The Victorian Internet (4 page)

Within three weeks he had built a prototype that combined three of Baron Schilling's needle telegraphs in a single device.
It used a system of switches to control three needles via six wires. Each needle could be made to tilt to the left or the
right, or could remain unmoved, and different combinations of the three needles' positions signified different letters.

Having built prototypes that were capable of sending messages over wires thirty or forty feet long, Cooke, who had by this
time returned to England, was eager to try out his apparatus over greater distances. His friend Burton Lane, a solicitor at
Lincoln's Inn in London, gave him the use of his office for three days so that he could lay out a mile of wire. "I had to
lay out this enormous length of 1,760 yards in Burton Lane's small office, in such a manner as to prevent one part touching
another; the patience required and the fatigue undergone was far from trivial," Cooke wrote in a letter to his family. Worse
still, the result was disappointing: His apparatus simply didn't work with longer wires. After a week, he had outstayed his
welcome, and Lane wanted his office back.

Meanwhile in New York, Morse, working independently, had come up against exactly the same problem. Although his telegraph
worked over short distances, all his experiments with longer wires had failed. Each man realized that there was more to the
electric side of building a telegraph than first suspected, and neither had the scientific training to get past this hurdle.

In fact, the problem had already been solved by Joseph Henry, an American physicist, who had managed to get a battery and
an electromagnet, connected by 1,060 feet of wire, to ring a bell. In a series of experiments carried out in 1829 and 1830,
Henry discovered that getting an electric current to travel through a long wire was all a matter of using the right kind of
battery. He found that in conjunction with a suitable electromagnet, a large number of small batteries connected in a row,
rather than a single large battery, enabled the signal to travel much farther. But Morse and Cooke, as amateur experimenters,
were unaware of Henry's work, even though members of the scientific community on both sides of the Atlantic were familiar
with it.

Cooke arranged a meeting with Michael Faraday, the eminent British scientist whose particular area of research at that time
was the relationship between electricity and magnetism. Faraday confirmed that Cooke's design for a telegraph was technically
sound; but when Cooke enthusiastically offered to explain his design for a perpetual motion machine as well, Faraday, suspecting
that he had a quack on his hands, declared that he was pressed for time and showed Cooke the door.

Next, Cooke turned to his friend Peter Roget for advice. Roget is best known today as the compiler of the first thesaurus,
but he was also a scientist and had published a treatise on electricity in 1832- He introduced Cooke to Professor Charles
Wheatstone, who had made his name through an ingenious series of experiments to determine the velocity of electricity. A meeting
was arranged, and Cooke was delighted to discover that Wheatstone had quite a length of wire—four miles of it, in fact—ready
for experimentation. He was rather less pleased to hear that Wheat­stone had also been carrying out telegraphic experiments
of his own. Moreover, since Wheatstone was familiar with Henry's work, he had succeeded in getting signals to travel over
long distances where Cooke had failed.

Professor Charles Wheatstone, scientist and co-inventor of the electric telegraph.

The two men formed an uneasy partnership: Cooke needed Wheatstone's scientific knowledge, so he offered Wheatstone a sixth
share in the profits of his device. Wheatstone haughtily proclaimed that he thought it was inappropriate for scientific men
to do anything other than publish their results and let others make whatever commercial use of them they wanted; but that
if he was to be a partner with Cooke, who was his junior, it would have to be on equal terms. Impressed by what he later described
as Cooke's "zeal, ability and perseverance," Wheatstone eventually agreed to a partnership, on the rather childish condition
that his name would go first on the documentation.

This sort of behavior was typical of Wheatstone, who was a somewhat prickly character, and whose relationship with Cooke was
always highly precarious. Ry turns painfully shy and incurably arrogant, Wheatstone insisted on referring to the invention
of the telegraph in the first person singular and claiming all the scientific credit for himself, as though Cooke were nothing
more than a business associate whom he had engaged to promote his invention.

But even though they didn't get on personally, the two men's professional relationship was productive: They had soon devised
and patented an improved five-needle telegraph. Each needle could be deflected to the left or right to pick out numbers and
letters on a diamond-shaped grid, so there was no need to learn which combination corresponded to which letter. However, the
limited number of possible combinations with the five-needle design meant that only twenty letters were included in the telegraphic
alphabet; thus "c," " j," "Q," "U," "x," and "z" were omitted. Although this design required separate wires between sender
and receiver for each needle, it could transmit messages quickly without the need for a codebook.

