TRIBUTE: Long, Long Ago

The genesis of modern telecom networks can be traced to the electromagnetic
telegraph first conceived of by Samuel FB Morse in 1832. Morse constructed an
experimental version in 1835. However, his idea eventually took off only in 1844
when he built a telegraph line from Baltimore to Washington, DC. The first
message sent by the electric telegraph was, "What hath God wrought,"
from the Supreme Court room in the Capitol in Washington to the railway depot at
Baltimore on 24 May 1844. Within ten years, after the first telegraph line
opened, 23,000 miles of wire crisscrossed the US.

While Morse was overwhelmed with the idea of helping people send messages to
each other in distant places using what he had invented, telegraph proved to be
much more than that. Apart from laying the foundation of modern
telecommunications, telegraph made significant contribution to the building of
America. It had a tremendous impact on the development of the West (US). It made
rail travel safer.

Samuel F B Morse Cyrus Field Alexander Graham Bell A Telegraph Model

More than anything else, telegraph allowed businessmen to conduct their
operations more profitably. Later on, telegraph became important for the US
military and was used first at Varna during the Crimean War in 1854. It was also
widely used in the American Civil War. It was telegraph that made war reporting
worthwhile as journalists first made use of telegraphy during the
Spanish-American War (1898). The first military use for radiotelegraphy was
during the Russo-Japanese War in 1904—05.

Ten years after the completion of the first telegraph line came another path
breaking event in the history of telegraphy, when an entrepreneur Cyrus Field
began the quest to lay a telegraphic cable across the Atlantic Ocean. After
several failed attempts, in August 1858, Field arranged for Queen Victoria to
send the first transatlantic message to the US President James Buchanan.

However, the cable broke after just three weeks. It was only 1866 that
finally his project reached completion. This trans-Atlantic cable marked a new
beginning, laying the earliest foundations of a connected world. Distance had
received its first deathblow.

Ten years later, the world of communications changed forever when Alexander
Graham Bell uttered, "Mr Watson, come here. I want to see you," on the
telephone. What Bell did was indeed much more revolutionary than the invention
of telegraph. However, Bell appears to have spent a lot of time creating
awareness and making the telephone socially acceptable and making people (by now
comfortable with the use of telegraph for almost 50 years) understand that
telephone was a much better invention.

And it was an arduous task, as even the president of Western Union could not
understand the import of the invention of telephone. He dismissed an option to
buy Bell's patents for $100,000 saying, "What use could this company make
of an electric toy?" He was soon proved wrong. Bell established a
commercial telephone service in 1877. By 30 June 1887, there were 230 phones
installed; in July, there were 750; and in August there were 1,300. Within a
decade, by 1897, US had around 167,000. A revolution that would keep recurring,
with new vigor in the years to come, had just begun....

Ravi Shekhar Pandey