The Telegraph and the Birth of Electrical Communication
The telegraph was the first major electrical communication technology, and it laid the foundation for the modern telecommunications industry. The telegraph used electrical signals to transmit messages over wires, with the messages encoded in a system of dots and dashes known as Morse code.
The telegraph turned long-distance communication from a matter of days into a matter of minutes. The pages below trace Samuel Morse’s instrument and the dot-dash code that carried its messages, and link to detailed articles on both.
The Development of the Telegraph
The telegraph was developed in the 1830s and 1840s by a number of inventors, including William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone in Britain, and Samuel Morse in the United States. The development of the telegraph was the result of a long series of experiments with electricity, magnetism, and electromagnetism, going back to the work of Hans Christian Ørsted, Michael Faraday, and others.
The first practical telegraph systems were developed almost simultaneously in Britain and the United States in the late 1830s. The Cooke-Wheatstone telegraph, patented in 1837, was used on the Great Western Railway in Britain, and the Morse telegraph, patented in 1840, was demonstrated in 1844 with a famous message from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore, Maryland. The article on Samuel Morse and the telegraph describes the development of the Morse telegraph in more detail.
The telegraph spread rapidly in the mid-nineteenth century, and by 1850 there were more than 12,000 miles of telegraph wire in the United States alone. The telegraph was used by the railways to coordinate the movement of trains, by businesses to communicate with branches and suppliers, by newspapers to report events from around the world, and by governments to send messages to distant outposts.
The Telegraph Network
The telegraph network expanded rapidly in the second half of the nineteenth century. In the United States, the Western Union Telegraph Company, formed in 1856, came to dominate the American telegraph industry, and it built a network of wires that stretched from coast to coast. In Britain, the General Post Office took over the telegraph system in 1870, and it built a national network that reached even the most remote areas of the country.
The transatlantic telegraph cables, of which the first successful one was laid in 1866, were a major achievement of the telegraph era. The cables connected North America with Europe, and they made possible the instantaneous communication of information across the Atlantic. The development of the transatlantic cables was a major financial and engineering undertaking, and it involved several attempts before a successful cable was finally laid.
The telegraph was the first major technology to be transformed by the Second Industrial Revolution. The development of the duplex and quadruplex telegraph systems, which allowed two or four messages to be sent over a single wire, dramatically increased the capacity of the telegraph system, and the laying of submarine telegraph cables connected the continents for the first time.
The Effects of the Telegraph
The telegraph had a transformative effect on the modern world. It made possible the rapid transmission of information over long distances, and it reshaped commerce, government, and the press. The article on the causes of the Industrial Revolution describes the broader context of the technological transformation of the period.
The telegraph was particularly important for the development of the modern financial system. The stock ticker, a telegraph device that transmitted stock prices from the exchanges to brokerage offices, made possible the modern stock market, and the transatlantic telegraph cables allowed the rapid transmission of financial information between New York and London. The article on the rise of American corporations describes these connections in more detail.
The telegraph was also important for journalism. The use of the telegraph by the Associated Press, founded in 1846, and other news agencies made possible the rapid reporting of events from around the world, and it laid the foundation for the modern newspaper. The telegraph also had important effects on politics, as governments were able to communicate with their far-flung colonies and military forces more rapidly and effectively than before.
The Telegraph in the Industrial Revolution
The telegraph was a defining technology of the Second Industrial Revolution. It was the first major industry to be based directly on scientific knowledge, in this case the science of electromagnetism, and it established the model of the research-based industrial firm. The development of the telegraph was a key chapter in the broader history of the Industrial Revolution, and it laid the foundation for the modern telecommunications industry.
The Atlantic Cable Project
The attempt to lay a working telegraph cable across the Atlantic Ocean was one of the great engineering projects of the nineteenth century, and it occupied a central place in the public imagination of the period. The first attempt, by the American financier Cyrus Field and the British electrical engineer Charles Tilston Bright, was made aboard the British frigate HMS Agamemnon in 1857; the cable broke twice and the project was abandoned. A second attempt in 1858 succeeded in laying a cable from Valentia Island, Ireland, to Trinity Bay, Newfoundland, and Queen Victoria sent President James Buchanan a congratulatory message of 143 words on August 16, 1858, taking 16 hours to transmit. The cable failed within three weeks, and the project was suspended until 1865, when the steamship Great Eastern attempted to lay a heavier cable; the cable broke again, and a third expedition in 1866 succeeded in laying both a working cable and recovering and completing the 1865 cable. The two cables, with a French cable added in 1869 and a series of subsequent additions, formed the basis of the transatlantic telegraph service. The transatlantic cables reduced the time required for news and business information to cross the Atlantic from perhaps 2 to 4 weeks (by steamship) to a few hours, and the company chartered to operate them, Anglo-American Telegraph Company, became one of the most profitable and litigated of the period’s joint-stock enterprises.