Cooke and Wheatstone's original five-needle electric telegraph. Each needle could be tilted to the left or right, or remain
vertical; moving two needles picked out a letter on a diagonal grid (in this case, the letter "v").

m
orse HAD BY THIS Time spent five years working on his telegraph, compared to a few months in the case of Cooke and Wheatstone.
This was largely because he had got sidetracked into building a vastly overcomplicated design that involved feeding a preprepared
rack (or "port rule") of toothed pieces of metal, each representing a letter or number, into the sending apparatus. As the
rack passed through the machine, the spacing of the teeth caused long and short pulses of electricity to be transmitted down
the wire to the receiver, switching an electromagnet on and off and deflecting a pencil as it drew a line on a moving strip
of paper. The long and short pulses were transcribed as a zigzag line, whose wiggles could then be translated from Morse code
back into the original message. Morse thought the advantages of this rather convoluted scheme were that messages could be
prepared for transmission in advance, and that at the receiving end there would be a permanent record of all incoming messages.
It was all rather complicated, and Morse, who was living on a tiny salary after being appointed professor of literature of
the arts of design at New York University, frequently had to choose between spending his money on food or components for his
telegraph. So it had taken him a long time to build the device.

Having run into the problem of transmitting over long distances, Morse too was guided by a helpful academic. Professor Leonard
Gale, who taught chemistry at New York University, was a personal friend of Henry's and suggested changing the battery and
improving the receiving electromagnet. "After substituting the battery of twenty cups for that of a single cup, we sent a
message through two hundred feet of conductors, then through 1,000 feet, and then through ten miles of wire arranged on wheels
in my own lecture room in the New York University in the presence of friends," Gale recalled. This was the breakthrough that
Morse had been seeking.

Morse and Gale teamed up and were soon joined by Alfred Vail, a young man who saw a demonstration of Morse's prototype telegraph
and wanted to get involved. In exchange for becoming a partner in the venture, with a share of the patent rights, he agreed
to build a complete set of instruments at his own expense. For the cash-strapped Morse, Vail, who had money, enthusiasm, and
practical experience from his father's ironworks, was a godsend.

Morse's original telegraph. Winding the handle (L) forced the toothed rack through the transmitting apparatus (P), making
and breaking the circuit. At the receiving end, the intermittent current was recorded as a zigzag line on a moving tape (A)
by deflecting a pencil (G) with an electromagnet.

With Vail on board, Morse's design made progress in leaps and bounds. They did away with the rack and the toothed metal pieces
in favor of tapping a key by hand. The zigzag line drawn by the pencil was replaced by an ink pen that rose and fell to inscribe
a line of dots and dashes. Morse's number system was also replaced with an alphabetic code, in which each letter was represented
by a combination of dots and dashes, thus doing away with the need for numbered codebooks. By counting the number of copies
of each letter in a box of printer's type, Morse and Vail designed the code so that the most common letters had the shortest
equivalents in code; "E," the most common letter, was represented by a single dot.

a
s THEY PERFECTED their designs, Morse and Cooke were both aware of the wider significance of their work, although they were
still unaware of each other's efforts. Cooke thought the electric telegraph would be useful to governments "in case of disturbances,
to transmit their orders to the local authorities and, if necessary, send troops for their support." He also thought it could
be used for transmitting stock prices or to help a family in the event of an illness "hastening towards a fatal termination
with such rapidity that a final meeting is without the range of ordinary means."

Morse had similar ambitions for his telegraph. One visitor to his rooms recalled that he "believed he had discovered a practical
way of using [electromagnetismj as a means of communication and interchange of thought in written language, irrespective of
distance and time save that required for manipulation, and that it would ultimately become a daily instrumentality in domestic
as well as public life."

Right from the start, Morse was confident that Europe and North America would eventually be connected by a wire that would
link telegraph networks on both sides of the Atlantic. He had visions of a wired world, with countries bound together by a
global network of interconnected telegraph networks. "If it will go ten miles without stop­ping," he was fond of saying, "I
can make it go around the globe."

And the role that the telegraph might have played in his private life a few years earlier was all too clear to Morse. According
to his son, Edward, "He recalled the days and weeks of anxiety when he was hungry for news of his loved ones-, he foresaw
that in affairs of state and commerce, rapid communication might mean the avoidance of war or the saving of a fortune; that,
in affairs nearer to the heart of the people, it might bring a husband to the bedside of a dying wife, or save the life of
a beloved child; apprehend the fleeing criminal, or commute the sentence of an innocent man."

Cooke and Morse had done the impossible and constructed working electric telegraphs. Surely the world would fall at their
feet. Building the prototypes, however, proved to be the easy part. Convincing people of their significance was far more of
a challenge.