June 2, 2022 • 50 mins
The telegraph revolutionized long-distance communication and paved the way for our interconnected information age. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the invention of the telegraph.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My
Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and
today is going to be one of our Invention episodes.
We're going to be talking about the invention of the
(00:23):
electrical telegraph. And I thought perhaps a good way to
kick off this talk would be to discuss a classic
thought experiment known as the two generals problem, Rob do
you ever encountered this before? I don't think I've really
seen it spelled out. So this one is a lot
of fun. So this is used in like computer science
classes and stuff these days. Normally it has a kind
(00:46):
of generic format, though to give a little extra flare, uh,
it typically takes place in an archaic, low technology setting.
So I'm going to give this generic problem a dark
crystal twist. Oh we're going to throw yeah, yeah, okay, okay.
So you've got two Guelfling armies and they are set
(01:06):
to attack the Skexi stronghold in the Castle of the Crystal,
and the two armies are stationed on opposite sides of
the valley where the stronghold lies. The gain world that
would be the ba Limb Valley. But so there's a
valley where the castle is, the two armies are on
opposite sides, and the valley is shrouded in an eerie haze. Now,
(01:28):
each gulf Ling army is commanded by a general, and
the two generals know that with their combined strength, if
they attack at the same time, they can defeat the
skex eas and overcome the power of the Crystal. But
if either of them attacks without the other, they're doomed.
They won't be strong enough, so they have to coordinate.
(01:50):
The only method they have to communicate is to send
a messenger through enemy territory to the other side. But
here's the problem. How can they ever be sure that
they are agreed on a plan. So imagine the first
general sends a message the messages we're going to attack
tomorrow at dawn. So maybe the general writes it down,
(02:12):
hands it off to the messenger and she flies off
into the fog with the message. But then the first
general has to wonder is she going to make it
through or will she be shot down and captured by
the Gartham. So without confirmation that the messenger succeeded, the
first general might really hesitate to go through with the attack,
(02:33):
because remember, neither army can succeed alone. So the first
general is just not going to know if the message
reached the second general and won't know if they're they're
actually on the same page or not. Yeah, it's not
just a trust exercise. It's a trust in your method
of long distance communication. Right now, you might think there's
a solution to this. You might think, well, the second
(02:54):
general could just send back a confirmation message. So so
imagine the first messenger does get through, second general writes
the message that says tomorrow at dawn confirmed, and they
hand that off to their own messenger. The second messenger
flies off into the fog. But then, unfortunately the second
general would, like the first time, have no way of
(03:17):
knowing if their message made it through. And so the
second general may begin to wonder if the first general,
who may or may not have received a confirmation, will
actually go ahead with the attack or may hold back
for fear of leading that doomed maneuver alone. And then
you can just keep permuting this. You can say, okay, well,
the first general could send a message confirming that they
(03:38):
got the second general's confirmation, but Unfortunately, the same uncertainty
is before would still apply, and back and forth and
back and forth, with the point being that there is
actually no way to guarantee agreement on both sides of
a communication line when there were doubts about the message
reaching its target unhindered or unaltered, and some forms of
(04:01):
this problem. And I think I've actually been like formally
mathematically proven. Now. It's funny how, on one hand, the
two general's problem is used to illustrate issues about the
inherent uncertainties of telecommunication in computer science and networking technology.
But I also think about how, in a practical sense,
if you like, we're to take this out of the
(04:22):
thought experiment realm and apply real modern technology to it.
Modern telecommunications have pretty much made this problem obsolete in
the way it's literally envisioned. Because while electronic messages can
still be intercepted, they can be subject to man in
the middle attacks and so forth. Something like a traditional
voice to voice phone call is just pretty solid, right
(04:45):
if you get on the phone with the other general
there is simultaneous real time two way communication, which would
allow for enough you know, conversational fidelity to massively reduce
the uncertainty of both generals. If they can talk and
it's simultane and he is talking, they're probably going to
feel confident enough to go ahead, right right, I am
communicating with the person nay to communicate with. We can
(05:08):
we can hash out the details that it comes up,
like well, which don which of the various sons of
thraw are we referring to? But they can go ahead,
and you know, any kind of potential miscommunications can be
ironed out in real time rather quickly without having to
to send messages back and forth. Right, And it makes
me think about how we generally take like simultaneous instantaneous
(05:29):
telecommunications totally for granted these days, but for the vast
majority of human history, communication with anybody out of your
line of sight was not easy. It took intense time
and labor to transmit messages to people who were not
in your direct vicinity. This was a major limitation on
previous civilizations. It was a major limitation on the scope
(05:53):
of projects that could be coordinated. It was a major
limitation on just personal relationships over distance. I mean it,
the world is so different now that we have basically
instantaneous simultaneous telecommunication. It's it's a different world than it
was before. Yeah, yeah, this is this is a fascinating
topic and it's actually pretty interesting to think about it
(06:14):
within the confines of the Dark Crystal Thraw situation, because
on one hand, I think it I think you're absolutely
correct with the Gelflings. I don't think it is established
in the Cannon that they have any means of long
distance communication aside from sending messengers such as their their
their wing and females um. Some of them can communicate
with animals, so they could do that. Otherwise their dream
(06:36):
fasting abilities have to be done like basically within close contact.
And then there's also this ability to etch dreams and rocks,
but I don't know if that it was ever established
as being anything that could be done quickly. That seems
like more of a communicate with future generation sort of thing. Meanwhile,
the Skexies during the Gartha Wars, at least they have
(06:59):
the crystal bats, which are you know, these these crystal
uh creature amalgams that can fly through the air and
they're used for spying. But uh, they're not expressly used
for long distance communication, but it seems like maybe they
could be. And in the Age of Resistance, it is
implied that they're able to summon skech Maul the hunter
(07:20):
from Afar, So they seem to have some means at
their disposal, and that gives them a tremendous advantage over
the gelf links of this scenario. Well don't they like
blow a big horn to summon the skexest voiced by
Ralph Inison. Oh yeah, yeah, is it a horn that
they use? Okay, I think so, I could be wrong.
Well that's funny because it connects to one of the
next things that we're going to talk about, which is
(07:42):
what came before. Whenever we talk about an invention, we'd
like to say, were there ways people sort of tried
to solve or partially solve this problem before the invention
in question with other means. So before we get to
the invention of the electric telegraph in the first half
of the nineteenth century, there was a long history of
alternative solutions for long distance communication. So before the eighteen
(08:06):
thirties or so, if you needed to get a message
to somebody far away as fast as possible, what were
your options? Uh? And I guess the first category of
things we should talk about is UH, fast movers. One
of you know, this option is pretty straightforward. Send a
message by the fastest moving person or thing that you
can get your hands on that you think will actually
(08:28):
get it to the to its point of destination. So
these could be fast moving runners or writers. I was
looking at a couple of examples of organized systems of
fast moving messengers in history. One is cited in the
work of the Greek historian Herodotus. There appear to be
different versions of the paragraph in question from the history
(08:49):
of Herodotus, But uh, this text I'm about to quote
was the one translated into English by Macaulay in eight
So this is talking about the context of uh war
with Persia, and it mentions the Persian king Xerxes. So
Herodotus writes, quote, while Xerxes was doing thus, he sent
a messenger to the Persians to announce the calamity which
(09:12):
had come upon them. Now there is nothing mortal which
accomplishes a journey with more speed than these messengers. So
skillfully has this been invented by the Persians? For they
say that according to the number of days of which
the entire journey consists, so many horses and men are
set at intervals. Each man and a horse appointed for
(09:32):
a day's journey. These neither snow, nor rain, nor heat,
nor darkness of night prevents from accomplishing each one the
task proposed to him with the very utmost speed. The
first then rides and delivers the message with which he
has charged the second, and the second to the third,
and after that it goes through them, handed from one
(09:52):
to the other, as in the torch race among the Hellenes,
which they perform for he faced us. This kind of
running of their horses the Persians call an angaryon, So
this is interesting. This angeryon that Herodotus describes is a
is a massive messaging system throughout the Persian Empire which
(10:14):
involves riders that each travel for one day's journey and then,
like a relay race, hand the message off to a
fresh writer who's rested and ready to go the next day.
A couple of other things struck me about this quote.
One is that it has that line which I think
it was later adapted into the motto of the US
Postal Service, the you know, neither rain, nor heat, nor
(10:35):
darkness of night prevents us from accomplishing our rounds, which
I think speaks to the longevity of this particular solution
like this. This is a solution that emerges out of
out of human innovation UH in multiple cultures, and it
sticks with us for a very long time because it's
just a very sensible, straightforward way to do it without
additional technological innovations to enable other possibilities. Right. But I
(11:00):
think there's another part of this that needs to be appreciated,
which is that messaging systems like this, which this is
not unique to the Persians. I want to talk about
another example in a second. They don't just rely on
fast movers themselves. They don't just rely on say the
riders or the runners being swift. They also usually rely
(11:20):
on infrastructure, having some kind of dedicated road or pathway system,
often with like stations or houses along the way, in
order to facilitate that fast travel, because of course, you know,
the terrain you're traveling over makes a very big difference
to how fast you can go. Of course, having the
UH the path laid out for you, and not having
(11:41):
to navigate just through open country that also makes a
big difference. So one of the other examples I wanted
to mention were the famous the chas Keys of the
Incan Empire in the in the andies in South America. UH.
These were messengers who carried information by foot. They were
runners who would carry keypoos with them. The keypoos were
(12:01):
the talking knots, the not based UH notation system that
would be on these these cords or fibers, and the
knots in them would encode some kind of information, and
so the runners would carry these keypos with them, UH,
trading out with freshly rested runners at waypoints along this
road system throughout the Incan Empire, and a commonly cited
(12:24):
figure is that these runners could UH could cover distances
of about two hundred and forty kilometers a day, which
is very impressive. But as impressive as these systems are,
like the systems used by the Persians and the Incans,
there are still pretty stiff limitations on how fast a
message can travel by by runner or rider. I mean
(12:46):
that that's still relatively slow compared to solutions that would
come along later. Yeah, because it may only be uh,
you know, five miles as the crow flies, but even
with the best road that you've been able to cut
between point A and point B, that that distance could
could be doubled. But speaking as of the crow, that
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may fly above the mountains and the roads and the
bridges and the rivers and so forth. There, of course,
is the the other obvious solution to this, and it's
the use of animals. It's the use specifically of homing pigeons,
and the practice of attaching messages to homing pigeons and
releasing them. This dates back to the ancient world. Uh.
