The first electrical transmission of a message
Telegraphy and the Railroad
First Telegraph Lines
Werner Siemens
Samual Morse
ITU: The first global organisation
Telegraphy and Time

After our introduction into the discovery of the electricity, let’s get back to telecommunications. We will start with wired communication until we reach wireless mobile communication.

History of Telegraphy

The first electrical transmission of a message

The first electrical communication happened in Göttingen, a small town in southern Lower Saxony, Germany. George II, King of England, and also known under his German Name Georg August was Elector of Brunswick Lüneburg and founded here a University. Named after the founder Georgia Augusta, this was one of the leading universities in the world in the 19th century. The greatest mathematician of the century, Carl Friedrich Gauss, worked there.

Gauss was an universal genius and did not only work with mathematics but was also a princely surveyor and astronomer. Another area of his interest was Physics and therefore also the theory of electricity. He worked together with a brilliant physicist named Wilhelm Weber. Both knew about Faraday’s experiments and built inductors themselves.

In 1833 they used electrodynamics to transmit a message. They built a device that could slide a large coil in and out of a permanent magnet. This was connected to two very long wires running a distance of 1,1 km, from downtown to the observatory on the outskirts of Göttingen. In the city center there was a receiver. This was a very sensitive mirror galvanometer to measure weak current pulses. A telescope was required to observe the weak deflections of the galvanometer.

It was not enough to transmit electrical pulses over a distance. They still required a code, which assigns letters to a sequence of electric surges. Gauss and Weber also developed such a code using right and left deflections of the galvanometer. The first message was probably „Michelmann is coming“. Michelmann was the caretaker who was sent from downtown to the observatory to check if the massage had arrived.

Gauss and Weber did not patent their telegraph, and it was never commercialized. They considered the telegraph to be of purely scientific interest only and didn’t even believe that it could have any economic benefit so both turned to other research.

For the first time a new medium was used for communication: electricity. Nothing material is transmitted here, as with the propagation of a message with sound. Spreading news with electric signals is like pulling a long string with a bell attached to the end. Only the energy of the pull is transmitted through the cord. This means only electrical energy is transmitted. Charge carriers (electrons) move, but they are not physically transferred from the sender’s to the receiver’s location.

Telegraphy and the Railroad

The fact that electricity could be used to transmit messages was now well known. However, its use was limited. It wasn’t like the world was waiting to finally have a new method of messaging. To make telegraphy work, large investments were necessary and who was supposed to make them? Perhaps it would have been a long time before telegraphy was introduced if not another technology, the railroad, had been introduced at the same time.

The railroad lines not only ensured rapid traveling between cities, they also enabled fast establishment of telegraph lines for communication.

The railway connected towns and cities and therefore could these routes also be used for installing telegraph lines. At the beginning, telegraphy was only interesting for the railroad companies. The application was „signaling“ rather than „transmission of messages“. Many engineers and inventors started now developing new and more efficient instruments than the simple aparatus used by Gauss and Weber. This lead to different types of receivers with different displays. Some were based on compass needles, using up to five needles at the same time each with a corresponding line. Receivers like pointer telegraphs directly displayed letters while others could even write messages. The most famous system was developed by Samuel Morse. His telegraph used dots and dashes representing letters. It took a long time for a common system to become established.

First Telegraph Lines

The world’s first telegraph line was installed in England. The Great Western Railways used it to link London’s Paddington Station with West Drayton, a distance of 13 miles. It started operating in the summer of 1837. At the beginning they used a 5 needle telegraph. However, the high number of wires, which also had to be isolated from each other, made this system not very reliable and it was replaced by a single-needle telegraph later. Other British telegraph lines along the railway lines soon followed.

This technical innovation was not really well known for a long time, until a dramatic event happened in January 1845. A murder took place in the town of Slough. The killer, a man named John Tawell, fled to London by train. The police notified Paddington Station through the telegraph line that a suspected murderer was coming. The message was: „He is in the last compartment and is wearing a long brown coat.“ The officer at the train station informed the police and in fact the murderer was caught because news about his crime got to London faster than he did himself. This event was discussed in the news and made this technology that was „faster than a train“ extremely popular.

The first telegraph lines in Germany were installed along railway lines in 1843 and 1844. In 1846 there was a connection between Bremerhaven and Bremen. A little later a connection between Cuxhaven and Hamburg. It was important for harbor towns to know when a ship was arriving. In the first year, 6,802 ship reports and 3,944 private reports were transmitted only in the City Bremen. Due to the fact that these sent messages required a fee, telegraphy soon became profitable.

Werner Siemens

One engineer who immediately saw the potential of telegraphy was Werner Siemens. In 1847, together with a precision mechanic named Johann Georg Halske, he founded a company to manufacture telegraphs, the Telegraphen Bau-Anstalt von Siemens & Halske in Berlin.

Werner Siemens started his company building telegraphs.

