights to the use of the device to the Great Western Railway, which sent messages, between London and West Drayton (about 13 miles). So well did it work that within short order the railway was selling message services to the public, and thus was born the idea that railways could not only operate rail services to carry live passengers to and fro, but also message services involving everything from mail to telegraph messaging. With a keen eye towards profits, Cooke and Wheatstone were the first to initiate a commercially viable electric telegraph service.[2]

As for the United States, while there was keen interest in the concept of long distance messaging, it was felt that there was little prospect for commercial success of such a venture, and so U.S. inventors and business people opted instead to sit back and watch the British try to “wire their country” with commercial electrical communication semaphore based telegraph service.

Commercial – because they  charged money for the service. Electrical – because the system depended on electric “fluid” to drive the voltage meters at the end of each circuit. Communication – because the idea was to send messages from one signal station to the other. Semaphore – because it was the wig-wag of the needle on the voltage meter that told the receiving end that a signal was being sent as well as what the signal’s content was. And telegraph because that was in fact what was happening… interpretable signals were being telegraphed from one place to another… just like in the days when men with flags stood on hills and waved those flags at each other.

It is again important to note that just like in the case of the earlier mechanical or manual telegraphs that depended on people waving flags, this incredible new pioneering “electrical” telegraph still depended on visual signaling.

As Cooke and Wheatstone sat back and watched the money roll in from the commercialization of their device, other inventors set about testing electric telegraph deigns based on more exotic design criteria. Most famous among them was our own Samuel Finley Breese Morse, who, as we all know, developed a two wire system. Operationally different than Cooke and Wheatstone’s five wire system, Morse’s approach centered on a single circuit to carry the electrical fluid between semaphore sites. However, more important than the number of wires Morse designed his system to use was the fact that even he could not get past the idea that to understand the message being transmitted the signal being received had to be seen with the receiving party’s eyes… in the same manner that signal flags were. In Morse’s view, unless the receiving operator could see the message as it arrived, how was he ever going to understand its content?

Morse, having only recently figured out how electromagnets worked, spent three years trying to develop a telegraph based on electromagnetism, and needing only two wires to operate. In 1835 he finally built a workable device. In form and function it approximated an electromagnetic pendulum that held at its bottom a pencil that was kept in constant contact with a moving strip of paper.

In September, 1837, he displayed the device to the public, demonstrating how it was able to operate via a circuit of 1,700 feet of wire that ran back and forth across a room he rented at a local university. So proud was Morse of his accomplishment that he said that by linking multiple devices in “repeater” stations he could transmit a signal around the world in mere seconds. Notice the term repeater, trivia buffs. That's where our modern day communication use of it came from: Samuel F.B. Morse's bragging of his telegraph's capabilities to the people who saw it.

Those that saw the actual device said that it consisted of a train of “clock-like-wheels” (gears) that regulated the motion of a strip of paper so that a pencil could record on it the message being received by moving in such a manner as to “output” what looked like what we would today call saw tooth and square waves.

The paper measured about 1.5 inches wide and passed over three cylinders that were made of wood. You can see these cylinders in the device in the picture at right, at points A, B, and C. The movement of the paper was controlled by a clock-like element, D, which pulled the paper across the central cylinder, B. The clock element itself was no more than a weighted item that unwound (like a clock) as the weight, E, fell. 

The operational value of the device was derived from the movement of the wooden pendulum, shown as F at right. It was suspended over the center of the cylinder B, over which the paper strip moved. As the pendulum swung in tune with voltage changes that caused the electromagnet armature to move, the pencil that was fixed in the lower part of the pendulum left a written trail of the electromagnet’s movement, as the paper advanced across its cylinders (a small weight at G kept the pencil bearing down on the paper strip).

In this way Morse found it possible to convert what was no more than the movement of the electromagnet’s armature into a series of written saw tooth and square wave pulses on the paper strip. The pulses, thus written, could then be decoded.

As to how the signal recorded on the paper tape could be decoded, if the reader looks carefully at the sample wave shown in the upper right corner of the figure at lower right, he will see what is without doubt the genesis of the later form of code we would one day call Morse Code. Any Signaleer can clearly tell that the pencil track labeled “5” at right shows, beginning on the upswing at point “1” what we today would call two “dashes,” followed by a single “dot,” then another "dash" and five more dots… creating the following result:  − − • − • • • • •

The generation of these saw tooth and square wave pulses was accomplished by the ruler device shown at the bottom of the first figure above, and also in the second figure as item "2". “Type” was set in this ruler device, over which the armature passed, causing a fork of copper wire to be plunged (when the lever was depressed) into two cups of mercury, which in turn completed the circuit that caused the electromagnet to move.