(13:27):
This this has been a trace back to depending on
where you're looking, what source you're looking at, to ancient
Egypt or ancient Persia. Certainly the Romans used homing pigeons. Uh,
certainly a subset of fast movers, and it depends on
a rare, domesticated animal mover that can be trusted to
return to a specific location. Now that's not to say
(13:50):
it's guaranteed that a single bird will make it back
with the message. But and this is one of the
reasons why you would release more than one carrying the
same message. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The pigeons thing makes me
think of the two generals problem again. There you're introducing
kind of serious questions about whether your message actually gets through.
I think, yeah. I mean, because if you're sending a
(14:12):
runner or you're sending a bird, there are just things
that can happen. A hawk uh might decide that that
pigeon looks particularly delicious. Uh. That you could also have
counter intelligence enemy operatives who who are catching or shooting
pigeons out of the air that sort of thing, or
the pigeon might see something it's interested in along the
way and get distracted. Right, It's again, it's not guaranteed.
(14:36):
I believe. We did an episode on homing pigeons and
also compared them to the use of other homing animals
and other fantasy series and sort of talked about why
don't we use owls, why do we use pigeons, Why
don't we use crows, why are they why are we
using pigeons, and so forth. Now, there's another method of
long distance communication that goes much faster, uh and has
(15:01):
been achieved in some rather ingenious forms throughout the world,
and that's auditory long distance communication. That's right, Yeah, I
mean this at heart, this is pretty straightforward, right. We
use You can just use sound to communicate something. You
just need to make sure that it is a sound
that can be heard. Uh. We already alluded to the
possibility of summoning skech Maul the hunter by blowing a horn.
(15:23):
And another of course fantasy example that comes to mind,
or the horns of the night Watch, and uh, the
Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones. One
blast of the horn means rangers are returning. To blast
means it's wild things attacking the wall or you know,
or in the vicinity out there. And then three horn
blasts that means it's the others or the White Walkers attacking. Now,
(15:44):
George RR. Martin and creating this is of course playing
off of the long history and human cultures of using
horns and other loud instruments to communicate. And these are
called signal instruments. And there are a great many things
that fall under this basic category, and many of them
some of the the example you're gonna point out here. They're
also far more complicated than this, uh the simple three
(16:05):
horn system would suggest. So signal drums are among the
oldest documented form of signal instruments and they have a
long history in Africa especially, and again these are pretty complicated.
According to David Locke and Godwin Belly in article titled
Drum language in a Zogbo, this is an example of
what we can indeed think of as quote, a surrogate
(16:28):
language played on musical instruments. And in addition to the
use of drums, we see the use of um of courtaphones, aeriophones, membronophones,
and ideophones used as in this manner historically among various
African people's quote. These surrogate languages maybe signals, that is,
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special symbolic codes or representations of speech, that is, actual
imitations of spoken language. These talking drums worked generally by
imitating the rhythm of words in a given language, so
like the rise and fall of specific words. And they
could be used to send messages up to twenty miles
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or thirty or two kilometers, and then of course the
message could then be relayed by other drummers to spread
news or other communications. And yeah, these were used, according
to Lock and Belly, for all sorts of things you
could have, um, uh you know, messages, messages, announcements, invocations, prayers, proverbs, eulogies,
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emergency alarms, etcetera. And of course we continue to see
you know, echoes of these very basic uses, like anytime
there is allowed announcement that needs to be heard by people,
uh you know, and sometimes that announcement is made via
a sound. Uh. You know, we're kind of dipping into
this same area. Now, there are additional examples we might
turn to if we were to do an exhaustive look
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at the different forms of auditory long distance communication you have,
especially in military uh said situations. You have things like
fife and drum corps. You have as tech conk signal ers.
You have alpine horns, bugle players, church bells. Even we
don't really think of that, but a church bell is
a way of communicating uh something to the surrounding area. Bagpipes,
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of course are a big one in uh, in different cultures.
So yeah, there's a whole list of any anything you have.
Time you have something that can create a very loud noise,
and especially we can be modulated, uh in some form
or another. Well that can be used to communicate. All right,
well that's long distance uh communication by sound. But another
thing that we should explore is what is sometimes called
(18:37):
optical telegraphy uh. And we of course associate the telegraph
with the technology we're gonna be talking about in a bit,
the electrical telegraph, but telegraph technically just means distance writing basically,
you know, writing writing far away uh. So communication at
a distance, and it was used to refer to these
optical techniques before it was ever used to for two
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electrical techniques. And the optical techniques could involve all kinds
of things, uh, fire and smoke signals, thing what's known
as semaphore, towers with shutters and flags basically, oh, mirrors
that reflect the sunlight. Basically anything you can use to
create a visual signal that somebody at a distance could
(19:20):
see and then maybe relay along to the next station. Uh,
so that you can go beyond a single a single
station's line of sight that also works to transmit messages
at a distance. Yeah. And of course if you need
if you say you're if you're at sea or something
dealing with you know, with with uniform um heights and all,
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and it's just like one person on one ship and
it's just as far as the next ship is visible.
But in other cases you might need to make use
of towers or higher points of elevation. Um. But yeah,
and all of this, uh you see everything from me
a mirrors to a lot of flares and towards chosen lights.
But also yeah, this use of semaphore UM. This was
(20:04):
used for ship ship ship to ship communication often you know,
you accomplished with flags, but it could also be carried
out by a giant puppet sort of. Um Claude Chope
in France and developed a system by which giant pivoted
arms on a tower could convey the signal to other
towers uh five to ten miles or eight to sixteen
(20:26):
kilometers apart, and then these messages could be then read
by telescopic sightings. Okay, this makes me think, like the
Aliens are landing, it's eighteen hundred or so, and they
just see this long string along the countryside of these
like dancing giant scarecrows with their arms waving all over
the place. Yeah. Yeah, I mean it looked kind of like, um,
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I guess it kind of looks like an American football goal,
but of course it can move, and it's to create
these various shapes that represent different letters. Uh so, yeah,
it's pretty crazy to think about like this. This was
one way of carrying out this form of long distance communication,
which makes me think in a fantasy setting. I don't
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know that anyone has done this, but say, like like
take a game of Throne style world or any of
these other ones. You often have giants about. The giants
are generally tasked with things like breaking down walls and
heaving stones, but it seems like kind of a waste
of their ability get them to stand on the nearest
hill and do a bunch of arm motions and send
signals to another giant on another hill. Well, this does
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highlight something that I mean, as far as the actual
speed of travel from station to station goes with optical symaphore,
I mean, you can't really beat the speed of light.
That that's great, but you are limited by line of sight.
So you would be required to have stations close enough
together and enough of them that they could keep like
seeing the message the last station transmitted and then transmit
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that along the chain to its intended destination. And so
that does require a lot of infrastructure and like human
off paraders for these big weird puppets. Yeah uh. And
of course with with semaphore also, yeah, you have to
you have to know the language of it. Now, there's
(22:15):
a There are a couple of other systems I want
to want to discuss here, and you could categorize them
both as being hydraulic telegraphs. Though to be clear, even
though they both are water based and involved water. One
of them is essentially an optical system. The other is
more overtly hydraulic in nature. So it's two different systems.
(22:36):
There's one that's a fourth century BC Greek system and
the Lads and nineteenth century British invention that UH and
the Greek system in question here it was actually used.
The British invention never really progressed past the test phase
for obvious reasons, as we'll get into. But the Greek
technology of the hydraulic telegraph was used during the First
(22:57):
Punic War, and it's described by both Tacticus and the Polybius.
It was essentially a system of water aided semaphore, so
torches were used to sync up two sides. So again,
imagine two sides on two different hills. They can see
the flames that each side has so they can communicate
with torch. But in addition to each side having a torch,
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each side also has a water vessel with a with
a lined vertical rod inserted inside it. UH. You know,
like you might use to to measure the depth and
measure to measure how much water is in that vessel.
Once they the two sides have syncd up, with their
with reveals of their torches. Then they both start draining
their vessels, and we have to stress these vessels are
(23:40):
not connected in any way. Okay. Uh So then they
both stop when the sender signal stop with the torch.
So it's again it's like all right, your flash of
the torch, start draining your vessel. Okay, now stop, let's
both stop at the same time, and they both stop.
Uh So, the different measured water levels in side the
(24:00):
vessel that both sides have have different messages at the
different depth levels, such as calvalry arrived in the country,
or heavy infantry or ships or corn, simple messages like that,
and if it's ancient Greece, that would have to be
corn in the older meaning of like grain in general,
not meaning maze right right now. The British system in
(24:21):
question here was designed by civil engineer Francis wish Shaw,
who later worked in electric telegraphs, and it was devised
to you know, similarly to to send a coded message
that could be read, but and based on water pressure
in a chamber, though in this case the receiving chamber
would be connected to the sending chamber, so there's literally
(24:43):
like a hose of some sort or pipe connecting these
two different stations, and of course multiple stations as well. Um.
So they wouldn't have labeled specific messages within the chamber.
But whether there was a language of changes in water
pressure sure more in keeping with what will act we'll
discuss in reference to say like morse code. Um. So
(25:06):
it would not be like, okay, go to level five
and that means that we need ships. No, it would
be like, uh, you know, increase, increased, decrease, There's something
to that effect. There would be a language of changing
levels in the water. Um. Of course, there are obvious
limitations that come to mind with this. You're dealing you're
dealing with with with water and the pressure of water.
