By :
Mark Etinger
Before e-mails, telephones or a truck delivery service, telegrams were the preferred method of message transfers. Telegraphy requires a code known to sender and receiver, also called a language. At first smoke signals, beacons and reflected lights were used to convey messages. Since ancient times these were the only ways to transfer messages, besides by a quick courier service by horseback or foot. Often these were only effective over short distances. Semaphore, a system of flags and signals, helped Napoleon change Europe so much that it was imitated widely during the 19th century. But semaphore lines had problems: they necessitated good weather and towers every 20 miles. Using pivoting shutters in different positions, semaphore lines weren't very private or cost-effective, and so were only used by governments. It was the first of electrical telecommunications. The electrical telegraph was much faster and effective than semaphore. Samuel Morse developed an electrical telegraph and with his partner Alfred Vail, created Morse code. Over two miles of wire on a cold winter day in 1838, the first electrically sent message read, "A patient waiter is no loser." The first transatlantic line was completed twenty years later. The first cable weighed 1.1 tons per nautical mile. It had seven copper wires of a weight of 107 pounds per nautical mile, wrapped in gutta-percha and hemp. The first cable broke the first day and was repaired, but broke again over the telegraph plateau, nearly 2 miles deep, and it wasn't until the following year the Agamemnon, a British cruiser and the Niagara, an American vessel, met in the middle of the Atlantic to splice the cable. Again the cable broke, in multiple places. But despite numerous failures, the cable eventually succeeded. During the 20th century, the focus of telegraphy was to reduce hand-operated routing. With the arrival of the computer in the second half of the century, e-mails were used to send information from computer to computer, usually on the same mainframe. Early e-mails required both users be online at the same time. By the 1990s local internet providers had recognized that e-mail was the computer's killer app, and the technology became widespread. Today we take for granted our same day delivery service and the many e-mails we send, forgetting the hundreds of years of quick courier service technology that led to its development. Hopefully now the next time you receive an e-mail or a package from a package delivery service, you can appreciate the modern inventions that made this possible.
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