Thomas Edison’s Quadruplex
The introduction of the quadruplex telegraph by Thomas Edison in 1874 was a major innovation in telegraph engineering. The quadruplex allowed four messages to be sent over a single wire simultaneously — two in each direction — by combining the earlier duplex of Julius Gintl (1853) with the diplex of Charles Wheatstone (1858). Edison’s patent was contested by George Prescott, the chief electrician of Western Union, and the resulting litigation was settled out of court in 1877 in favor of Western Union, which paid Edison $30,000 plus royalties. The quadruplex and its successors — the harmonic telegraph of Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell, and the synchronous multiplex developed by Patrick B. Delany in the 1880s — multiplied the capacity of the existing telegraph wires by factors of 4 to 10. The economic significance was considerable: rather than build new lines, the telegraph companies could increase the revenue of their existing wires, and the price of a telegraph message between New York and Boston fell from 5 cents per word in 1860 to 25 cents for 10 words in 1885, an effective reduction in price of more than 90 percent.
The Stock Ticker and the Modern Financial System
The development of the stock ticker by Edward Calahan in 1867 and the printing telegraph of Thomas Edison in 1871 were decisive steps in the integration of the American and British financial systems. The first stock ticker, the Gold and Stock Telegraph Company’s device used on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, transmitted the price of stocks and commodities to brokerage offices around Wall Street. By 1870, ticker service was available in every major American city, and by 1890 to 600 cities and towns. The combination of the ticker with the transatlantic cable allowed the near-real-time integration of the New York and London stock exchanges, and the basis for the 24-hour global market in stocks, commodities, and currencies was established. The role of the telegraph in the financial system is the subject of Charles R. Geisst’s Wall Street: A History (1997) and of the earlier Walter Werner and Steven Tuch essay in the Yale Law Journal (1979), which argued that the modern corporation and the modern financial market were co-constructed with the telegraph and the stock ticker.
The Telegraph and News Agencies
The relationship between the telegraph and the news agency was particularly close. Paul Julius Reuter, the founder of Reuters, established his first telegraph-based news service in 1851, with a line from London to Calais, and the company expanded rapidly with the growth of the submarine cable system. The Associated Press, founded in 1846 by David Hale and James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald, signed a series of cooperative agreements with Reuters and other agencies in the 1860s, and the network of news agencies and telegraph wires produced the first truly global news system. The cost of a 100-word message between London and New York fell from £20 in 1866 to £2 in 1870 and to 1 shilling 6 pence by 1900, and the volume of news traffic rose accordingly. The role of the news agency in shaping modern journalism is the subject of Mitchell Stephens’s A History of News (1988) and of Menahem Blondheim’s News over the Wires (1994), which argues that the news agency was as significant an institution in the development of the global communication system as the telephone exchange or the broadcast network.
Historiography: The Telegraph in the History of Communication
The role of the telegraph in the larger history of modern communication is a topic of recent scholarship. Harold Innis’s Empire and Communications (1950) and the more influential Marshall McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) emphasized the medium over the message, treating the telegraph as a key moment in the “implosion” of the older oral and print cultures. The economic and business history, including the work of Richard John’s Network Nation (2010) and Daniel Czitrom’s Media and the American Mind (1982), has been more attentive to the institutional development of the telegraph as a regulated business. The standard view, most recently defended in David Hochfelder’s The Telegraph in America, 1832-1920 (2012), treats the telegraph as the prototype of the modern communications industry, with a high fixed cost of infrastructure, a low marginal cost of additional messages, and a set of network effects that favored monopoly and eventually, in 1866, the integration of the competing companies into Western Union.
The Telegraph and the Long-Term Question of Networked Industries
The history of the telegraph raises questions that are still being asked in the 21st century. What is the appropriate regulatory structure for a natural monopoly? How should the public interest be balanced against the interests of the network owners? Should the network be operated by a private firm, by a regulated utility, or by the state? The history of the telegraph shows that each of these three models has been tried, with mixed results. The private-firm model of Western Union in the United States was technically successful but politically vulnerable — the company was investigated by the Cox Committee in 1869 and the Adams Committee in 1884, and the federal government eventually took over the operation of the telegraph system during the First World War. The regulated-monopoly model of AT&T in the telephone system was politically successful and technically successful, and it lasted from 1913 to 1984. The state-monopoly model of the British GPO and the continental European PTTs was also politically successful and technically successful, and it lasted, in modified form, until the privatization of the 1980s and 1990s. The current debates about the regulation of the internet, the platform firms, and the social networks are direct descendants of the debates that began with the telegraph. The standard reference is Tim Wu’s The Master Switch (2010), which traces the recurring cycle of openness and control in the communications industry from the telegraph to the present.
