For centuries, people and governments have tried to quickly transmit short messages in one direction, using smoke signals, fire towers, tom-toms, flags, and other means. Not until the late eighteenth century were the first effective systems devised that could communicate any message in either direction further than the human voice could carry and faster than a letter could be transported. We call these systems telecommunication, and their modern descendants underwrite our contemporary information infrastructure.
The first effective bidirectional open-ended telecommunication systems were created—and not by coincidence—during the wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon. Two new systems, one on land and the other at sea, arose out of the demands of war and, just as importantly, from the belief that reason and ingenuity could conquer time and distance.
The creator of the first land-based telegraph system was the Frenchman Claude Chappe. It consisted of stations positioned on towers or church steeples a few kilometers apart, each one visible to two others. Each station had a set of boards that could be moved by ropes and pulleys into ninety-eight different positions, each position corresponding to a word or phrase in a *code book. After many attempts, Chappe persuaded the French National Convention to fund his system. Beginning with a line from Paris to Lille built in 1794, the network was extended to all the major cities of France and, under Napoleon, to neighboring countries as well. By the 1840s, the French network consisted of 530 stations covering five thousand kilometers. Spain, England, and Sweden also built lines, most of them between a royal palace and the capital city, but abandoned them when peace came in 1815.
New lines were erected in the 1830s and 1840s. Those built in continental European countries were reserved for administrative and military use. In Britain and the United States, private individuals erected lines to signal the approach of ships or to transmit commercial and financial information. Nowhere were these early telegraph networks open to the public, though the New York and Boston lines did provide users with access to the information they conveyed in return for the payment of an annual fee.
The other pre-electrical telecommunication system was naval flag signaling. For centuries, warships had communicated by hoisting flags and other objects, but such communications involved unidirectional prearranged messages, and were often confusing. During the 1780s and 1790s, several British officers came up with sets of flags and signal books for use during naval maneuvers. Rear Admiral Sir Home Popham’s Telegraphic Signals or Marine Vocabulary, first issued in 1800, made it possible for ships to communicate with one another and allowed the admiral of a fleet to direct the movements of his ships even during the course of a battle. After several editions, it became the official code of the Royal Navy in 1813. It was followed in 1817 by Captain Frederick Marryat’s Signals for the Use of Vessels Employed in the Merchant Service. These systems remained in use until the early twentieth century, when they were gradually replaced by radiotelegraphy.
Even as the French were building their optical telegraph network, several inventors tried to use electricity to send messages at a distance. The demand for rapid communication, the science and technology of electricity, and the ingenuity of inventors coalesced in 1837–38 with the introduction of two practical and commercially profitable electric telegraph systems.
One of these was created by Charles Wheatstone and William Fothergill Cooke in England in 1837. It consisted of a battery and a set of wires, a board with needles pointing to letters or numbers, and, at the receiving end, another board with needles that moved in response to the positions of the needles on the sending board. This system was rapid and effective and did not require highly trained operators. It proved especially useful for railroad operation and was widely adopted in Great Britain and the British Empire.
In the United States at the same time, Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail presented a system that required only one needle (with the Earth forming the return), a battery and a key (or switch) at the sending end, and an electromagnet and sounding device at the receiving end. The basis of this system was the *Morse code, with electric pulses (dots and dashes) corresponding to letters and numbers. The system was less expensive than Wheatstone and Cooke’s, a consideration in the United States where distances were much greater than in Britain, but it required trained operators who could turn written characters into dots and dashes and who could hear the incoming signals and write down the corresponding characters. The Morse system spread quickly. By 1852, telegraph lines covered twenty-three thousand miles throughout the eastern United States. It was also adopted in Europe and around the world. Because it worked at night and in bad weather, the electric telegraph was able to transmit ten times more words per day than the optical telegraph, which it soon replaced. Since it could carry far more messages than governments needed, it was opened to the public and was widely used by merchants, financiers, newspapers, and ordinary people.
