Interesting People mailing list archives
Re: Re[2]: 150 th anniversary of Morse
From: David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>
Date: Tue, 31 May 1994 10:37:23 +0200
Posted-Date: Mon, 30 May 1994 11:04:45 -0400 Mime-Version: 1.0 Date: Mon, 30 May 1994 11:04:41 -0500 To: farber () central cis upenn edu (David Farber) From: rjs () farnsworth mit edu (Richard Jay Solomon) Subject: Re: Re[2]: 150 th anniversary of Morse Cc: mike () whammo media mit edu
Author: mike () whammo media mit edu%SMTP at x400po Date: 5/29/94 7:10 PM What is amazing is that barely a decade after that, the first transatlantic cables were strung, shortening the transit time of a piece of news from 2 months to about 2 seconds.
No. The 1858 cable only lasted 2 weeks before it was permanently abandoned due to an undersea break. Another Atlantic Cable was laid after some difficulties, and opened in 1868, some 24 years after Morse's telegraph. The baud rate was about 2 bits per second, or less than 30 words per minute. Because of electrical interference and downtime, it could take literally hours for a coherent message to be transmitted, and sometimes when traffic was heavy, a cablegram would be backed up days, even a week or more in the queue. But it was faster than a ship, though affordable only by rich governments, potentates, wealthy newspapers and magnates. Ordinary folks would never use it. In fact, ordinary people couldn't even afford domestic telegrams. Only major pieces of news (war and assassinations) would transit the ocean in a minute; everything else still took days or weeks. In the late 19th Century, the U.S. government built its own cable system (no, not all U.S. telegraphs were private) to Land's End in the U.K. to avoid commercial disruptions. It rented time on its cable to other governments, but the U.S. State Department had priority. It was radio -- private, non-common carrier radio at that -- which gave those who could afford their own transmitters and networks the ability to know what was going on in the world quickly. That was some 80 years after Morse. The nanosecond world for the general public had to wait another century or more after Morse, and it was the direct-dial telephone, with discount off-peak rates forced by the FCC in the 1960s, which made even domestic long-distance communications affordable. Cheap international, almost instantaneous, telecom had to wait for the Internet. The world doesn't change as quickly as it seems from the chronologies... Richard Solomon
Current thread:
- 150 th anniversary of Morse David Farber (May 29)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- Re[2]: 150 th anniversary of Morse David Farber (May 29)
- Re: Re[2]: 150 th anniversary of Morse David Farber (May 31)