You're if you had this system set up in a
(25:28):
place where the temperatures dropped enough, you'd have to deal
with potential freezes and so forth. So it was apparently
never developed outside of tests. Okay, interesting idea though, yeah,
And of course obviously it becomes unnecessary given the advances
of the electric telegraph. Exactly. So the real revolution comes
(25:48):
with the discovery of electricity. In particular a few a
few different breakthroughs. One is the work of Alessandro Volta
on the storage and control of electrical current with the
use of the voltaic pile, which is pretty much the
same principle as what we would today call a battery,
which Volta created around the year eighteen hundred and Another
(26:11):
input on the development of electrical telegraphy was the research
on the relationship between electricity and magnetism, especially that of
Hans Christian or Instead of Denmark in eighteen twenty, where
he found, for example, that you could attract one of
the polls of a magnetic compass by running current through
a nearby wire. Now, building on this knowledge, the idea
(26:34):
of transmitting messages across electrical wires created an exciting technological
frontier in around the eighteen thirties. Now, the electrical telegraph
is not one of those inventions that was a unique
stroke of genius by a single inventor working alone from
out of nowhere. Rather, it's it's exactly the opposite. It's
(26:54):
one of those cases where lots of people all around
the same time became interested in basically the same idea.
In this case, they became aware that you could use
electromagnetism to send encoded messages over wire across a great
distance and at great speed, receipt would be practically instantaneous.
(27:15):
You can't ask for much better than that. So electrical
telegraphy was not an unexpected breakthrough that came from from
a single point, but rather a kind of uh race
between many different inventors and teams to design the ideal
system to implement this new potential. And there were so
many different ideas we certainly can't mention them all. Instead,
(27:37):
we're going to focus on a couple of the major
early models that were the most influential. So one team
was based in England and that was Sir William Cook
and Sir Charles Wheatstone. And then another team was based
in the United States. That was Samuel Morise, Leonard Gael
and Alfred Vale and uh And a kind of interesting
(27:58):
thing to to keep in mind here is that, really
I think the most important differences in the systems were
actually not so much in the core transmission technology, but
in the systems for encoding and decoding the messages, because
remember this is not a phone call. There's no complex
audio signal traveling through the wires of a telegraph. Instead,
(28:20):
what was clear in the eighteen thirties was that you
could send current through a wire. You could send h
current or pulses of electricity and by extension magnetism, and
so the question was what is the best way to
encode and decode information using that electrical current across wire?
So first I'm gonna talk about the the English team
(28:41):
the Cook and Wheatstone telegraph. This was also known sometimes
as the five needle telegraph, though there were actually many
models with different numbers of needles, but it was a
way to transmit written messages across wires with the use
of a coding diamond and an array of five different
magnetic pointer needles. Unfortunately, I think this is one that's
(29:05):
just really hard to explain without a visual aid. So
if you can look up a picture of the Cook
Wheatstone Telegraph, I recommend it, but if not, I will
do my best to explain it. So imagine a sort
of large diamond shape made out of many smaller diamonds,
and those smaller diamonds are connecting letters of the alphabet.
(29:26):
So on the upper half of the diamond, picture like
a pyramid with the letter A at the top, and
then two lines forking down from the A, and those
forks go to the letters B, and D, and each
of those letters has two lines below it, forking down
to two more letters, So the B forks to an
(29:46):
E and an F, the D forks to the F
and the G, and so on. And then this forking
alphabet pyramid is again represented upside down with different letters
below the middle line of this diamond. So the big
diamond is full of the letters of the alphabet, not
all the letters of the alphabet, as we'll get to
in a minute, but most of them. And then in
(30:09):
the middle of this big vertical diamond, it is bisected
by a line, which is a rack mounted with five
magnetic needles. Now, the five needles could be operated by
switches at the transmitting station, which would send current through
the wire associated with each needle and would attract or
(30:30):
repell it, causing it to move pointing either to the
left or the right. By triggering two different pointer needles
at the same time, you could essentially point to any
letter on the diamond. So one needle would turn and
you'd look up the line where it's pointing. Another needle
would turn, you'd look up the line where it's pointing,
(30:51):
and you'd see where those two lines intersected, and that
would be the letter that's encoded in the message. Now
I've been describing the five needle model. The rack stally
other variations on on the Cook and Wheatstone design which
required which had different numbers of needles and as fewer needles,
which was cheaper to do because you didn't have to
use as many wires, but which required more training for
(31:13):
the operators to encode and decode messages rather than using
the whole alphabet diamond um So, after its invention in
the eighteen thirties, the Cook and Wheatstone telegraph was put
into use in several variations by railway companies in Britain,
since rail stations were the places where instantaneous distance communication
(31:33):
was actually useful, that was needed there, and they had
the money to invest in the infrastructure necessary to operate
the machines. Though I think actually um Cook and Wheatstone
may have paid out of pocket to implement some of
the original designs because it was initially considered experimental, early
implementations of the telegraph would widely be associated with rail
(31:55):
and railway stations. Uh and and in fact that actually
plays into one of the most famous stories about how
the telegraph was used. Early on. So the Cook and
wheat Stone telegraph was famously used in the apprehension of
a murderer named John Tawell in eighteen forty four. Have
you ever heard of this rob So the story goes
(32:17):
like this. Tawell was a British shopkeeper and chemist who
had at multiple points he had been a member of
the Quakers, and he had been carrying on an extramarital
affair with a woman named Sarah Hart, and I think
it was on New Year's Day eighteen forty five he
apparently murdered her by poisoning her beer with hydrogen cyanide,
(32:39):
and witnesses saw him leaving her house and then she
was found dead in her house. He was tracked to
the railway station in the city where he was, which
was slow in southern England. Towell tried to flee the
area by boarding a steam engine in Slough that was
bound for Paddington station in Westminster, but the authorities used
(33:02):
the telegraph to send a head a description to Paddington
and there he was apprehended successfully. He was put on
trial and he was convicted. And as a side note,
I think he his lawyer tried to argue that um
that the woman had been poisoned by eating by eating
the seeds of an apple. But an interesting quirk of
(33:25):
the telegraph technology was that again it didn't code for
every letter of the alphabet, just most of them, So
the machine did not have letters such as Q or
J or X or U or C or z, presumably
because you could replace all of these letters phonetically with
combinations of other letters, as they actually did in the
(33:47):
message they sent. Because the main fact used to identify
um John Towell at the location was that he was
wearing uh quote Quaker garb, so he was wearing the
clothing commonly associated with the Quakers. But they didn't have
a queue on the machine, so they had to spell
at k W a k e er, which apparently led
(34:07):
to great confusion, but they eventually figured it out. Also,
the very opening of the message, because there was no
J in the machine, says a murder has gust been committed.
But anyway, so looking at the Cook and Wheatstone model
with when you're when you're actually talking about the five
needle model, the one that's got the most complete alphabetic
(34:28):
diamond with all those needles. A great upside here is
that you didn't really need any special training to decode
messages other than basic literacy, because they would be spelled
out in plane language with a few simple phonetic substitutions.
A downside to the five needle model was that in
order to operate all these needles, the machines had to
(34:49):
be connected by cable arrays consisting of like five or
six different wires strung out along polls, and that was expensive. Yeah,
not just one wire but multiple wires. And then also,
let's face it, criminals could have eventually figured this out.
They're like, Okay, if I'm going to commit a crime,
I just need to make sure there are a lot
of j's and queues and cs and what I'm doing.
(35:10):
So I need to dress as a juggler, uh while
wearing a queen's tierra um and be on the lookout
for guggler. What can you imagine the confusion and sending
messages about jazz, oh goodness, no JA or Z will
that be g A S S. You can't do it,
(35:31):
It just doesn't work. You gotta you gotta have the ZS. Okay.
But that was one of the big English models, the
model that really won out in the in the early
telegraph Wars was the one that that grew out of
the work of Morse, Gael and Veil in America. That's right, Yeah,
that leads us to American artist and inventor Samuel F. B. Morris.
Um is an interesting guy, a Calvinist painter who was
(35:54):
also interested in electricity, a little bit interested in politics,
and then ultimately falls into and to helping to invent this,
uh this, this this impressive technology. And of course Morrise code.
So as a child he was apparently eccentric and at
times disinterested. As a student, but he was interested in
(36:15):
painting miniature portraits, which one biographer was looking at said
that it apparently distressed his parents. You know that this
is this is his interest because his father was a
distinguished geographer and uh, Congregationalist clergyman. But here is a
little Morrise and he just wants to paint little pictures
for the most part. Can you imagine the horror that
your son wants to paint. But Morris ends up graduating
(36:40):
from Yale. While he's there, he attends some lectures on electricity,
so he does become interested in uh in some of
this new technology. After graduating, travels to England, to study
under the American painter Washington Allston, and when he comes back,
he turns to painting portraits to make a living. He
wasn't well off, but he moved in intellectual circles and
eventually taught at what would become in Why You. And
(37:00):
then it happens he's returning from another trip to Europe
in eighteen thirty two, and he overhears a conversation about
this exciting new electro magnet technology and he gets it
in his head like other people have gotten it in
their head. This is how we can we can send
a long distance communication. Uh. He seems to have, like
(37:21):
many of these individuals, probably thought that he came up
with the idea and uh, you know, and was perhaps
the first, but of course it had already been proposed
in seventeen fifty three, had been tested in seventeen seventy four,
but he persisted and made his own model by eighteen
thirty five and was all in on the invention by
eighteen thirty seven. Uh. Sometimes it is it's argued that
(37:42):
you know that he's a that he was like a
quote unquote failed painter who then became this And then
if he had been successful, as a painter, maybe he
would not have turned to this innovation. I don't know.
Those are often strange conversations to get into a lot
of like what ifs in the arching narrative of a
single individual. Okay, his collaborators were Leonard Gail and Alfred Vale. Yes, yeah,
(38:05):
he ends up teaming up with a chemist Leonard Gail,
and a machinist Alfred Vale. I don't know if you
insisted on their names rhyming like that that came together.