The Key Patent Battles
The development of the telegraph was marked by a series of patent disputes that shaped the structure of the industry. The first of these was the dispute over the basic Morse patent, in which the Morse School (Morse, F. O. J. Smith, and Amos Kendall) fought with Henry O’Reilly, the principal opponent of the O’Reilly Telegraph Company, for control of the western and southern markets. The O’Reilly v. Morse case, decided in 1854 by the U.S. Supreme Court, upheld the basic Morse patent and gave the Morse School a temporary monopoly of the industry. The second dispute was the Western Union consolidation of 1856, in which the New York and Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Company and the New York, Albany and Buffalo Telegraph Company were merged into the new firm. The third dispute was the series of cases over the quadruplex telegraph, the stock ticker, and the automatic telegraph, in which Edison, Elisha Gray, Alexander Graham Bell, and others contested the priority of their inventions. The fourth dispute was the Bell Telephone patent case of 1888, in which the United States v. American Bell Telephone Company case was decided by Justice Swayne of the Supreme Court. The patent disputes of the period are the subject of Pauline Maier’s essay on the Morse patents and of Richard John’s Network Nation (2010), which argues that the patent system was central to the development of the American communications industry.
Submarine Cables and the Global Information Network
The submarine telegraph cable, first developed in the 1850s, was one of the great engineering achievements of the 19th century. The first successful transatlantic cable, completed on July 27, 1866, was the basis for the transatlantic telegraph service, and the development of the cable-laying industry — with firms like the Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company of London and the Glass, Elliot and Co. of Greenwich — was one of the most important new industries of the period. By 1900, the world had more than 200,000 miles of submarine cable, connecting all the major cities of Europe, North America, South America, Asia, and Africa. The cable industry was dominated by a small number of British firms, and the Eastern Telegraph Company, the Eastern Extension, Australasia and China Telegraph Company, and the Eastern and Associated Telegraph Companies together controlled about two-thirds of the world’s cable traffic. The cable industry, like the telegraph industry, was eventually nationalized, with most of the British cable companies being absorbed into the Cable & Wireless system, established by the British government in 1929. The history of the cable industry is the subject of Daniel R. Headrick’s The Tentacles of Progress (1988) and of JoAnne Brown’s A Victorian Technology (1988).
A Note on Sources
The standard primary sources for the history of the telegraph are the U.S. National Archives in College Park, Maryland, which holds the Morse and Vail papers and the telegraph company records; the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, which holds the surviving examples of early telegraph apparatus; the British Library in London, which holds the Cooke and Wheatstone papers; and the BT Archives in London, which hold the records of the General Post Office and the Post Office telegraph system. The standard secondary works are too numerous to list, but the works of Charles R. Geisst, Daniel Czitrom, Richard John, David Hochfelder, Menahem Blondheim, and Tim Wu, cited throughout this article, are the most useful starting points. The Telecommunications History Group and the IEEE History Center are the principal research organizations, and the journals History of Telecommunications, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, and Technology and Culture are the principal venues for new research.
Key Dates in Telegraph History
A short chronology of the principal dates in the history of the telegraph:
- 1837 — Cooke and Wheatstone telegraph patented
- 1840 — Morse telegraph patented
- 1844 — First telegraph message from Washington to Baltimore
- 1846 — Associated Press founded
- 1850 — 12,000 miles of telegraph wire in the U.S.
- 1856 — Western Union Telegraph Company formed
- 1858 — First transatlantic cable laid (fails after 3 weeks)
- 1866 — First successful transatlantic cable
- 1869 — French transatlantic cable
- 1870 — British Post Office takes over the telegraph system
- 1874 — Edison’s quadruplex
- 1884 — International Meridian Conference
- 1892 — AT&T formed
- 1900 — 200,000 miles of submarine cable in the world
- 1929 — British Cable & Wireless formed
The most important open scholarly debate about the telegraph is the natural-monopoly question: was the telegraph a natural monopoly, and if so, what does that imply for the regulation of the 21st-century network industries? The traditional answer, going back to the 1866 Atlantic Cable and given its modern form in the work of Alfred Chandler, is that the telegraph was a textbook natural monopoly: the cost of duplicating the right-of-way was prohibitive, the value of the network grew with the number of subscribers, and the industry had to be either regulated or consolidated. The interesting current question, raised in the post-1984 breakup of AT&T and developed in the recent literature on the layered internet, is whether the natural-monopoly argument was ever right. The empirical evidence from the 1990s-2010s — multiple fibre-optic networks in the same urban corridor, mobile networks competing in the same spectrum bands, the success of dark fibre and cable-modem competition — suggests that natural monopoly in networks is a contingent claim, not a structural one, and that what looked like natural monopoly in 1870 was actually the result of a particular regulatory and capital-market regime. The question is now being argued in the context of the 5G rollout, the Starlink low-orbit constellation, and the AI compute-network buildout, where the same Metcalfe’s-Law logic is being deployed. The history of the telegraph, in other words, is more relevant to the present than its age would suggest.