Ingenious. Truly ingenious… yet still based on visible signaling no different than what a couple of Civil War era Army Signal Corps guys could do with a set of wig wag flags.[3]

And so the first reliable, effective, simple electric telegraph machine was born, finding greater and greater acceptance as years went on, as a very basic yet vastly more reliable device than Cooke and Wheatstone’s five wire system. So well was it received that as it began to be used its operators became so familiar with the sounds it made that they stopped looking at the paper tape to see what the messages being sent and received said. Instead, sitting there hour after hour, day after day, they found that they developed a quite natural ability to tell what the signal was that was being received simply by listening to the diminutive almost inaudible sounds made by the pencil as it bounced back and forth, as it moved across the paper tape. And thus was born Morse Code.

How many of the world’s great technological innovations were derived from kismet? Whatever the number, count the concept of audible Morse Code among them.

Unfortunately, while Morse had developed a truly better version of Cooke and Wheatstone’s telegraph device, that did not mean it would result in financial success for Morse (or his partner Vail). In fact, from 1839 to 1844 Morse's financial life crumbled before his eyes. With the cost of development, along with a failed attempt to achieve commercial success in France for his telegraph, he became almost destitute. Hoping beyond hope that the U.S. government would see value in his invention, he petitioned everyone he could find in an effort to seek funding.

To support his claims of the value of telegraphic signaling, in 1842 he laid an insulated wire in New York Harbor, between Castle Garden and Governor's Island. Over this he sent telegraphic signals, impressing New York businessmen and local politicians, but raising little money.

A few months later he followed this up with another wire that he laid across a canal in Washington D.C. This finally got the attention of Congress, and within a few weeks of his demonstrating the success of his “underwater cable” telegraph service Congress passed a bill recommending the allocation of $30,000 to aid him in further development of the “telegraphic form of signaling.”

With this $30,000 Morse constructed a telegraph line between Washington and Baltimore, and on May 24, 1844, he sent the coded message that the world has come to recognize as the defining point when communication entered a new age: “What hath God wrought!”

If "What hath God wrought!" was the proper phrase for the moment when Morse sent the world's first easily understood electronic message over a telegraph line, what should have been the phrase first broadcast over Twitter? One can only wonder.

Regardless, finally, Samuel F.B. Morse was on the road to success. 

In short order financial success followed his personal triumph as a recognized inventor. In April 1845, the communication line he installed between Washington and Baltimore was turned over to the U.S. Post Office to manage. They in turn made it available to the public as a means of transmitting personal messages, and from that point forward man never looked back. With a charge of one cent for every four characters, both the Post Office and Morse started making money. In the first week alone the duo saw revenue rise to the astonishing level of one dollar!

The line between Washington and Baltimore being the first commercial line in the U.S., and being a financial success at that, it drove others to lay telegraph lines throughout the United States.

As for the telegraph device itself, Morse soon keyed in (no pun intended) on the idea that the audible tracking of messages that the operators had come to rely on was quicker and more reliable than the pencil and tape idea that his device was based on. This led him to modify his device so that the teletype keys we are familiar with today replaced the bulky wooden pendulum idea.

To bring the signaling code more in line with the capabilities of the telegraph key, Morse redid his code, yet stuck to the dot-and-dash approach that the original device spurred. Within short order the new code he developed quickly became acknowledged worldwide as the way to go when it came to transmitting messages. In a manner of speaking, his concept of code became the worldwide standard. One can see this by looking at the number of telegraph lines the U.S. Signal Corps had in existence by 1885.

Yet while the concept of his form of code became the worldwide standard… his code did not. In point of fact, while Morse got all of the credit for development of both the device and the code, the format of the code he developed fell out of favor outside of the U.S., due in part to some of the oddities he put into it.

So, while the form of code he developed… i.e. code based on a standardized sequence of dots and dashes that could be interpreted audibly… became the norm, outside of the U.S. a different structure of this same code began to be used. With this bifurcation Morse’s original code quickly became known as American Morse Code. The version used in Europe in turn became known as Continental Morse Code.

To be fair to the Europeans, their version proved more useful and consistent than Morse’s and it soon spread back into America, replacing Morse’s original code. Even after all of this however, one more entrant came into the picture: the U.S. Navy. For reasons only the Navy could tell of, they created their own short lived version.

In the final analysis it was the business world that dictated the end of the story. While better telegraph devices came and went, and technology progressed, the commercial world, in the form of U.S. radio stations, standardized on Continental Morse Code simply so that communication the world over would be understood. Today what was then called Continental Morse Code is known as International Morse Code, and it still rules the world.