Imperial Telecommunications

Imperialism has existed in the world since the beginning of government all together, but this practice took a dramatic turn in the latter half of the nineteenth century. New inventions, modern thinking, and stronger governments all made imperialism easier. Now thousands of miles could be conquered in a matter of months; an empire could have a stronger hold on a colony than ever before. The result was that by the end of the century, at least one European nation had a claim to nearly every piece of land on the Earth.

In the early nineteenth century, it would take a message 5-8 months to travel from England to India. Steamships cut that time to six weeks each way, but furthermore electrical telecommunications made that time, for all practical purposes, instantaneous. This new form of communication gave imperialists the ability to maintain their empire, being able to govern a colony thousands of miles away. The web of cables that was so eagerly constructed around the world gave the European empires an advantage that earlier nations never could have imagined.

The following pages will cover the history and effects of electrical telecommunications from its beginning through the first world war. They will describe the basic technology and inventors behind the telegraph; following this the implication of this technology, mainly by Britain and France, into everyday practice will be discussed along with its effects. And finally, the effects on politics and economics leading up to the First World War will be discussed.

Samuel Finley Breese Morse (Fig. 1), a North American painter and inventor, got the idea for the telegraph while traveling from Italy to America. He began work and patented the first successful telegraph in 1838, along with a system of dashes and dots of electric pulses to represent letters (Stall sec. 1). The first message on a commercial telegraph cable was sent on May 24, 1844, from Washington DC to Baltimore. Morse sent the message “What hath God wrought” himself to his partner Albert Lewis Vail at the Baltimore & Ohio railway station. Plans to expand the network to Philadelphia, New York, and Boston began immediately (2).

Meanwhile in England, two gentlemen William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone (Fig. 2) had been working on the needle telegraph (Fig. 3). After years of experiments and patents, they finally built a one-needle telegraph that was so efficient and so simple that it was used in England for nearly eighty years to come (8).