#1837

Dress, 1836-40

Textured cotton printed with red and purple florals.

An Elderly Jew and a Muslim Tartar in Crimea by Auguste Raffet

Can you? Fields and fencerows. 1937.

Electrical Telegraph

The Electrical Telegraph was invented in 1837 by William Fothergill Cook (1806-1879) and Charles Wheatstone (1802-1875) in England with parallel innovations being made by Samuel Morse (1791-1872) in the United States. The telegraph, once wires and undersea cables had connected countries and continents, transformed communications so that messages could be sent and received anywhere in just minutes.

Telegraph Pioneers

The idea of sending signals from one distant place to another has been in use since antiquity, notably with towers using fire beacons. Ships have long used a system of flags (semaphore) to communicate beyond shouting distance. These methods, though, were limited to only very important communications, for more mundane messages people had to use horse-riding messengers that could take several days or even weeks to reach their intended recipient.

The Italian Alexander Volta (1745-1827) invented the electric battery in 1800, necessary for a telegraph machine to be operated anywhere. Then the Danish physicist Hans Christian Ørsted (1777-1851) created the first electromagnet in 1825. Ørsted's discovery that an electrical current flowing in a conductor can create a magnetic field – which he noted when observing the effect on a magnetic compass on his desk – was crucial to the telegraph machine since this was the answer to the problem of how to make electrical impulses visible in the form of a moving needle. The French physicist André-Marie Ampère (1775-1836) worked to create a theory that explained the relationship between an electrical current and magnetism. The first electric motor was developed by the Englishman Michael Faraday (1791-1867) in 1821. With all of these scientific discoveries put together, inventors now had the theoretical means to send electrical impulses through a wire and then see the effect at the other end. The trick was just how to create a working machine capable of sending and receiving these impulses over long distances and a code by which such impulses could be transformed into words.