They both became partners in his telegraph venture. Morse and
Vale developed a code to use the telegraph, consisting of
the system of dots and dashes. I've also seen it
credited as being a situation where Morse invented it, but
(38:27):
then Vale helped improve upon it. Uh. And there were
other points at which it needed to be improved upon. So,
for instance, it was developed in America. Um. But then
it was introduced to Europe and they realized, okay, well,
we've got to make changes with it so that it
will work with other languages. So the International Morse Code
or Continental Morse Code was devised in eighteen fifty one
(38:50):
by a conference of European nations. Yeah, and I think
the original uh idea of Morse code was that in
it in many ways you can see why it would
be an improved and over say these like, uh, you know,
five wires for the letter diamond thing, because Morse code,
you're just opening and closing the circuit, right is just
like there, there's a simple action. And then all you
(39:12):
need is a code for the timing of your your
dots and dashes for like closing the circuit for a
quick thing or a little bit longer. That's your dot
in your dash. And then with the combination of dots
and dashes, you can code out the entire alphabet. I
believe the original idea with Morse code was that it
was supposed to first um be something that would be
transcribed as dots and dashes on paper and then decoded
(39:36):
on paper by somebody who has trained in the code.
But eventually they figured out that oh, okay, operators who
have some experience with this just learn the code and
then they can go straight from hearing it to knowing
exactly what the actual plain text messages. So at that
point they modified the technical design to make it like Louder,
to make it into sort of very clear audible beeps
(39:56):
and bibs instead of just the clicking of the eating implement. Yeah,
and I imagine a lot of you have heard audio
of this before. You know where the code takes on
the form of something like say di di di di
di dit data sort of a thing, or you've perhaps
you've seen a movie where someone uses Morse code to
communicate whilst you trapped in a casket or a tomb
(40:19):
or something. You know, um that it's been. It's been
utilized a number of times in motion pictures. Interesting thing
about the message s O S that is something that
comes from Morse code, and it actually doesn't stand for anything.
S OS is not an acronym. It's just a code
that was chosen because it's easy to code and easy
to distinguish when you hear it, because one letter is
(40:40):
just three dots and one letter is three dashes. Now, apparently,
in creating this, Morse was trying to cash in on
like a bounty that had been established by the US
Congress of something like thirty thou dollars for someone who
could create a real time telegraphy system that would essentially
connect a bunch of different I don't remember exactly what
(41:02):
the extent of it was supposed to be, but they
had some specifications and and Morrise was trying to claim
that money, saying like, well, I've done it, I've got
what you're looking for. And all this does lead up
to Morse doing a demonstration of the new technology for
the US Congress. So whenever there's a new technology for
transmitting or recording messages, you always want to know what
(41:24):
was the first message. And you know, there's a little
bit of slide of hand in these stories because you
can imagine, well, there were probably always like a little
weird test messages before that whatever the canonical supposed first
message was. But we still know about some famous examples.
So you got the first telephone call in eighteen seventy six,
where supposedly what it was was Alexander Graham Bell calling
(41:45):
his associate Thomas Watson and saying, Mr Watson, come here,
I want you. And then of course there's always the
question of the first audio recording made. That's a little
bit more complicated. It depends on if you count recordings
made by somebody named Edward Leone Scott de Martinville in
France in the eighteen fifties, or I think maybe in
the year eighteen sixty this consisted of a recording of
(42:08):
all Claire Duloon. But the more commonly cited example is
Thomas Edison recording into his talking machine around eighteen seventy seven.
And I think he claimed that the first message recorded
was him reciting Mary had a little Lamb, But some
evidence indicates maybe the real answer was that he was
reciting the alphabet, or just saying messages like can you
(42:29):
hear this? Yeah, I'll come back to this in a
in a bit here. But technology historian James Burke mentions
this um in Connections, and he describes it not as
a singing but as a shouting of Mary had a
little lamb. It's flee sowless, white as snow. So if
it was more shouting than singing, then maybe you can
(42:49):
get a little um pedantic about whether this constitute of
first recording of the song. Okay, but at least you know,
if you buy the mythology the canonical examples, Mr Watson,
come here, I want you Mary had a little lamb.
What are we going to get for the telegraph? Well,
apparently the first public message sent by telegraphs as a
demonstration for the US Congress by Samuel Morrison Alfred Vale.
(43:12):
It was sent between Washington, d C. And Baltimore, and
the message was what hath God wrought? Something about? This
is hilarious to me. It's a quotation from the Bible,
and I am sure Morse did not mean it this way,
but it suggests a sort of Oppenheimer esque horror and
regret about the birth of this new technology. I'm sure
(43:33):
that is not what it was supposed to sound like.
But I don't know. I think something is lost across
the culture and history there. Yeah, I don't. I don't
understand why this particular quote screams to be the first
transmitted message. Yeah, like, why not something a little more
upbeat or just a little more clear? What have I done?
(43:55):
But okay, But anyway, we get all these telegraph innovations,
electrical telegraph in a vations in the eighteen thirties and
eighteen forties and in the decades to follow. It becomes
an essential part of technological civilization. You know. It's like
it's used for all kinds of things. I've read multiple
references to it being used to make rail travel safer, presumably,
(44:16):
I think to coordinate travel along rail lines to reduce
the risk of say, collisions or something. Okay, so not
just to help prevent murderous quakers from traveling. Yes, you
know it. It's coming back to the two generals problem.
It also certainly had an impact on military operations, as
it could be used in real time to solve this
(44:37):
very problem. It's been discussed by historians that the telegraph
was a technology that helped Abraham Lincoln in the defeat
of the Confederates. The Confederates the Confederate States during the
Civil War they had telegraph technology as well, but they
didn't use them as much or as well as the
Union Army. Um. Now, you might not think about this,
(44:59):
but uh, what this amounted to is not just taking
advantage of pre existing telegraph lines, but you had to
have someone to build telegraph lines during battles, including like
maintaining them during an actual shooting battle. And that's exactly
what the Union Armies Telegraph Construction Corps did, uh do.
(45:20):
So it's it's pretty pretty impressive to to think about. Interesting.
I didn't know that outside of warfare, though sometimes this
also factors into warfare. Obviously, telegraph technology had a big
impact on journalism. Uh, It's just it comes down to
just how quickly you can convey information, and it's why
so many newspapers to this day have telegraph in their names.
(45:42):
Well how about wire service? Yeah, yeah, there you go. Yeah,
it all comes down to the same thing because and
of course this is playing on the fact too that
you also have these other papers that have the older
terms of like post and mail in their titles. But
journalism at the time where there are many of these
outlets that were just ready to fully embrace this new
technology high speed communication. High speed communication means better news,
(46:06):
and we're gonna put that slap dab in the title
of the paper itself. Though. It's funny thinking about if,
like the similar principle applied to later ways, like the
technology that was used to acquire the information that is
published in the article, Like if later newspapers were called
like the daily telephone or something, Yeah, the weekly outsourcing
(46:28):
of reporting duties or so forth. Um, but your morning
facts Yeah, um, but yeah, I know, you know, you can,
you can. There may be there may be some example
that I'm I'm missing the where we can envision this.
But I mentioned that I was going to come back
(46:48):
to Uh, Mary had a little lamb. And I want
to come back to something that technology historian James Burke
brings up in connections, and that is that there is
a direct line to be drawn from the repeating telegraph
to the invention of the Edison phonograph. So in the
eighteen seventy seven innovation allowed the coded messages from a
telegraph to be encoded by a stylus on a waxed
(47:11):
paper disc. The stylist moved up and down, making indentations
in the disc as it revolved on what was essentially
a turntable. Uh. To replay the message, you flip the
paper disc over, which turned these inventions into bumps. Uh.
And a reader stylist traveled over these bumps. Okay, so
Thomas Edison is said, and again we have to consider
(47:33):
the possible, you know, myth making uh uh mild or
overt in any invention story. But Thomas Edison is said
to have been listening to such a machine work at
high speed and realize that there was a connection between
the vibration of the stylists and a sound pattern. Burke writes, quote,
he hit upon the idea, not a new one, that
he could reproduce sounds as vibrations by the use of
(47:55):
a thin membrane. So he placed a needle on the
membrane that would up and down as the membrane vibrated,
and mounted it in such a way to score a
bumpy path in tinfoil. So he tinkered with this setup
and then famously was able to and again Burke describes
it as a shouting of Mary had a little lamb
its flee so it's white as snow at the membrane.
(48:17):
Then return it to the original position, placed the needle
in the groove and turned the cylinder at the same
speed to reproduce his own voice through the vibrating membrane.
And so the phonograph and the age of recorded sound
was essentially born out of this shift. And these are
just a few of the examples, because ultimately we were
talking about the the the advent of the telegraph. I mean,
(48:41):
it really was a game changer. Like we're entering the
age of of of telecommunication at this point, you know,
we're entering the age of rapid communication. And this is
this is the this technology is the forerunner of so
many of the technologies as defined life in the modern
age totally. I mean there's a lot more we could
(49:01):
talk about on the subject, though I think for time
we got to wrap it up. Yeah, so we're gonna
go ahead and call it there, but yes, we may
come back in the future. If there's a particular aspect
of this episode you'd like to be further explored, let
us know. Let us know also your thoughts on the
invention of the telegraph technologies that came before UH technologies
(49:21):
and traditions as well. We'd love to hear from you.
As always remind you, We remind you that Stuff to
Blow Your Mind is a science podcast that publishes on
Tuesdays and Thursdays and the Stuff to Blow Your Mind
podcast feed um and we also have a Monday episode
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publish a short form artifact or monster fact episode, and
(49:42):
on Friday's we do Weird Our Cinema. That's our time
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(50:11):
to Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio.
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your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My
Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and
today is going to be one of our Invention episodes.
