Improving the Telegraph
Is it resourceful to drive to your friend’s home to ask them a question? Or, is it more resourceful to call and ask them a question? It is more resourceful and much faster to call your friend. It is essential to understand that communication today is much more convenient than it was in the past. Communicating with someone far away used to be difficult and time-consuming. Before telephones were available, a device called a telegraph was used to communicate over long distances. A telegraph is an electrical device that uses wire to send messages.
It prints out a message that can be read a long distance away. This was a better way to communicate than sending letters or traveling a long distance to deliver a message. Let’s learn about a man who took the telegraph and improved it! His name is Samuel Morse. Morse didn’t invent the telegraph. But, he improved older models so that people could use them efficiently.
How does a telegraph work?
Did Samuel Morse invent the telegraph?
A telegraph is an electrical device that is used to send messages over long distances. It uses wire that carries electrical signals. It prints out a message that can be read a long distance away. This was a better way to communicate than sending letters or traveling a long distance to deliver a message.
Samuel Morse was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts, on April 27, 1791. He went to Yale University and began his professional career not as an inventor but as a painter. In 1832, Morse became interested in telegraphy after overhearing a conversation on a ship. At the time, telegraph machines used multiple wires (one used 26, and another model used 5).
Morse thought he could get the number of wires down to just one. He used a key, a battery, a single wire, and a receiver to develop Morse code to transmit messages using numbers and letters as a ‘code’ made up of dots and dashes. A dot was quick and short, while a dash was long. Eventually, operators could listen to the clicks and beeps and translate the coded messages. Printing marks on paper was no longer necessary. On May 24, 1844, the first official telegraph was sent by Samuel Morse. The message was “What hath God wrought!” This is a reference to Numbers 23:23 in the Bible.
What did Samuel Morse develop?
What is Morse code?
Why is communication important in our society?
