Gov. Morton Civil War #telegraph archive at IUPUI:

On the 150th anniversary of the US transcontinental #telegraph, my #telegraphy blog the Peninsula Telegraph-Recorder

RT @jcr: RT @pourmecoffee: ... On its 150th birthday, AP looks at first Internet: transcontinental telegraph. cc @v ...

what twitter needs is pitch-by-pitch telegraphic style baseball game coverage a la

Taulli and Mock write: "Unscrupulous stock promoters exaggerated this theoretical advantage of radio way beyond reason at the time....it demonstrates what can happen when a revolutionary technology emerges in a capitalist society. Truly, there was a very real and promising industry in wireless telegraphy and telephony; it only needed more time to develop. The problems with stock scams at this time actually had more to do with corrupt financiers than with the radio industry...." Eventually, government regulators shut down the fraudulent companies.

As a story plays out across the Network, as new information is uncovered, the inputs are routed through the mixing board of the writer’s keyboard. A writer must now listen to how the whole jam is sounding— the writer is a player down in the groove with other players. As we learn to write through a real-time medium, we’ll need to look to the values, standards and practices of live performance. But these performances aren’t necessarily the traditional one-to-many events unfolding within a proscenium. We’ll need to dig into the performance theories of Richard Schechner and the Happenings of Allan Kaprow; revive the thoughts of Michael Kirby and The Art of Time, and the work of Fluxus. The journey from text on a page to hypertext on the Network is not a small adjustment to a business model; it’s a transvaluation of all values.

These telegrams were communicated back and forth from late July of 1913 until the end of the strike between James MacNaughton, then Second Vice President of the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company (C & H), Quincy Shaw, the president of the company. The telegrams were sent via the Western Union Telegraph Company, written in code. The two simply took a number of key words and replaced them with random words, so that the communications would not be made public. They were trying to keep as much of a lid on the strike as they possibly could by doing this.

As a result, with the success of the Lille line, optical telegraph lines were built over the entirety of France over the next twenty years or so. Napoleon loved the system, having his own portable station built which he carried with him on campaign. He also poured money into building more of the network. It wasn't cheap, because each station had to be manned by a highly-trained person, who observed the signal from other towers and knew how to pass it on. But the French system of fast communication was one of the key ingredients in France's success during the Napoleonic War, and so they hung onto it as long as they could. Claude Chappe himself remained in his position as the head of the system for over 30 years, until there was an administration change.

Apparently the first illustration of telecommunications in the United States, in 1838. On the left the semaphore station of Staten Island in New York Bay. This was an intermediate between Sandy Hook and Merchants' Exchange in Manhattan, New York. (From Semaphore to Satellite, published by the International Telecommunication Union, Geneva 1965)

CLAUDE CHAPPE (1763-1805), French engineer, was born at Brulon (Sarthe) in 1763. He was the inventor of an optical telegraph which was widely used in France until it was superseded by the electric telegraph. His device consisted of an upright post, on the top of which was fastened a transverse bar, while at the ends of the latter two smaller arms moved on pivots. The position of these bars represented words or letters; and by means of machines placed at intervals such that each was distinctly visible from the next, messages could be conveyed through 50 leagues in a quarter of an hour. The machine was adopted by the Legislative Assembly in 1792, and in the following year Chappe was appointed ingenieur-telegraphe; but the originality of his invention was so much questioned that he was seized with melancholia and (it is said) committed suicide at Paris in 1805. ( (50 leagues) per (quarter hour) = 690 mph

Buell's Mercantile Cypher (1860) appears on eve of the Civil War and near the end of the canal transport for which it provides language. Code compilation was still tentative at this time; its phraseology is practical but too specific and even politely long-winded, giving it the tone of an exercise book. The nature of the markings throughout the present copy suggest that it was used for preparation for another code, based on and incorporating some, and rejecting much else, of its content.

The codes did not appear out of nowhere. Their immediate tributaries were nautical and coastal signal systems (typically involving flaghoist combinations), and visual telegraphs such as the Chappé optical telegraph system that operated across France from the mid-1790s well into the 1840s. With all of these systems, each sign or combination of signs represented a word or phrase in a code dictionary.

It turned out that what I had instead was a commercial telegraphic code. From the 19th through the mid-20th centuries, telegrams were integral to business and personal communications. Telegraph codes proliferated as a way to correspond economically and privately. Readily available code books such as the ABC Universal Commercial Electric Telegraph Code, not to mention many others, were published, with many businesses creating in-house codes. According to telegraphy historian-enthusiast John McVey, “Thousands of codes were published or issued privately, but they are largely forgotten now. They present a finely-grained window into their respective domains and their time. And they provide instances of sometimes stunning visual, technical, lexicographic and unwitting poetic achievement.”

The Evening Telegraph project has been on the go for a number of years. The original idea which was to reprint the 16 June 1904 edition of the Dublin Evening Telegraph had to be abandoned when we discovered the condition of the surviving originals. It was then decided to investigate recreating the paper using computer based typographic and graphic software.

The code Morse devised in partnership with Alfred Vail uses a system of dots and dashes to represent letters and numbers

On March 2, 1791 sent a message 10 miles away. In about 4 minutes they transmitted the phrase: "If you succeed, you will bask in glory."

excellent french maps of the optical telegraph

From Good Words June 1877; complete text, hard to read though

Ethan goes back to the 1960s for digital community; unspoken is 100 years prior of communities collected by telegraph lines.

"Meet timmy, the telegram-toting monkey"

Multiplex Telegraphy and Simultaneous Telegraphy and Telephony

scans of an 1873 harper's article on the telegraph; close your eyes and listen and replace a few words and you have web 2.0 or the dot com era

"We shall see a web spun of wires"

highly compressed code used by telegraph operators; would be useful for the net in general. kthxbye

on the Nashua Telegram's use of Twitter to broadcast headlines in real time. Waiting for a newspaper to rename itself after Twitter.

The news zipped through telegraph and telephone wires to cities around the country. Impromptu celebrations erupted everywhere, but most especially in [redacted].

"We hail you by lightning as fair sisters, as bright stars of the West. Time has been annihilated. Let no element of discord divide us. May your prosperity, as heretofore, be onward. What Morse has devised and Speed has joined let no man put asunder."