We're going to be talking about the invention of the
(00:23):
electrical telegraph. And I thought perhaps a good way to
kick off this talk would be to discuss a classic
thought experiment known as the two generals problem, Rob do
you ever encountered this before? I don't think I've really
seen it spelled out. So this one is a lot
of fun. So this is used in like computer science
classes and stuff these days. Normally it has a kind
(00:46):
of generic format, though to give a little extra flare, uh,
it typically takes place in an archaic, low technology setting.
So I'm going to give this generic problem a dark
crystal twist. Oh we're going to throw yeah, yeah, okay, okay.
So you've got two Guelfling armies and they are set
(01:06):
to attack the Skexi stronghold in the Castle of the Crystal,
and the two armies are stationed on opposite sides of
the valley where the stronghold lies. The gain world that
would be the ba Limb Valley. But so there's a
valley where the castle is, the two armies are on
opposite sides, and the valley is shrouded in an eerie haze. Now,
(01:28):
each gulf Ling army is commanded by a general, and
the two generals know that with their combined strength, if
they attack at the same time, they can defeat the
skex eas and overcome the power of the Crystal. But
if either of them attacks without the other, they're doomed.
They won't be strong enough, so they have to coordinate.
(01:50):
The only method they have to communicate is to send
a messenger through enemy territory to the other side. But
here's the problem. How can they ever be sure that
they are agreed on a plan. So imagine the first
general sends a message the messages we're going to attack
tomorrow at dawn. So maybe the general writes it down,
(02:12):
hands it off to the messenger and she flies off
into the fog with the message. But then the first
general has to wonder is she going to make it
through or will she be shot down and captured by
the Gartham. So without confirmation that the messenger succeeded, the
first general might really hesitate to go through with the attack,
(02:33):
because remember, neither army can succeed alone. So the first
general is just not going to know if the message
reached the second general and won't know if they're they're
actually on the same page or not. Yeah, it's not
just a trust exercise. It's a trust in your method
of long distance communication. Right now, you might think there's
a solution to this. You might think, well, the second
(02:54):
general could just send back a confirmation message. So so
imagine the first messenger does get through, second general writes
the message that says tomorrow at dawn confirmed, and they
hand that off to their own messenger. The second messenger
flies off into the fog. But then, unfortunately the second
general would, like the first time, have no way of
(03:17):
knowing if their message made it through. And so the
second general may begin to wonder if the first general,
who may or may not have received a confirmation, will
actually go ahead with the attack or may hold back
for fear of leading that doomed maneuver alone. And then
you can just keep permuting this. You can say, okay, well,
the first general could send a message confirming that they
(03:38):
got the second general's confirmation, but Unfortunately, the same uncertainty
is before would still apply, and back and forth and
back and forth, with the point being that there is
actually no way to guarantee agreement on both sides of
a communication line when there were doubts about the message
reaching its target unhindered or unaltered, and some forms of
(04:01):
this problem. And I think I've actually been like formally
mathematically proven. Now. It's funny how, on one hand, the
two general's problem is used to illustrate issues about the
inherent uncertainties of telecommunication in computer science and networking technology.
But I also think about how, in a practical sense,
if you like, we're to take this out of the
(04:22):
thought experiment realm and apply real modern technology to it.
Modern telecommunications have pretty much made this problem obsolete in
the way it's literally envisioned. Because while electronic messages can
still be intercepted, they can be subject to man in
the middle attacks and so forth. Something like a traditional
voice to voice phone call is just pretty solid, right
(04:45):
if you get on the phone with the other general
there is simultaneous real time two way communication, which would
allow for enough you know, conversational fidelity to massively reduce
the uncertainty of both generals. If they can talk and
it's simultane and he is talking, they're probably going to
feel confident enough to go ahead, right right, I am
communicating with the person nay to communicate with. We can
(05:08):
we can hash out the details that it comes up,
like well, which don which of the various sons of
thraw are we referring to? But they can go ahead,
and you know, any kind of potential miscommunications can be
ironed out in real time rather quickly without having to
to send messages back and forth. Right, And it makes
me think about how we generally take like simultaneous instantaneous
(05:29):
telecommunications totally for granted these days, but for the vast
majority of human history, communication with anybody out of your
line of sight was not easy. It took intense time
and labor to transmit messages to people who were not
in your direct vicinity. This was a major limitation on
previous civilizations. It was a major limitation on the scope
(05:53):
of projects that could be coordinated. It was a major
limitation on just personal relationships over distance. I mean it,
the world is so different now that we have basically
instantaneous simultaneous telecommunication. It's it's a different world than it
was before. Yeah, yeah, this is this is a fascinating
topic and it's actually pretty interesting to think about it
(06:14):
within the confines of the Dark Crystal Thraw situation, because
on one hand, I think it I think you're absolutely
correct with the Gelflings. I don't think it is established
in the Cannon that they have any means of long
distance communication aside from sending messengers such as their their
their wing and females um. Some of them can communicate
with animals, so they could do that. Otherwise their dream
(06:36):
fasting abilities have to be done like basically within close contact.
And then there's also this ability to etch dreams and rocks,
but I don't know if that it was ever established
as being anything that could be done quickly. That seems
like more of a communicate with future generation sort of thing. Meanwhile,
the Skexies during the Gartha Wars, at least they have
(06:59):
the crystal bats, which are you know, these these crystal
uh creature amalgams that can fly through the air and
they're used for spying. But uh, they're not expressly used
for long distance communication, but it seems like maybe they
could be. And in the Age of Resistance, it is
implied that they're able to summon skech Maul the hunter
(07:20):
from Afar, So they seem to have some means at
their disposal, and that gives them a tremendous advantage over
the gelf links of this scenario. Well don't they like
blow a big horn to summon the skexest voiced by
Ralph Inison. Oh yeah, yeah, is it a horn that
they use? Okay, I think so, I could be wrong.
Well that's funny because it connects to one of the
next things that we're going to talk about, which is
(07:42):
what came before. Whenever we talk about an invention, we'd
like to say, were there ways people sort of tried
to solve or partially solve this problem before the invention
in question with other means. So before we get to
the invention of the electric telegraph in the first half
of the nineteenth century, there was a long history of
alternative solutions for long distance communication. So before the eighteen
(08:06):
thirties or so, if you needed to get a message
to somebody far away as fast as possible, what were
your options? Uh? And I guess the first category of
things we should talk about is UH, fast movers. One
of you know, this option is pretty straightforward. Send a
message by the fastest moving person or thing that you
can get your hands on that you think will actually
(08:28):
get it to the to its point of destination. So
these could be fast moving runners or writers. I was
looking at a couple of examples of organized systems of
fast moving messengers in history. One is cited in the
work of the Greek historian Herodotus. There appear to be
different versions of the paragraph in question from the history
(08:49):
of Herodotus, But uh, this text I'm about to quote
was the one translated into English by Macaulay in eight
So this is talking about the context of uh war
with Persia, and it mentions the Persian king Xerxes. So
Herodotus writes, quote, while Xerxes was doing thus, he sent
a messenger to the Persians to announce the calamity which
(09:12):
had come upon them. Now there is nothing mortal which
accomplishes a journey with more speed than these messengers. So
skillfully has this been invented by the Persians? For they
say that according to the number of days of which
the entire journey consists, so many horses and men are
set at intervals. Each man and a horse appointed for
(09:32):
a day's journey. These neither snow, nor rain, nor heat,
nor darkness of night prevents from accomplishing each one the
task proposed to him with the very utmost speed. The
first then rides and delivers the message with which he
has charged the second, and the second to the third,
and after that it goes through them, handed from one
(09:52):
to the other, as in the torch race among the Hellenes,
which they perform for he faced us. This kind of
running of their horses the Persians call an angaryon, So
this is interesting. This angeryon that Herodotus describes is a
is a massive messaging system throughout the Persian Empire which
(10:14):
involves riders that each travel for one day's journey and then,
like a relay race, hand the message off to a
fresh writer who's rested and ready to go the next day.
A couple of other things struck me about this quote.
One is that it has that line which I think
it was later adapted into the motto of the US
Postal Service, the you know, neither rain, nor heat, nor
(10:35):
darkness of night prevents us from accomplishing our rounds, which
I think speaks to the longevity of this particular solution
like this. This is a solution that emerges out of
out of human innovation UH in multiple cultures, and it
sticks with us for a very long time because it's
just a very sensible, straightforward way to do it without
additional technological innovations to enable other possibilities. Right. But I
(11:00):
think there's another part of this that needs to be appreciated,
which is that messaging systems like this, which this is
not unique to the Persians. I want to talk about
another example in a second. They don't just rely on
fast movers themselves. They don't just rely on say the
riders or the runners being swift. They also usually rely
(11:20):
on infrastructure, having some kind of dedicated road or pathway system,
often with like stations or houses along the way, in
order to facilitate that fast travel, because of course, you know,
the terrain you're traveling over makes a very big difference
to how fast you can go. Of course, having the
UH the path laid out for you, and not having
(11:41):
to navigate just through open country that also makes a
big difference. So one of the other examples I wanted
to mention were the famous the chas Keys of the
Incan Empire in the in the andies in South America. UH.
These were messengers who carried information by foot. They were
runners who would carry keypoos with them. The keypoos were
(12:01):
the talking knots, the not based UH notation system that
would be on these these cords or fibers, and the
knots in them would encode some kind of information, and
so the runners would carry these keypos with them, UH,
trading out with freshly rested runners at waypoints along this
road system throughout the Incan Empire, and a commonly cited
(12:24):
figure is that these runners could UH could cover distances
of about two hundred and forty kilometers a day, which
is very impressive. But as impressive as these systems are,
like the systems used by the Persians and the Incans,
there are still pretty stiff limitations on how fast a
message can travel by by runner or rider. I mean
(12:46):
that that's still relatively slow compared to solutions that would
come along later. Yeah, because it may only be uh,
you know, five miles as the crow flies, but even
with the best road that you've been able to cut
between point A and point B, that that distance could
could be doubled. But speaking as of the crow, that
(13:07):
may fly above the mountains and the roads and the
bridges and the rivers and so forth. There, of course,
is the the other obvious solution to this, and it's
the use of animals. It's the use specifically of homing pigeons,
and the practice of attaching messages to homing pigeons and
releasing them. This dates back to the ancient world. Uh.
