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By Root 850 0

to stir a piece of gold leaf or a pith ball suspended in a glass jar or “other bodies that can be as easily attracted, and are, at the same time, easily visible.”♦ That was too many wires to be practicable. A Frenchman named Lomond in 1787 ran a single wire across his apartment and claimed to be able to signal different letters by making a pith ball dance in different directions. “It appears that he has formed an alphabet of motions,” reported a witness, but apparently only Lomond’s wife could understand the code. In 1809 a German, Samuel Thomas von Sömmerring, made a bubble telegraph. Current passing through wires in a vessel of water produced bubbles of hydrogen; each wire, and thus each jet of bubbles, could indicate a single letter. While he was at it, von Sömmerring managed to make electricity ring a bell: he balanced a spoon in the water, upside down, so that enough bubbles would make it tilt, releasing a weight, driving a lever, and ringing the bell. “This secondary object, the alarum,” he wrote in his diary, “cost me a great deal of reflection and many useless trials with wheelwork.”♦ Across the Atlantic, an American named Harrison Gray Dyer tried sending signals by making electric sparks form nitric acid that discolored litmus paper.♦ He strung a wire on trees and stakes around a Long Island race track. The litmus paper had to be moved by hand.

Then came needles. The physicist André-Marie Ampère, a developer of the galvanometer, proposed using that as a signaling device: it was a needle deflected by electromagnetism—a compass pointing to a momentary artificial north. He, too, thought in terms of one needle for every letter. In Russia, Baron Pavel Schilling demonstrated a system with five needles and later reduced that to one: he assigned combinations of right and left signals to the letters and numerals. At Göttingen in 1833 the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, working with a physicist, Wilhelm Weber, organized a similar scheme with one needle. The first deflection of the needle gave two possible signals, left or right. Two deflections combined gave four more possibilities (right + right, right + left, left + right, and left + left). Three deflections gave eight combinations, and four gave sixteen, for a total of thirty distinct signals. An operator would use pauses to separate the signals. Gauss and Weber organized their alphabet of deflections logically, beginning with the vowels and otherwise taking letters and digits in order:

right = a

left = e

right, right = i

right, left = o

left, right = u

left, left = b

right, right, right = c (and k)

right, right, left = d

etc.

This scheme for encoding letters was binary, in a way. Each minimal unit, each little piece of signal, amounted to a choice between two possibilities, left or right. Each letter required a number of such choices, and that number was not predetermined. It could be one, as in right for a and left for e. It could be more, so the scheme was open-ended, allowing an alphabet of as many letters as needed. Gauss and Weber strung a doubled wire over a mile of houses and steeples between the Göttingen observatory and the physics institute. What they managed to say to each other has not been preserved.

Far away from these inventors’ workrooms, the telegraph still meant towers, semaphores, shutters, and flags, but enthusiasm for new possibilities was beginning to build. Lecturing to the Boston Marine Society in 1833, a lawyer and philologist, John Pickering, declared, “It must be evident to the most common observer, that no means of conveying intelligence can ever be devised, that shall exceed or even equal the rapidity of the Telegraph, for, with the exception of the scarcely perceptible relay at each station, its rapidity may be compared with that of light itself.”♦ He was thinking particularly of the Telegraph on Central Wharf, a Chappe-like tower communicating shipping news with three other stations in a twelve-mile line across Boston Harbor. Meanwhile, dozens of young newspapers around the nation were modernistically calling themselves