How Did Long Before Samuel F. B. Morse Use The Electromagnet

Long before Samuel F. B. Morse electrically transmitted his famous message “What hath God wrought?”, there were signal systems. That’s when they knew they had come up with a new way to communicate long distances without hand delivering messages. The world’s eagerness to push the ability of communicating from a distance only grew. The idea of using electricity to communicate over distance is said to have been Morse during a conversation aboard ship when he was returning from Europe in 1832. Michael Faraday’s recently invented electromagnet was much discussed by the ship’s passengers, and when Morse came to understand how it worked, he thought that it might be possible to send a coded message over a wire. While a student at Yale College a few years before he invented the electromagnet, had written his parents a letter about how interesting he found the lectures on electricity. Without what he learned at Yale, Morse found when he began to develop his idea that he had little real understanding of the nature of electricity, and after many attempts to work with batteries, magnets, and wires, he finally went for help to a college
called the University of the City of New York, Leonard D. Gale.
Gale was a professor of chemistry and familiar with the electrical work of Princeton’s Joseph Henry, a true pioneer in the new field.
Well before Morse had his shipboard idea about a telegraph, Henry rang a bell at a distance by opening and closing an electric circuit. In 1831, he had published an article, of which Morse was unaware, that contained details suggesting the idea of an electric telegraph. Gale’s help and his knowledge of this article proved crucial to Morse’s telegraph system because Gale not only pointed out flaws in the system but showed Morse how he could regularly boost the strength of a signal and overcome the distance problems he had encountered by using a relay system Henry had invented. Henry’s experiments Gale’s assistance, and soon after, hiring the young technician, Alfred Vail, were the keys to Morse’s
success.
By December 1837, Morse had enough confidence in his new system to apply for the federal government’s approval, and during the next year he conducted demonstrations of his telegraph both in New York and Washington. However, when the economic disaster known as the Panic of 1837 took hold of the nation and caused long depression, Morse was forced to wait for better times. It was during this time that Morse visited Europe again and tried not only to secure patent protection overseas but to examine competing telegraph systems in England. After meeting Charles Wheatstone, the inventor of one such electric telegraph system, Morse realized that although his main competitor had built an ingenious mechanism, his own system was way more simpler, more efficient, and easier to use.
Morse felt very confident. His system used automatic sender consisting of a plate with long and short metal bars representing the Morse code equivalent of the alphabet and numbers. The operator slid a pointer connected to a battery and the sending wire across the bars, and immediately the appropriate dots and dashes were sent over the line. The receiver used an electromagnet with a pen on the end of an arm. When the magnet operated, the pen made an impression or tiny dent in a paper tape which wound past a clockwork motor. The tape was then read by the operator. In collaboration with Gale and Vail, Morse eventually produced a single-circuit telegraph that worked by pushing the operator key down to complete the electric circuit of the battery. This action send the electric signal across a wire to a receiver at the other end. By 1843, the country was beginning to recover economically, and Morse again asked Congress for the $30,000 that would let him build a telegraph line from Washington to Baltimore, forty miles away. The House of Representatives eventually passed the bill containing the Morse appropriation, and the Senate approved it in the final hours of that Congress’s last session. With President Tyler’s signature, Morse received the cash he needed and began to carry out plans for an underground telegraph line.
Morse had hired the ingenious construction engineer Ezra Cornell to lay the pipe carrying the wire, and although Cornell did his job superbly, one of Morse’s partners, Congressman F. O. J. Smith, and had purchased wire with defective insulation. Too much time had been wasted laying bad wire, and with the project ana rigid deadline, something had to be done quickly Cornell suggested that the fastest and cheapest way of connecting Washington and Baltimore was to string wire overhead on trees and poles. The desperate Morse gave the go ahead, and the line was complete in time for the dramatic and spectacularly successful link between the Supreme Court chamber of the Capitol building and the railroad station in Baltimore. Soon, as overhead wires connected cities up and down the Atlantic coast, the dots and dashes method that recorded messages on a long moving strip of paper was replaced by the operator’s ability to interpret the code in the real time and transcribe it into English letters as he heard it. Telegraph lines soon went more westward, and within Morse’s own lifetime they connected the continents of Europe and America. The telegraph thrived in the 1920s, but the great depression hit the industry hard, and it never recovered to its previous position. AT&T introduced the teletypewriter exchange service in 1931. The teletypewriter and the Telex let customers install a machine in their businesses that would send and receive messages within seconds. This final merger was not enough to stop the continuing rise of the telephone or the telegraphs decline. AT&T made $1.9 billion in yearly revenues by transmitting 89.4 million local phone calls and 4.9 toll calls everyday. The telegraph accelerated the speed of business transaction during the late nineteenth century and contributed to the industry of the the United States. The telephone was easier and faster to use, and the telegraph ultimately lost its cost advantages. A Western Union telegram is still available, currently costing $9.95 for 250 words.