October has been very, very busy! I'm trying to get both blogs caught up for the entire month, but apart from anything else, things have gone a bit haywire at my regular job and it's been frankly exhausting.
Among other things, I recently took a trip with my parents to visit my youngest sister. Until earlier this year, Liza had been living here in the Lehigh Valley in the same house with me, but now she's gotten a new job and a new place farther west. So we made a trek out to see her and her boyfriend Taylor and their new residence, and afterward we went out for lunch with some of her friends from her new church.
There happened to be a marker between her house and the restaurant, which I didn't even see - my stepdad Ravi caught sight of it, and was even so kind as to be the one to hop out and run across the street to get a photo. And that is how I ended up telling you today about how the first commercial telegraph line in the country was set up right here in Pennsylvania.
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The marker stands on Old Harrisburg Pike,
about half a mile west of Snyder Road.
Image courtesy of Ravi Shankar. |
The telegraph wasn't invented in the United States, of course, and probably at least a few of my readers already knew that. Ideas for a system that would easily transmit information over far distances in a matter of minutes had been batted around for centuries. In the early 1800s, a few different people throughout Europe came up with disparate systems, including inventors in England, Germany, and Russia.
The telegraph as we know it now was created in 1837 by Samuel Morse. Sam was a successful traveling artist, and also a husband and father. While he was away on a commission, his beloved wife died unexpectedly, and because he was so far away, it took him a long time to get the news. It took so long, in fact, that the funeral had already taken place by the time he was able to get home. He was distraught at not having been able to say goodbye to her, and vowed that no one else should ever have to endure that. To that end, he and his assistant Alfred Vail created an instrument that would transmit messages quickly, partially through the application of electromagnetism. They simplified the transmissions through use of the Morse code, which converted all the letters of the alphabet into combinations of dots and dashes. (I remember reading years ago that he nicknamed his son "Dash" and his daughter "Dot" as a sort of extension of the whole project, but I don't know if that's actually true.)
Morse demonstrated his telegraph for Congress in the 1840s, and sent his first federally-funded message - WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT - from Washington, D.C. to Baltimore in 1844. (If you visit the Uncharted Lancaster post I've linked in my sources, you can see a contemporary drawing of Morse sending the message.) Needless to say, people almost immediately started scrambling to make the telegraph a reality across the country and around the globe. As I've said before in this blog, Pennsylvania is full of firsts, and this is no exception; the first contract awarded to build a commercial telegraph line was granted here, for a line to connect Lancaster and Harrisburg. The goal was to have it ready by New Year's Day of 1846.
Considering that they started building in November of 1845, that deadline seems a little risky to me. But they moved quickly, erecting poles of chestnut wood roughly every hundred yards along a railroad line. The poles were mounted with crossarms, which were wrapped with gummed cloth for insulation. I had never heard of gummed cloth, but it was, and in fact still is, a kind of fabric tape with a water-activated adhesive. It's rubberized on one side, so it was ideal for their purpose. The wires were strung along these poles, and on the night of Thanksgiving they reached Harrisburg to complete the connection.
The honors of sending the telegraph were granted to Morse's friend Henry O'Reilly, and on New Year's Day, telegraph instruments arrived in Lancaster for him to operate. Everything was set up, O'Reilly sat down to send the message, and... it didn't work. For the next week they kept trying, and the system just didn't seem to be cooperating. But on January 8th, someone accidentally adjusted the instruments and they abruptly came to life, spilling out a sequence of dots and dashes. The first commercial telegraph message - WHY DONT YOU WRITE YOU RASCALS - had been sent.
As with most any new technology, the telegraph sparked as much fear as interest. The humming of the active wires made some people uneasy, especially with reports of electrocuted birds lying dead on the ground. There were actually very few commercial uses of the lines initially, because most of the people sending telegrams were just curious and wanted to see what names or phrases looked like when converted to Morse. But gradually, with the addition of improvements and new features over the next few decades, public acceptance grew and commercial use became more widespread. Ezra Cornell (he of Cornell University fame) created a new kind of insulation that made the wires safer for animals and people alike, while Thomas Edison came up with an advancement that allowed as many as four messages to be sent at the same time on one wire. By the 1860s, the Western Union Telegraphy Company had been established and was laying transcontinental telegraph lines, which proved to be invaluable in that decade for communication during the Civil War.
Of course, nowadays the 20th century innovations of things like telephones and internet have rendered the telegraph largely useless. If you drive along a railroad track, the odds are good that you'll spot the obsolete telegraph lines still standing alongside it; they look like very short telephone poles with light bulbs on the crossbars. But our modern methods of reaching out to one another had to start somewhere - and as with so many other things, they partly got started right here in Pennsylvania.
Sources and Further Reading:
Except where indicated, all writing and photography on this blog is the intellectual property of Laura Klotz. This blog is written with permission of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. I am not employed by the PHMC. All rights reserved.
Is there a marker for Daniel Drawbaugh of Cumberland County, who almost beat Bell in patenting the telephone?
ReplyDeleteHello, and thanks for this one! (a) think of the grueling work that went into putting up all of those configured poles, and (b) it blows my mind that we still have so much of our communications infrastucture on poles with wires in 2024. I hope you can keep up your good work. Best wishes for 2025.
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