(13:27):
This this has been a trace back to depending on
where you're looking, what source you're looking at, to ancient
Egypt or ancient Persia. Certainly the Romans used homing pigeons. Uh,
certainly a subset of fast movers, and it depends on
a rare, domesticated animal mover that can be trusted to
return to a specific location. Now that's not to say
(13:50):
it's guaranteed that a single bird will make it back
with the message. But and this is one of the
reasons why you would release more than one carrying the
same message. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The pigeons thing makes me
think of the two generals problem again. There you're introducing
kind of serious questions about whether your message actually gets through.
I think, yeah. I mean, because if you're sending a
(14:12):
runner or you're sending a bird, there are just things
that can happen. A hawk uh might decide that that
pigeon looks particularly delicious. Uh. That you could also have
counter intelligence enemy operatives who who are catching or shooting
pigeons out of the air that sort of thing, or
the pigeon might see something it's interested in along the
way and get distracted. Right, It's again, it's not guaranteed.
(14:36):
I believe. We did an episode on homing pigeons and
also compared them to the use of other homing animals
and other fantasy series and sort of talked about why
don't we use owls, why do we use pigeons, Why
don't we use crows, why are they why are we
using pigeons, and so forth. Now, there's another method of
long distance communication that goes much faster, uh and has
(15:01):
been achieved in some rather ingenious forms throughout the world,
and that's auditory long distance communication. That's right, Yeah, I
mean this at heart, this is pretty straightforward, right. We
use You can just use sound to communicate something. You
just need to make sure that it is a sound
that can be heard. Uh. We already alluded to the
possibility of summoning skech Maul the hunter by blowing a horn.
(15:23):
And another of course fantasy example that comes to mind,
or the horns of the night Watch, and uh, the
Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones. One
blast of the horn means rangers are returning. To blast
means it's wild things attacking the wall or you know,
or in the vicinity out there. And then three horn
blasts that means it's the others or the White Walkers attacking. Now,
(15:44):
George RR. Martin and creating this is of course playing
off of the long history and human cultures of using
horns and other loud instruments to communicate. And these are
called signal instruments. And there are a great many things
that fall under this basic category, and many of them
some of the the example you're gonna point out here. They're
also far more complicated than this, uh the simple three
(16:05):
horn system would suggest. So signal drums are among the
oldest documented form of signal instruments and they have a
long history in Africa especially, and again these are pretty complicated.
According to David Locke and Godwin Belly in article titled
Drum language in a Zogbo, this is an example of
what we can indeed think of as quote, a surrogate
(16:28):
language played on musical instruments. And in addition to the
use of drums, we see the use of um of courtaphones, aeriophones, membronophones,
and ideophones used as in this manner historically among various
African people's quote. These surrogate languages maybe signals, that is,
(16:48):
special symbolic codes or representations of speech, that is, actual
imitations of spoken language. These talking drums worked generally by
imitating the rhythm of words in a given language, so
like the rise and fall of specific words. And they
could be used to send messages up to twenty miles
(17:09):
or thirty or two kilometers, and then of course the
message could then be relayed by other drummers to spread
news or other communications. And yeah, these were used, according
to Lock and Belly, for all sorts of things you
could have, um, uh you know, messages, messages, announcements, invocations, prayers, proverbs, eulogies,
(17:31):
emergency alarms, etcetera. And of course we continue to see
you know, echoes of these very basic uses, like anytime
there is allowed announcement that needs to be heard by people,
uh you know, and sometimes that announcement is made via
a sound. Uh. You know, we're kind of dipping into
this same area. Now, there are additional examples we might
turn to if we were to do an exhaustive look
(17:53):
at the different forms of auditory long distance communication you have,
especially in military uh said situations. You have things like
fife and drum corps. You have as tech conk signal ers.
You have alpine horns, bugle players, church bells. Even we
don't really think of that, but a church bell is
a way of communicating uh something to the surrounding area. Bagpipes,
(18:15):
of course are a big one in uh, in different cultures.
So yeah, there's a whole list of any anything you have.
Time you have something that can create a very loud noise,
and especially we can be modulated, uh in some form
or another. Well that can be used to communicate. All right,
well that's long distance uh communication by sound. But another
thing that we should explore is what is sometimes called
(18:37):
optical telegraphy uh. And we of course associate the telegraph
with the technology we're gonna be talking about in a bit,
the electrical telegraph, but telegraph technically just means distance writing basically,
you know, writing writing far away uh. So communication at
a distance, and it was used to refer to these
optical techniques before it was ever used to for two
(19:00):
electrical techniques. And the optical techniques could involve all kinds
of things, uh, fire and smoke signals, thing what's known
as semaphore, towers with shutters and flags basically, oh, mirrors
that reflect the sunlight. Basically anything you can use to
create a visual signal that somebody at a distance could
(19:20):
see and then maybe relay along to the next station. Uh,
so that you can go beyond a single a single
station's line of sight that also works to transmit messages
at a distance. Yeah. And of course if you need
if you say you're if you're at sea or something
dealing with you know, with with uniform um heights and all,
(19:42):
and it's just like one person on one ship and
it's just as far as the next ship is visible.
But in other cases you might need to make use
of towers or higher points of elevation. Um. But yeah,
and all of this, uh you see everything from me
a mirrors to a lot of flares and towards chosen lights.
But also yeah, this use of semaphore UM. This was
(20:04):
used for ship ship ship to ship communication often you know,
you accomplished with flags, but it could also be carried
out by a giant puppet sort of. Um Claude Chope
in France and developed a system by which giant pivoted
arms on a tower could convey the signal to other
towers uh five to ten miles or eight to sixteen
(20:26):
kilometers apart, and then these messages could be then read
by telescopic sightings. Okay, this makes me think, like the
Aliens are landing, it's eighteen hundred or so, and they
just see this long string along the countryside of these
like dancing giant scarecrows with their arms waving all over
the place. Yeah. Yeah, I mean it looked kind of like, um,
(20:49):
I guess it kind of looks like an American football goal,
but of course it can move, and it's to create
these various shapes that represent different letters. Uh so, yeah,
it's pretty crazy to think about like this. This was
one way of carrying out this form of long distance communication,
which makes me think in a fantasy setting. I don't
(21:09):
know that anyone has done this, but say, like like
take a game of Throne style world or any of
these other ones. You often have giants about. The giants
are generally tasked with things like breaking down walls and
heaving stones, but it seems like kind of a waste
of their ability get them to stand on the nearest
hill and do a bunch of arm motions and send
signals to another giant on another hill. Well, this does
(21:31):
highlight something that I mean, as far as the actual
speed of travel from station to station goes with optical symaphore,
I mean, you can't really beat the speed of light.
That that's great, but you are limited by line of sight.
So you would be required to have stations close enough
together and enough of them that they could keep like
seeing the message the last station transmitted and then transmit
(21:52):
that along the chain to its intended destination. And so
that does require a lot of infrastructure and like human
off paraders for these big weird puppets. Yeah uh. And
of course with with semaphore also, yeah, you have to
you have to know the language of it. Now, there's
(22:15):
a There are a couple of other systems I want
to want to discuss here, and you could categorize them
both as being hydraulic telegraphs. Though to be clear, even
though they both are water based and involved water. One
of them is essentially an optical system. The other is
more overtly hydraulic in nature. So it's two different systems.
(22:36):
There's one that's a fourth century BC Greek system and
the Lads and nineteenth century British invention that UH and
the Greek system in question here it was actually used.
The British invention never really progressed past the test phase
for obvious reasons, as we'll get into. But the Greek
technology of the hydraulic telegraph was used during the First
(22:57):
Punic War, and it's described by both Tacticus and the Polybius.
It was essentially a system of water aided semaphore, so
torches were used to sync up two sides. So again,
imagine two sides on two different hills. They can see
the flames that each side has so they can communicate
with torch. But in addition to each side having a torch,
(23:19):
each side also has a water vessel with a with
a lined vertical rod inserted inside it. UH. You know,
like you might use to to measure the depth and
measure to measure how much water is in that vessel.
Once they the two sides have syncd up, with their
with reveals of their torches. Then they both start draining
their vessels, and we have to stress these vessels are
(23:40):
not connected in any way. Okay. Uh So then they
both stop when the sender signal stop with the torch.
So it's again it's like all right, your flash of
the torch, start draining your vessel. Okay, now stop, let's
both stop at the same time, and they both stop.
Uh So, the different measured water levels in side the
(24:00):
vessel that both sides have have different messages at the
different depth levels, such as calvalry arrived in the country,
or heavy infantry or ships or corn, simple messages like that,
and if it's ancient Greece, that would have to be
corn in the older meaning of like grain in general,
not meaning maze right right now. The British system in
(24:21):
question here was designed by civil engineer Francis wish Shaw,
who later worked in electric telegraphs, and it was devised
to you know, similarly to to send a coded message
that could be read, but and based on water pressure
in a chamber, though in this case the receiving chamber
would be connected to the sending chamber, so there's literally
(24:43):
like a hose of some sort or pipe connecting these
two different stations, and of course multiple stations as well. Um.
So they wouldn't have labeled specific messages within the chamber.
But whether there was a language of changes in water
pressure sure more in keeping with what will act we'll
discuss in reference to say like morse code. Um. So
(25:06):
it would not be like, okay, go to level five
and that means that we need ships. No, it would
be like, uh, you know, increase, increased, decrease, There's something
to that effect. There would be a language of changing
levels in the water. Um. Of course, there are obvious
limitations that come to mind with this. You're dealing you're
dealing with with with water and the pressure of water.
