The Electric City, VII: Normalising Telegraphy

 

So, and as will come as no surprise, I've had the experience of a short work week pulled out from under my feet at something like the last minute. It was perhaps not impossible for me to write Postblogging Technology, August 1954, I: I Know Eyewash When I See It, and I'm honestly not sure who besides me to blame for my taking a day off on the 11th and yesterday, but I'll settle for Larian Studios, for making Baldur's Gate III so seductive. That, of course, means that instead of something long, with a lot to chew over, you're getting a bit of a dive into semi-random thoughts I had this week. 

In this case, and as a development of "smokeless powder is just another textiles industry development, therefore the modern rifle, and modern war, comes out of industrial cotton," I am wondering about how normal early telegraphy was. (Is the rifle, or telegraphy, more important to the transformation of war before 1914?) So 

let's forget about all that "information  industry" stuff, and look at the telegraph as it came in, and try to understand why people might take the first steps to improve on semaphore and heliographs and pony expresses, and see where we are.

Moist von Ludwig

As often in the history of technology we start with the demonstrated demand for a technology, a technology that implements that demand, and plenty of evidence that that system (semaphore) is just no darn good. Claude Chappe ran the French semaphore system named for him from 1791 until Louis Philippe took it over after the Revolution of 1830. (France being a bit of a scum saver over its revolutions in those days.) As usual there is a story about an American inventor (your Samuel Morse) and a British precursor (Cooke and Wheatstone's telegraph); and perhaps not enough attention to the question of how you push useful information in the form of an electrical current down wires in 1837, when the Liverpool and Manchester Railway wanted to signal the rope-hauling engine house that pulled trains out of the station tunnel, per the story, cue argle-bargle about the telegraph sets, and the various ways in which information in the current was decoded, or exhibited. 

unknown/illegible artist - Francis Ronalds, 
Descriptions of an Electrical Telegraph,
London: R. Hunter, 1823

Geez, guys, it's 1837. Maybe we can roll it back a bit and look at the electric juice and not get into Wheatcroft's ouija board or Morse's "They'll just have to learn to code" approaches? It turns out that we get pushed back a generation to Sir Francis Ronalds, who must have been a nerd, since his 1816 telegraph proposal to the British Admiralty involved an experimental demonstration in his mother's garden. Ronald, born, says Wikipedia, to a successful cheesemonger, laid out eight miles of iron wire on wooden boards and energised them with electrostatic generators. Even doubling up the wires, it sounds like there's money in cheese. Not so much in telling the Admiralty about a change of winds in the Downs, alas.

"Eventually," Wikipedia continues, "electrostatic telegraphs were abandoned in favour of electromagnetic systems." I, uhm, should think so, as long-distance electrostatic effects strike me as impractical right up to the point where they become dangerous.  

1.12 minutes of select capacitor explosions

It says in Wikipedia that the actual first operative electric telegraph, by Gauss and Weber, connected the Goettingen Observatory with the Institute of Physics, a distance of 1 km. Having Karl Friedrich Gauss on your side is always a good  idea, even if it's hard to tell. I think this is before the hazy cutoff where you transliterate "Carl" back to "Karl," but fuck if I know and I'm not gonna. Anyway the story here is that the early guys all went too hard with multiple wires, which is certainly a terrible idea with your cross circuits and all. Leaving aside your usual American-inventor-bullshit where Morse is deemed to have prior art due to having an inspiration one day that can be documented as before Cooke and Wheatcroft on the basis of "I'm a New England Whig so just fuck off," More's device was more practical in the short term, even if it had less development potential, but the coding requirement was vital to radio telegraphy, so good on you, Sam.

Morse, it says in Wikipedia, "Encountered the problem of getting a telegraphic signal to carry over  more than a few hundred yards of wire." 

The input signal opens and closes a circuit, sending
on a stronger emf with the same signal. And, yes, 
you will get an error, with long and short dashes 
eventually becoming indistinguishable, but it is a
pretty robust system, in all. 

Yeah. That's a thing you can say. It is a surprisingly bad idea to pile up the voltage on one end of a wire to the point that the output at the end has enough emf to run an electromagnet. At least the multi-wire systems could conceivably distribute the load a bit better, although I wouldn't count on it.  Morse solved the problem with relays that repeated the signal every 3.2km. (That is, two miles.) Which sounds extravagant, but fortunately Morse was again able to use the "I'm a New England Whig so just fuck off" and extracted 30 grand from Congress to build a line from Washington to Baltimore, the money being needed because Morse had given up on what seems like the obvious solution of transmitting down the steel rails of a railway line, which, in fact, is so entirely impractical that you'd probably have to be a historian of science to understand why Wheatcroft thought it was practical. (In short, you might confuse yourself into thinking that you can do that by observing radio transmissions and getting yourself confused over the "luminiferous aether.") Morse was able to lay twelve thousand miles of telegraph wire between 1845 and 1850. It sounds super expensive and fraught with difficulties, and if I had to guess why it took off in the States, that we're probably looking at a tech bubble combined with the effects of America's still terrible roads. 

God this is crude

There's still no-one explaining how you're working with electrical power in 1837 or 1845 or whenever, though. That's be because it's all a bit embarrassing, maybe? The potted history (hah!) of the  wet cell battery has it invented by Volta in 1796, explained by Faraday in 1834, and turned into a practical technology by John Frederic Daniell in 1836. Daniell seems to have mostly been an industrial chemist, and died fairly young, in 1845, giving him very little chance to toot his own horn in connection with big orders for Daniell Cells to run electric telegraphs. But there's the basic (hah!) answer to your question. The power to run the early telegraphs was being made by the sulphuric acid manufacturers, who didn't even realise they were in the energy business, which is good, because there is a very short list of fuels that are more of a pain than sulphuric acid. Although you can put the power back in to sulphuric acide, which you can't do with natural gas, so there's that. 

So there you go. Electric telegraphy is also a textiles industry spinoff, via all that acid production for dye fixatives although also a lot of other industrial uses to be sure. Thank you, dark satanic mills, because without you, we wouldn't have Elon Musk.