Posted
on May 24, 2016
When
we want to honor an inventor like Samuel Morse, or his or her
invention, do we honor his birthday? The anniversary of his death?
The anniversary of an “ah-ha!” moment, or of the first successful
demonstration of the invention, or of the patent?
The
truth is, of course, that it depends on the inventor and the
invention. In some cases we have little information about exactly
when an inventor thought up an idea or tested a new gadget – but we
can clearly see the date of the patent. In some cases a group of
people invented a device, rather than one person with a definite
birthdate, and in other cases multiple people separately invented the
same thing.
One
of the two Morse Code Days is April 27, which is the birthday of
telegraph inventor Samuel Morse.
The
other is today, May 24, which is the anniversary of the first
official telegram.
Samuel
Morse and his partners, Leonard Gale and Alfred Vail, worked on the
prototype telegraph that was demonstrated in 1938. They also had to
develop a code that could be used to transmit letters and numbers.
Morse studied the use of semaphore flags and optical codes – which
assigned 3- or 4-digit numbers to various words – but Vail knew
that such a system would be limited in what could be expressed and
would be fairly difficult to translate from code to message. It was
Vail who put in the effort to study the frequency of use of the 26
letters in the English language. He assigned the shortest dot-dash
codes for the letters used most often, and longer codes for the
infrequently-used letters.
It
was perhaps even harder to convince Congress to fund the construction
of the first telegraph line than it was to invent the device and the
code! Finally, in 1843, Morse convinced them, thanks to the lobbying
of his former classmate and supporter Henry Ellsworth, and a
telegraph line was built linking Washington, D.C., to Baltimore,
Maryland, a distance of about 40 miles.
In
order to reward Ellsworth for his help with the skeptical Congress,
Morse decided to allow Ellsworth's daughter to choose what the first
official telegram would say. That's how 17-year-old Annie Ellsworth
entered the story. She chose a short line from the Bible: “What
hath God wrought?”
And
it was on this date in 1844 that Morse, seated in the U.S. Capitol,
tapped out Annie's message. Vail, sitting in a Baltimore railroad
depot, received the message just seconds later. By 1800s standards,
that was INSTANT communication!
The
telegraph was a success almost instantly, as well. Over the next few
years, private companies set up telegraph lines, and within a decade
more than 20 thousand miles of telegraph wire had been strung in the
U.S. alone. And although Morse had to spend years in court fighting
for recognition for his work and royalties for his inventions, he
died at age 80 a rich and famous man.
Of
course, almost instant coded communication via wire was eventually
replaced by non-coded vocal communication via wire (the telephone),
and then wireless communication (cell phones). Not to mention faxes
and email and text messaging and social media!
Western
Union, one of the first and biggest telegraph companies, delivered
its last telegram in January of 2006.
Also
on this date:
Plan
ahead:
Check
out my Pinterest boards for:
And
here are my Pinterest boards for:
On this date in 1999, at 5:00 p.m., the last commercial radio transmission in Morse Code was made.
And they made a plan to commemorate that last transmission - in a way that would make it, not the last, but lasting!
