The Information - James Gleick [68]
So at one end they had a lever, for closing and opening the circuit, and at the other end the current controlled an electromagnet. One of them, probably Vail, thought of putting the two together. The magnet could operate the lever. This combination (invented more or less simultaneously by Joseph Henry at Princeton and Edward Davy in England) was named the “relay,” from the word for a fresh horse that replaced an exhausted one. It removed the greatest obstacle standing in the way of long-distance electrical telegraphy: the weakening of currents as they passed through lengths of wire. A weakened current could still operate a relay, enabling a new circuit, powered by a new battery. The relay had greater potential than its inventors realized. Besides letting a signal propagate itself, a relay might reverse the signal. And relays might combine signals from more than one source. But that was for later.
The turning point came in 1844, both in England and the United States. Cooke and Wheatstone had their first line up and running along the railway from the Paddington station. Morse and Vail had theirs from Washington to the Pratt Street railway station in Baltimore, on wires wrapped in yarn and tar, suspended from twenty-foot wooden posts. The communications traffic was light at first, but Morse was able to report proudly to Congress that an instrument could transmit thirty characters per minute and that the lines had “remained undisturbed from the wantonness or evil disposition of any one.” From the outset the communications content diverged sharply—comically—from the martial and official dispatches familiar to French telegraphists. In England the first messages recorded in the telegraph book at Paddington concerned lost luggage and retail transactions. “Send a messenger to Mr Harris, Duke-street, Manchester-square, and request him to send 6 lbs of white bait and 4 lbs of sausages by the 5.30 train to Mr Finch of Windsor; they must be sent by 5.30 down train, or not at all.”♦ At the stroke of the new year, the superintendent at Paddington sent salutations to his counterpart in Slough and received a reply that the wish was a half-minute early; midnight had not yet arrived there.♦ That morning, a druggist in Slough named John Tawell poisoned his mistress, Sarah Hart, and ran for the train to Paddington. A telegraph message outraced him with his description (“in the garb of a kwaker, with a brown great coat on”♦—no Q’s in the English system); he was captured in London and hanged in March. The drama filled the newspapers for months. It was later said of the telegraph wires, “Them’s the cords that hung John Tawell.” In April, a Captain Kennedy, at the South-Western Railway terminus, played a game of chess with a Mr. Staunton, at Gosport; it was reported that “in conveying the moves, the electricity travelled backward and forward during the game upwards of 10,000 miles.”♦ The newspapers loved that story, too—and, more and more, they valued any story revealing the marvels of the electric telegraph.
When the English and the American enterprises opened their doors to the general public, it was far from clear who, besides the police and the occasional chess player, would line up to pay the tariff. In Washington, where pricing began in 1845 at one-quarter cent per letter, total revenues for the first three months amounted to less than two hundred dollars. The next year, when a Morse line opened between New York and Philadelphia, the traffic grew a little faster. “When you consider that business is extremely dull [and] we have not yet the confidence of the public,