Writing #3 Draft

Cecilya Lundy 4/11/16
Writing Assingment #3 Help Received: work cited
The Telegraph

The evolution of the way that people have communicated over time is truly amazing and each day the technology of communication advances more and more. Communication has come from individuals having only spoken language, to written language, to speaking through wires, and even today with things like face time. Old inventions are continuously developing from past ones and I am very curious to see what invention comes next to expand the communication factors of today. I believe that one of the most influential inventions of the past in communications is the telegraph, and I think this because it was one of the very first steps in wire communication. This essay will outline how the telegraph was created, what the telegraph was and how it worked, as well as why the telegraph stopped being the best way for communication.
In 1839, Samuel Morse created the system we know today as Morse Code. Morse Code was the way that people communicated on the telegraph, with symbols that were transferred through wires. Each letter of the alphabet had a corresponding code that would be sent when communicating. The telegraph was the very first step in communication over wires. The only forms of communication that individuals had before the telegraph was sending letters that could neever reach the destination or face to face conversation. The telegraph was the first step in sending messages over hundreds of miles quickly. By the 1850’s there were telegraph stations all over major cites so that people were able to communicate with the telegraph more often because it began to expand. The operators at the stations were sent the messages and they decoded them, the decoded messages were then sent to “runners” to deliver the telegraph to the individual that the message was sent for. The normal cost for a message at this time was about twenty-five cents per hundred miles for ten words. (1) The longer the message, the more it would cost because the price of the telegraph would raise by distance as well as word count.
The way that a telegraph works is that the sender delivers pulses through a wire that are then sent to a different location that is connected by the cable. At the location the message was sent the pulses were then converted into words a code (Morse Code) and these codes were then transmitted to a decoder so that they could translate the code into language that can be read and understood. The original telegraph used three different types of symbols: off which was a space in the code (this meant that there was no pulse transmitted), short which was a period, (this meant that there was a short pulse transmitted), and long which is a dash, (this meant that there was a long pulse sent). These different spaces would occur very often because when a message is being sent there are actual spaces in the message, or the letter changed. (2)
The problem with the telegraph was that even though there were cables in major cities, there were not cables everywhere. Communication with the telegraph was limited to only stations that had cables and if a city did not have station that had cables a message had no way of being delivered. A major issue that could happen in this situation would be if someone was trying to send a message to an individual and the receiver was not in a city that had a cable, the message would go nowhere. The issue with adding more cables was that creating areas that had stations for telegraphs was very expensive and in some areas the terrain was difficult to structure the station or get the cables up. If different areas had rough terrain the workers would not be able to lay a cable to create a new station causing this town to not have a cable. It took workers almost 20 years to be able to lay a cable across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, this cord was able to connect North America all the way to England. (1) Even though it might have taken individuals almost twenty years to lay the cable, they were still able to do it with the limited technology that they had in this time and it was one of the biggest steps that the telegraph took in connecting the whole world.
The telegraph was an invention that was important to the expansion of the communication that we use today. Without the telegraph who knows how long it would have took for us to come up with lines that are used to communicate with. The telegraph opened up the possibilities of communication across the world and gave individuals the thought that we could even communicate fast than just the telegraph. Without the telegraph we would have discovered certain things like the telephone later and it would probably be more behind than we are now. The simple inventions that have expanded over time are what have given our modes of communication the opportunity to expand and develop to what they are today and I cannot imagine how far behind we would be if the telegraph was not invented when it was.
Work Cited
(1) http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/telegraph.aspx
(2) http://thalia.spec.gmu.edu/~pparis/classes/notes_101/node26.html