A Brief History Of The Morse Telegraph

A Brief History of the Morse Telegraph
In the early 19th century, all of the essential components necessary to construct an electrical communication system had been discovered. The most important ofthese were the battery by Volta, the relationship between electric current and magnetism by Oersted, and the electromagnet by Henry. It now remained for someone to find a practical method to combinethese technologies into a working communication system.
Some commercial electrical communications systems existed in Europe as early as the 1830s. A classic example of this is the English "NeedleTelegraph". The needle telegraph required two or more lines to form a complete circuit. It was also relatively slow and the design of the transmitting and receiving instruments was complex. Somethingsimple and efficient was needed.
The Morse system of telegraphy was invented by Samuel Finley Breese Morse in the 1840s in the United States. "Morse Code" is essentially a simple way to represent theletters of the alphabet using patterns of long and short pulses. A unique pattern is assigned to each character of the alphabet, as well as to the ten numerals. These long and short pulses aretranslated into electrical signals by an operator using a telegraph key, and the electrical signals are translated back into the alphabetic characters by a skilled operator at the distant receivinginstrument. It has also been acknowledged that Morse's partner Alfred Vail very likely assisted in the development of the code and the instruments used to transmit and receive it.
Morse telegraphy became thestandard method of electrical communication in both the United States and Europe due to its simplicity and ability to work on inferior quality wires. In 1851, countries in Europe adopted a new codeknown as "continental" or "international" code. This new code was a modification of the original Morse. The new code eliminated the characters using spaced dots which were found to cause errors in...