Page 37 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

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Samuel Morse: Electric Telegraph 1836-1847 + Charles Wheatstone: Electric Telegraph 1837
The 1830s saw a spate of innovation as inventors and scientists alike searched for a solution to long- distance electric communications. There were several experiments in Europe, the US and UK, but by the mid-century two main contenders had emerged - Samuel Morse, the American neo-classical painter; and Charles Wheatstone, the English inventor/scientist. Morse’s key-switch system, combined with his relatively easy to learn Morse Code eventually became the dominant system, but for a long time Wheatstone’s deflector system - where needles were deflected by the switched electric current to actually point to the letters of the alphabet (see the 5-needle apparatus above right) - was not only the first in commercial service, and in wide use in the UK, but attractive to customers because there was little training involved - you didn’t have to learn a code. There is a kind of evolution to be charted between the electric telegraph, the wireless telegraph (Morse-code through the radio - Marconi 1895), the telephone (Bell, 1876), voice radio transmission (Fessenden 1900) through to data-transmission by wire, by fibre and by cellular in the last decades of the 20th century.
So in the same decade that gave us Photography, and the first large-scale computer, also began the ‘wiring-up’ of Britain, with electric telegraphy linking major cities and military/naval bases. Thus began the building of Britain’s central nervous system – the electronic messaging service that at last replaced the mechanical semaphores and beacon-fires of yore with a high-speed network of electric pulses. Wheatstone’s pulse-code translated as analogs of the alphabet; Morse’s system was a code relatively simple to learn – you handed your message written in block capitals to the telegraphist and he tapped away, converting your alphabetical message into the dots and dashes of Morse Code. By 1879, with the first telephone exchange, voice telephony was gradually added to telegraphy, and by the end of the century the first wireless telegraphy messaging experiments began. (Marconi's experiments near The Needles on the Isle of Wight).
A trans-Atlantic telegraph cable had been mooted in 1839, but after many attempts at this prodigiously difficult engineering task, it wasn’t until 1858 that the first telegraph message was sent across the ocean.
By 1901, the entire world was interlinked by electric telegraph subsea cables... the Wired World began here.