This was the origin of one of the largest technology companies worldwide that today is simply called Siemens. Siemens constructed a pointer telegraph which was quite robust and which also contained a transmitter. It only needed a single wire to operate. You have to think of a pointer telegraph as a kind of clockwork. All letters and numbers are arranged in the circle of this clock. The letters and numbers can be pressed like keys on the sending side. For example, if you press the E button, the clockwork runs and an electrical pulse is transmitted with each step. The transmitter sends as many pulses as needed to reach the E. On the receiver side, a pointer runs synchronously with the transmitter. Driven by a clockwork mechanism, the pointer advances one position for each pulse it receives, until it stops at E.

In 1848 there was a tender offer for a telegraph line between Berlin and Frankfurt, a distance of 500 km, which was won by Siemens. Since it was not possible to build everywhere along a railway line, especially on the long overland routes, they used wooden pillars and porcelain insulators made in the famous Meissen manufactory.

In 1848/49 there was a revolution going on in Germany. This lead to a national assembly in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt, with the goal to come up with a constitution for the German Reich. It was proposed that the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm, should be declared „Emperor of the German Empire“ and that he should become the head of the new German Reich. Thanks to the recently completed telegraph line from Siemens, this proposal was known in Berlin just an hour after it was made. When the so-called „Kaiserdeputation“ finally arrived a week later with the message, they have had enough time to make a decision and rejected it right away. The revolution failed and the German Reich had to wait another 22 years to be established. In any case, this coup made Siemens and the power of telegraphy famous.

Samuel Morse

As early as 1837, just 4 years after Gauss and Weber, an American painter developed a device that could be used to “record” electrical signals. A clock drew a strip of paper on which a hanging pen drew a line. Morse was able to deflect the pen using a magnet. This resulted in spikes or, if you deflected longer, trapezoidal shapes on the paper strip. Now a code was needed that converted short and long deflections into characters. Surprisingly, this code did not come from Morse, but from a companion, Alfred Vail, with whom he started a telegraph company. It wasn’t until 1840 that Morse got a patent for his telegraph.

The Morse code prevailed over the pointer graph because it could transmit messages almost six times as fast.

Morse’s telegraph was in direct competition with the pointer telegraphs used throughout Europe. There was a dispute what was the better system. Shortly after the triumph of Siemens on the Frankfurt-Berlin line, both systems were compared on the same route by telegraphing a speech by Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm. Morse’s system took 75 minutes while Siemens pointer telegraph took seven hours to transmit. Siemens was not upset or disappointed. He simply took advantage of the fact that the morse telegraph was not patented in Germany, improved it significantly and thus made it his own.

ITU: The first international organization worldwide

By 1850 there were already thousands of kilometers of telegraphic lines. The technology varied from line to line or from country to country, depending on the operator. This was a huge hindrance if you wanted to communicate “globally”. It was very inefficient to record the message after each line and then re-enter it on another line. It was better to enable connections across borders. So the telecommunications systems had to be standardized.

In July 1850, representatives of Prussia, Austria-Hungary, Bavaria and Saxony met in the beautiful city of Dresden to discuss such a standard. Two years later a similar association was founded for France, Belgium, Switzerland and Sardinia. Over time, the organizations converged and merged in 1865 to form the International Telecommunication Union, ITU. Today this is the oldest organization of the United Nations which was only founded in 1945.

In 1865, the first global telecommunications standardization organization, the ITU, was formed.

One of the ITU’s first standards was the establishment of Morse code. In the meantime, the code had been significantly be improved again by Friedrich Clemens Gehrke from Hamburg, who had already built the telegraph line between Hamburg and Cuxhaven in the 1940s. To this day, the ITU works for Global Standards in Telecommunications. 191 member countries are represented in it today.

Telegraphy and Time

In the 19th century, of course everybody was aware of the time and how late it was. It was also possible to measure time quite accurately. But there was no „common“ time. Every city and every place defined its “own” time. When the sun was at its zenith in the respective place at noon, the clock was set to 12. There was a determining clock, usually the clock at the town hall or the largest church. All other clocks are adjusted on this clock. None of this was a problem until the introduction of the railway. The railway came with timetables and since it took just a couple of hours to travel from one town to the next it was important that the times in the two corresponding towns are synchronized. But how should the different towns have the same time? Telegraphy made this possible. It allowed all clocks to be synchronized.

Now the time was no longer in the hand of towns but in the hand of states. The rulers of these states decided what time it should be in their country. For that reason there was a Berlin time (for Prussia), a Vienna time (for Austria), a Munich time (for Bavaria), etc. In some train stations, this led to different times being shown, similar to today’s world clocks.

Telegraphy allowed the realization of time zones because it became possible to synchronize clocks using electrical signals.

In the end, also the states had to agree on a common time. Americans, driven by their railroads, had already begun dividing their continent into time zones. Every 15 degrees of longitude, the time changes by one hour. (15 x 24 = 360 degrees). In an international conference 1884 it was decided that the English observatory in Greenwich should determine the zero median. Now the world was divided into 24 time zones. In 1893 the German Emperor ordered that „Central European Time“ should prevail in Germany. Since then, all clocks (in Germany) show the same time.