There were some really marvelous early
attempts at electric telegraphs to enhance
the communication system. Here’s an
electrostatic model, with a wire for each
letter and number, and a range from
the living room to the parlor, powered
by some fur rolling over a piece of rubber — sort of the rub-a-balloon-on-yourhead approach. 16
Here’s another British multi-wire device
with a battery and a saltwater receiver. 17
Remember how in high school chemistry
lab if you put wires from a battery into
saltwater, one of them bubbled? It was the
same deal here. There was a ball for each
letter, and you looked to see where the
bubbles showed up.
Here’s one that tried to use tones for letters. It was the first singing telegraph and
made signals like the keyboard at the end
of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. 18
I have no idea how this one was supposed to work, but when they said “sell,”
you sold. 19
Julius Reuter and his son Herb 20
decided to try another approach. They
got into the messenger pigeon business.
Edward G. Robinson played Reuter in the
1941 classic film, This Man Reuter. The
pigeons played themselves. 21
Finally, in 1837, Samuel Morse got
it right: a nice, simple, single wire and
ground design. 22
This quickly caught on all over the
world. Instantaneous communication! 23
Notice here that “the electric fluid travels at the rate of 280,000 miles per second,” or about one and a half times the
speed of light. Maybe they knew something we don’t.
For the first time in history, a message
could be sent instantly over the horizon.
An entire book could be filled with the
stories of how all facets of human endeavor
were transformed by telegraphy.1
Traders picked up on telegraphy in
a big way. Here we see a broker in New
York with his 19th-century BlackBerry, a
telegraph key, cradled in his arm. 24
In its day, telegraphy was seen as the
same kind of overwhelming transformation that the Internet is today. It was a big
advance, but to participate in the market
as things were happening, the participant
had to know Morse code.
The technological revolution of the
1850s needed more technology to allow
people to cope with the dramatic changes
in the information landscape. This time
20
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22
21
23
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www.MoAF.org | Spring/Summer 2011 | Financial History 53