You're if you had this system set up in a
(25:28):
place where the temperatures dropped enough, you'd have to deal
with potential freezes and so forth. So it was apparently
never developed outside of tests. Okay, interesting idea though, yeah,
And of course obviously it becomes unnecessary given the advances
of the electric telegraph. Exactly. So the real revolution comes
(25:48):
with the discovery of electricity. In particular a few a
few different breakthroughs. One is the work of Alessandro Volta
on the storage and control of electrical current with the
use of the voltaic pile, which is pretty much the
same principle as what we would today call a battery,
which Volta created around the year eighteen hundred and Another
(26:11):
input on the development of electrical telegraphy was the research
on the relationship between electricity and magnetism, especially that of
Hans Christian or Instead of Denmark in eighteen twenty, where
he found, for example, that you could attract one of
the polls of a magnetic compass by running current through
a nearby wire. Now, building on this knowledge, the idea
(26:34):
of transmitting messages across electrical wires created an exciting technological
frontier in around the eighteen thirties. Now, the electrical telegraph
is not one of those inventions that was a unique
stroke of genius by a single inventor working alone from
out of nowhere. Rather, it's it's exactly the opposite. It's
(26:54):
one of those cases where lots of people all around
the same time became interested in basically the same idea.
In this case, they became aware that you could use
electromagnetism to send encoded messages over wire across a great
distance and at great speed, receipt would be practically instantaneous.
(27:15):
You can't ask for much better than that. So electrical
telegraphy was not an unexpected breakthrough that came from from
a single point, but rather a kind of uh race
between many different inventors and teams to design the ideal
system to implement this new potential. And there were so
many different ideas we certainly can't mention them all. Instead,
(27:37):
we're going to focus on a couple of the major
early models that were the most influential. So one team
was based in England and that was Sir William Cook
and Sir Charles Wheatstone. And then another team was based
in the United States. That was Samuel Morise, Leonard Gael
and Alfred Vale and uh And a kind of interesting
(27:58):
thing to to keep in mind here is that, really
I think the most important differences in the systems were
actually not so much in the core transmission technology, but
in the systems for encoding and decoding the messages, because
remember this is not a phone call. There's no complex
audio signal traveling through the wires of a telegraph. Instead,
(28:20):
what was clear in the eighteen thirties was that you
could send current through a wire. You could send h
current or pulses of electricity and by extension magnetism, and
so the question was what is the best way to
encode and decode information using that electrical current across wire?
So first I'm gonna talk about the the English team
(28:41):
the Cook and Wheatstone telegraph. This was also known sometimes
as the five needle telegraph, though there were actually many
models with different numbers of needles, but it was a
way to transmit written messages across wires with the use
of a coding diamond and an array of five different
magnetic pointer needles. Unfortunately, I think this is one that's
(29:05):
just really hard to explain without a visual aid. So
if you can look up a picture of the Cook
Wheatstone Telegraph, I recommend it, but if not, I will
do my best to explain it. So imagine a sort
of large diamond shape made out of many smaller diamonds,
and those smaller diamonds are connecting letters of the alphabet.
(29:26):
So on the upper half of the diamond, picture like
a pyramid with the letter A at the top, and
then two lines forking down from the A, and those
forks go to the letters B, and D, and each
of those letters has two lines below it, forking down
to two more letters, So the B forks to an
(29:46):
E and an F, the D forks to the F
and the G, and so on. And then this forking
alphabet pyramid is again represented upside down with different letters
below the middle line of this diamond. So the big
diamond is full of the letters of the alphabet, not
all the letters of the alphabet, as we'll get to
in a minute, but most of them. And then in
(30:09):
the middle of this big vertical diamond, it is bisected
by a line, which is a rack mounted with five
magnetic needles. Now, the five needles could be operated by
switches at the transmitting station, which would send current through
the wire associated with each needle and would attract or
(30:30):
repell it, causing it to move pointing either to the
left or the right. By triggering two different pointer needles
at the same time, you could essentially point to any
letter on the diamond. So one needle would turn and
you'd look up the line where it's pointing. Another needle
would turn, you'd look up the line where it's pointing,
(30:51):
and you'd see where those two lines intersected, and that
would be the letter that's encoded in the message. Now
I've been describing the five needle model. The rack stally
other variations on on the Cook and Wheatstone design which
required which had different numbers of needles and as fewer needles,
which was cheaper to do because you didn't have to
use as many wires, but which required more training for
(31:13):
the operators to encode and decode messages rather than using
the whole alphabet diamond um So, after its invention in
the eighteen thirties, the Cook and Wheatstone telegraph was put
into use in several variations by railway companies in Britain,
since rail stations were the places where instantaneous distance communication
(31:33):
was actually useful, that was needed there, and they had
the money to invest in the infrastructure necessary to operate
the machines. Though I think actually um Cook and Wheatstone
may have paid out of pocket to implement some of
the original designs because it was initially considered experimental, early
implementations of the telegraph would widely be associated with rail
(31:55):
and railway stations. Uh and and in fact that actually
plays into one of the most famous stories about how
the telegraph was used. Early on. So the Cook and
wheat Stone telegraph was famously used in the apprehension of
a murderer named John Tawell in eighteen forty four. Have
you ever heard of this rob So the story goes
(32:17):
like this. Tawell was a British shopkeeper and chemist who
had at multiple points he had been a member of
the Quakers, and he had been carrying on an extramarital
affair with a woman named Sarah Hart, and I think
it was on New Year's Day eighteen forty five he
apparently murdered her by poisoning her beer with hydrogen cyanide,
(32:39):
and witnesses saw him leaving her house and then she
was found dead in her house. He was tracked to
the railway station in the city where he was, which
was slow in southern England. Towell tried to flee the
area by boarding a steam engine in Slough that was
bound for Paddington station in Westminster, but the authorities used
(33:02):
the telegraph to send a head a description to Paddington
and there he was apprehended successfully. He was put on
trial and he was convicted. And as a side note,
I think he his lawyer tried to argue that um
that the woman had been poisoned by eating by eating
the seeds of an apple. But an interesting quirk of
(33:25):
the telegraph technology was that again it didn't code for
every letter of the alphabet, just most of them, So
the machine did not have letters such as Q or
J or X or U or C or z, presumably
because you could replace all of these letters phonetically with
combinations of other letters, as they actually did in the
(33:47):
message they sent. Because the main fact used to identify
um John Towell at the location was that he was
wearing uh quote Quaker garb, so he was wearing the
clothing commonly associated with the Quakers. But they didn't have
a queue on the machine, so they had to spell
at k W a k e er, which apparently led
(34:07):
to great confusion, but they eventually figured it out. Also,
the very opening of the message, because there was no
J in the machine, says a murder has gust been committed.
But anyway, so looking at the Cook and Wheatstone model
with when you're when you're actually talking about the five
needle model, the one that's got the most complete alphabetic
(34:28):
diamond with all those needles. A great upside here is
that you didn't really need any special training to decode
messages other than basic literacy, because they would be spelled
out in plane language with a few simple phonetic substitutions.
A downside to the five needle model was that in
order to operate all these needles, the machines had to
(34:49):
be connected by cable arrays consisting of like five or
six different wires strung out along polls, and that was expensive. Yeah,
not just one wire but multiple wires. And then also,
let's face it, criminals could have eventually figured this out.
They're like, Okay, if I'm going to commit a crime,
I just need to make sure there are a lot
of j's and queues and cs and what I'm doing.
(35:10):
So I need to dress as a juggler, uh while
wearing a queen's tierra um and be on the lookout
for guggler. What can you imagine the confusion and sending
messages about jazz, oh goodness, no JA or Z will
that be g A S S. You can't do it,
(35:31):
It just doesn't work. You gotta you gotta have the ZS. Okay.
But that was one of the big English models, the
model that really won out in the in the early
telegraph Wars was the one that that grew out of
the work of Morse, Gael and Veil in America. That's right, Yeah,
that leads us to American artist and inventor Samuel F. B. Morris.
Um is an interesting guy, a Calvinist painter who was
(35:54):
also interested in electricity, a little bit interested in politics,
and then ultimately falls into and to helping to invent this,
uh this, this this impressive technology. And of course Morrise code.
So as a child he was apparently eccentric and at
times disinterested. As a student, but he was interested in
(36:15):
painting miniature portraits, which one biographer was looking at said
that it apparently distressed his parents. You know that this
is this is his interest because his father was a
distinguished geographer and uh, Congregationalist clergyman. But here is a
little Morrise and he just wants to paint little pictures
for the most part. Can you imagine the horror that
your son wants to paint. But Morris ends up graduating
(36:40):
from Yale. While he's there, he attends some lectures on electricity,
so he does become interested in uh in some of
this new technology. After graduating, travels to England, to study
under the American painter Washington Allston, and when he comes back,
he turns to painting portraits to make a living. He
wasn't well off, but he moved in intellectual circles and
eventually taught at what would become in Why You. And
(37:00):
then it happens he's returning from another trip to Europe
in eighteen thirty two, and he overhears a conversation about
this exciting new electro magnet technology and he gets it
in his head like other people have gotten it in
their head. This is how we can we can send
a long distance communication. Uh. He seems to have, like
(37:21):
many of these individuals, probably thought that he came up
with the idea and uh, you know, and was perhaps
the first, but of course it had already been proposed
in seventeen fifty three, had been tested in seventeen seventy four,
but he persisted and made his own model by eighteen
thirty five and was all in on the invention by
eighteen thirty seven. Uh. Sometimes it is it's argued that
(37:42):
you know that he's a that he was like a
quote unquote failed painter who then became this And then
if he had been successful, as a painter, maybe he
would not have turned to this innovation. I don't know.
Those are often strange conversations to get into a lot
of like what ifs in the arching narrative of a
single individual. Okay, his collaborators were Leonard Gail and Alfred Vale. Yes, yeah,
(38:05):
he ends up teaming up with a chemist Leonard Gail,
and a machinist Alfred Vale. I don't know if you
insisted on their names rhyming like that that came together.
