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By Root 861 0

Cooke formed a partnership in 1837. Wheatstone had performed experiments on the velocity of sound and of electricity, and once again the real problem lay in connecting the physics with language. They consulted England’s authority on electricity, Michael Faraday, and Peter Roget, author of a Treatise on Electro-Magnetism as well as the system of verbal classification he called the Thesaurus. The Cooke-Wheatstone telegraph went through a series of prototypes. One used six wires to form three circuits, each controlling a magnetic needle. “I worked out every possible permutation and practical combination of the signals given by the three needles, and I thus obtained an alphabet of twenty-six signals,”♦ noted Cooke, somewhat obscurely. There was also an alarm, in case the operator’s attention wandered from the apparatus; Cooke said he had been inspired by the only mechanical device he knew well: a musical snuffbox. In the next version, a synchronized pair of rotating clockwork disks displayed the letters of the alphabet through a slot. More ingenious still, and just as awkward, was a five-needle design: twenty letters were arranged on a diamond-shaped grid and an operator, by depressing numbered buttons, would cause two of five needles to point, uniquely, to the desired letter. This Cooke-Wheatstone telegraph managed to do without C, J, Q, U, X, and Z. Their American competitor, Vail, later described the operation as follows:

Suppose the message to be sent from the Paddington station to the Slough station, is this, “We have met the enemy and they are ours.” The operator at Paddington presses down the buttons, 11 and 18, for signalizing upon the dial of the Slough station, the letter W. The operator there, who is supposed to be constantly on watch, observes the two needles pointing at W. He writes it down, or calls it aloud, to another, who records it, taking, according to a calculation given in a recent account, two seconds at least for each signal.♦

Vail considered this inefficient. He was in a position to be smug.

As for Samuel Finley Breese Morse, his later recollections came in the context of controversy—what his son called “the wordy battles waged in the scientific world over the questions of priority, exclusive discovery or invention, indebtedness to others, and conscious or unconscious plagiarism.”♦ All these thrived on failures of communication and record-keeping. Educated at Yale College, the son of a Massachusetts preacher, Morse was an artist, not a scientist. In the 1820s and 1830s he spent much of his time traveling in England, France, Switzerland, and Italy to study painting. It was on one of these trips that he first heard about electric telegraphy or, in the terms of his memoirs, had his sudden insight: “like a flash of the subtle fluid which afterwards became his servant,” as his son put it. Morse told a friend who was rooming with him in Paris: “The mails in our country are too slow; this French telegraph is better, and would do even better in our clear atmosphere than here, where half the time fogs obscure the skies. But this will not be fast enough—the lightning would serve us better.”♦ As he described his epiphany, it was an insight not about lightning but about signs: “It would not be difficult to construct a system of signs by which intelligence could be instantaneously transmitted.”♦

TELEGRAPHIC WRITING BY MORSE’S FIRST INSTRUMENT

ALFRED VAIL’S TELEGRAPH “KEY”

Morse had a great insight from which all the rest flowed. Knowing nothing about pith balls, bubbles, or litmus paper, he saw that a sign could be made from something simpler, more fundamental, and less tangible—the most minimal event, the closing and opening of a circuit. Never mind needles. The electric current flowed and was interrupted, and the interruptions could be organized to create meaning. The idea was simple, but Morse’s first devices were convoluted, involving clockwork, wooden pendulums, pencils, ribbons of paper, rollers, and cranks. Vail, an experienced machinist, cut all this back. For the sending end, Vail devised