They both became partners in his telegraph venture. Morse and
Vale developed a code to use the telegraph, consisting of
the system of dots and dashes. I've also seen it
credited as being a situation where Morse invented it, but
(38:27):
then Vale helped improve upon it. Uh. And there were
other points at which it needed to be improved upon. So,
for instance, it was developed in America. Um. But then
it was introduced to Europe and they realized, okay, well,
we've got to make changes with it so that it
will work with other languages. So the International Morse Code
or Continental Morse Code was devised in eighteen fifty one
(38:50):
by a conference of European nations. Yeah, and I think
the original uh idea of Morse code was that in
it in many ways you can see why it would
be an improved and over say these like, uh, you know,
five wires for the letter diamond thing, because Morse code,
you're just opening and closing the circuit, right is just
like there, there's a simple action. And then all you
(39:12):
need is a code for the timing of your your
dots and dashes for like closing the circuit for a
quick thing or a little bit longer. That's your dot
in your dash. And then with the combination of dots
and dashes, you can code out the entire alphabet. I
believe the original idea with Morse code was that it
was supposed to first um be something that would be
transcribed as dots and dashes on paper and then decoded
(39:36):
on paper by somebody who has trained in the code.
But eventually they figured out that oh, okay, operators who
have some experience with this just learn the code and
then they can go straight from hearing it to knowing
exactly what the actual plain text messages. So at that
point they modified the technical design to make it like Louder,
to make it into sort of very clear audible beeps
(39:56):
and bibs instead of just the clicking of the eating implement. Yeah,
and I imagine a lot of you have heard audio
of this before. You know where the code takes on
the form of something like say di di di di
di dit data sort of a thing, or you've perhaps
you've seen a movie where someone uses Morse code to
communicate whilst you trapped in a casket or a tomb
(40:19):
or something. You know, um that it's been. It's been
utilized a number of times in motion pictures. Interesting thing
about the message s O S that is something that
comes from Morse code, and it actually doesn't stand for anything.
S OS is not an acronym. It's just a code
that was chosen because it's easy to code and easy
to distinguish when you hear it, because one letter is
(40:40):
just three dots and one letter is three dashes. Now, apparently,
in creating this, Morse was trying to cash in on
like a bounty that had been established by the US
Congress of something like thirty thou dollars for someone who
could create a real time telegraphy system that would essentially
connect a bunch of different I don't remember exactly what
(41:02):
the extent of it was supposed to be, but they
had some specifications and and Morrise was trying to claim
that money, saying like, well, I've done it, I've got
what you're looking for. And all this does lead up
to Morse doing a demonstration of the new technology for
the US Congress. So whenever there's a new technology for
transmitting or recording messages, you always want to know what
(41:24):
was the first message. And you know, there's a little
bit of slide of hand in these stories because you
can imagine, well, there were probably always like a little
weird test messages before that whatever the canonical supposed first
message was. But we still know about some famous examples.
So you got the first telephone call in eighteen seventy six,
where supposedly what it was was Alexander Graham Bell calling
(41:45):
his associate Thomas Watson and saying, Mr Watson, come here,
I want you. And then of course there's always the
question of the first audio recording made. That's a little
bit more complicated. It depends on if you count recordings
made by somebody named Edward Leone Scott de Martinville in
France in the eighteen fifties, or I think maybe in
the year eighteen sixty this consisted of a recording of
(42:08):
all Claire Duloon. But the more commonly cited example is
Thomas Edison recording into his talking machine around eighteen seventy seven.
And I think he claimed that the first message recorded
was him reciting Mary had a little Lamb, But some
evidence indicates maybe the real answer was that he was
reciting the alphabet, or just saying messages like can you
(42:29):
hear this? Yeah, I'll come back to this in a
in a bit here. But technology historian James Burke mentions
this um in Connections, and he describes it not as
a singing but as a shouting of Mary had a
little lamb. It's flee sowless, white as snow. So if
it was more shouting than singing, then maybe you can
(42:49):
get a little um pedantic about whether this constitute of
first recording of the song. Okay, but at least you know,
if you buy the mythology the canonical examples, Mr Watson,
come here, I want you Mary had a little lamb.
What are we going to get for the telegraph? Well,
apparently the first public message sent by telegraphs as a
demonstration for the US Congress by Samuel Morrison Alfred Vale.
(43:12):
It was sent between Washington, d C. And Baltimore, and
the message was what hath God wrought? Something about? This
is hilarious to me. It's a quotation from the Bible,
and I am sure Morse did not mean it this way,
but it suggests a sort of Oppenheimer esque horror and
regret about the birth of this new technology. I'm sure
(43:33):
that is not what it was supposed to sound like.
But I don't know. I think something is lost across
the culture and history there. Yeah, I don't. I don't
understand why this particular quote screams to be the first
transmitted message. Yeah, like, why not something a little more
upbeat or just a little more clear? What have I done?
(43:55):
But okay, But anyway, we get all these telegraph innovations,
electrical telegraph in a vations in the eighteen thirties and
eighteen forties and in the decades to follow. It becomes
an essential part of technological civilization. You know. It's like
it's used for all kinds of things. I've read multiple
references to it being used to make rail travel safer, presumably,
(44:16):
I think to coordinate travel along rail lines to reduce
the risk of say, collisions or something. Okay, so not
just to help prevent murderous quakers from traveling. Yes, you
know it. It's coming back to the two generals problem.
It also certainly had an impact on military operations, as
it could be used in real time to solve this
(44:37):
very problem. It's been discussed by historians that the telegraph
was a technology that helped Abraham Lincoln in the defeat
of the Confederates. The Confederates the Confederate States during the
Civil War they had telegraph technology as well, but they
didn't use them as much or as well as the
Union Army. Um. Now, you might not think about this,
(44:59):
but uh, what this amounted to is not just taking
advantage of pre existing telegraph lines, but you had to
have someone to build telegraph lines during battles, including like
maintaining them during an actual shooting battle. And that's exactly
what the Union Armies Telegraph Construction Corps did, uh do.
(45:20):
So it's it's pretty pretty impressive to to think about. Interesting.
I didn't know that outside of warfare, though sometimes this
also factors into warfare. Obviously, telegraph technology had a big
impact on journalism. Uh, It's just it comes down to
just how quickly you can convey information, and it's why
so many newspapers to this day have telegraph in their names.
(45:42):
Well how about wire service? Yeah, yeah, there you go. Yeah,
it all comes down to the same thing because and
of course this is playing on the fact too that
you also have these other papers that have the older
terms of like post and mail in their titles. But
journalism at the time where there are many of these
outlets that were just ready to fully embrace this new
technology high speed communication. High speed communication means better news,
(46:06):
and we're gonna put that slap dab in the title
of the paper itself. Though. It's funny thinking about if,
like the similar principle applied to later ways, like the
technology that was used to acquire the information that is
published in the article, Like if later newspapers were called
like the daily telephone or something, Yeah, the weekly outsourcing
(46:28):
of reporting duties or so forth. Um, but your morning
facts Yeah, um, but yeah, I know, you know, you can,
you can. There may be there may be some example
that I'm I'm missing the where we can envision this.
But I mentioned that I was going to come back
(46:48):
to Uh, Mary had a little lamb. And I want
to come back to something that technology historian James Burke
brings up in connections, and that is that there is
a direct line to be drawn from the repeating telegraph
to the invention of the Edison phonograph. So in the
eighteen seventy seven innovation allowed the coded messages from a
telegraph to be encoded by a stylus on a waxed
(47:11):
paper disc. The stylist moved up and down, making indentations
in the disc as it revolved on what was essentially
a turntable. Uh. To replay the message, you flip the
paper disc over, which turned these inventions into bumps. Uh.
And a reader stylist traveled over these bumps. Okay, so
Thomas Edison is said, and again we have to consider
(47:33):
the possible, you know, myth making uh uh mild or
overt in any invention story. But Thomas Edison is said
to have been listening to such a machine work at
high speed and realize that there was a connection between
the vibration of the stylists and a sound pattern. Burke writes, quote,
he hit upon the idea, not a new one, that
he could reproduce sounds as vibrations by the use of
(47:55):
a thin membrane. So he placed a needle on the
membrane that would up and down as the membrane vibrated,
and mounted it in such a way to score a
bumpy path in tinfoil. So he tinkered with this setup
and then famously was able to and again Burke describes
it as a shouting of Mary had a little lamb
its flee so it's white as snow at the membrane.
(48:17):
Then return it to the original position, placed the needle
in the groove and turned the cylinder at the same
speed to reproduce his own voice through the vibrating membrane.
And so the phonograph and the age of recorded sound
was essentially born out of this shift. And these are
just a few of the examples, because ultimately we were
talking about the the the advent of the telegraph. I mean,
(48:41):
it really was a game changer. Like we're entering the
age of of of telecommunication at this point, you know,
we're entering the age of rapid communication. And this is
this is the this technology is the forerunner of so
many of the technologies as defined life in the modern
age totally. I mean there's a lot more we could
(49:01):
talk about on the subject, though I think for time
we got to wrap it up. Yeah, so we're gonna
go ahead and call it there, but yes, we may
come back in the future. If there's a particular aspect
of this episode you'd like to be further explored, let
us know. Let us know also your thoughts on the
invention of the telegraph technologies that came before UH technologies
(49:21):
and traditions as well. We'd love to hear from you.
As always remind you, We remind you that Stuff to
Blow Your Mind is a science podcast that publishes on
Tuesdays and Thursdays and the Stuff to Blow Your Mind
podcast feed um and we also have a Monday episode
which is usually a listener mail. On Wednesdays we usually
publish a short form artifact or monster fact episode, and
(49:42):
on Friday's we do Weird Our Cinema. That's our time
to set aside most serious concerns and just talk about
a weird film, huge things. As always to our excellent
audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to
get in touch with us with feedback on this episode
or any other, to suggest a topic for the future
or just to say hello. You can email us at
contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff
(50:11):
to Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio.
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