Though very fast in comparison to the optical telegraph, the early electrical telegraphs offered many opportunities for improvement. One was to reduce the dependence on operators prone to making mistakes. David Hughes and Emile Baudot introduced keyboards that simplified transmission and devices that printed incoming telegrams. Thomas Edison’s quadruplex system allowed four messages to be sent through the same wire simultaneously. Teleprinters, introduced in the 1880s, eliminated the need for operators trained in the Morse code. Telex machines, introduced in the 1930s and sold to businesses, allowed typists to send telegrams to other telex machines without resorting to the telegraph office. Inventors also built various devices to transmit images through telegraph lines. Such facsimile (or “fax”) machines remained very complicated until the 1960s, when American and Japanese companies introduced simple and inexpensive machines as household consumer items.
After 1838, landlines spread quickly. In North America, Western Union’s lines reached the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers in 1860 and the Pacific coast a year later. By 1900 it operated one million miles of landlines. In other countries, landlines were operated by governments.
Inventors sought to fill the gaps between land masses with telegraph wires laid on the seafloor. To do so, they insulated copper cables from the surrounding water with gutta-percha and protected them by wrapping them with iron wires. The first successful submarine cable, laid across the English Channel in 1851, encouraged entrepreneurs to lay cables across the Mediterranean, down the Red Sea, and, in 1858, across the Atlantic Ocean. All these early cables failed, and it was only in 1866 that a successful cable crossed the North Atlantic and in 1870 that cables connected England and India.
After 1870, cables were laid to Australia, China, and Japan, to South America and the Caribbean, around Africa, and finally across the Pacific Ocean. By 1908, 473,108 kilometers of submarine cables linked every continent and most islands in a global network. Of these, 82 percent were owned by private companies, over half by Eastern and Associated, a British conglomerate.
The global telegraph network played an important part in the great expansion of world trade in the decades before World War I. Until the 1920s, to defray the enormous cost of manufacturing and laying cables, the cable companies set their rates so high that only governments, news agencies, and businesses could afford to send intercontinental messages. The British dominance of the world’s cables also rankled rival nations, first France and Germany, and later the United States, leading them to lay their own cables and, in the early twentieth century, to invest in radiotelegraphy. Nonetheless, copper submarine cables remained in use until the 1960s, for they were more secure than radio, especially in wartime, when radio signals could be intercepted, but cables could not.
No sooner did the electric telegraph become practical than inventors sought ways of transmitting sound through wires. The first person to obtain a patent for an instrument that transformed a human voice into electricity and back again, albeit only over short distances, was Alexander Graham Bell, in 1876. Improvements followed rapidly. Thomas Edison’s carbon microphone, invented in 1878, permitted sound to be carried over much longer distances. That year also saw the introduction of the telephone exchange with a switchboard that allowed an operator to connect any two subscribers. Telephony spread rapidly in the United States as operating companies were licensed by the Bell Telephone Company, which had been founded to commercialize the patents held by Alexander Graham Bell. As more telephones were installed, the number of possible connections rose exponentially, greatly increasing the demand for switchboard operators. To expand the market, Bell managers in the 1890s experimented with innovative calling plans (including “measured service” and pay-as-you-go telephones), sophisticated operator-assisted switchboards, and elaborate advertising campaigns. As a result of these innovations, telephones proliferated. By 1904 the United States had over three million telephone subscribers.
Telephony had social and cultural consequences. Unlike telegraphs, telephones were designed to be used in homes as well as offices. In most families that could afford a telephone, women stayed home when their husbands went to work. Though businessmen and telephone company executives complained that housewives clogged the lines with useless chatter, in fact it was office boys crowding the lines to gamble, gossip, or discuss the latest baseball scores who posed the biggest problems in the early days at the most highly congested big-city exchanges. However, the telephone did also allow housebound women to reach out to one another and form networks of friends more easily than before. Later, as phones proliferated, teenagers also took advantage of the new technology to stay in touch.
After two of Bell’s most important patents expired in 1893–94, numerous companies with no connection to Bell sprang up to provide service in local areas, and, in some instances, entire regions. Some of these companies relied on rotary dial phones and the Strowger automatic telephone exchange—inventions that had yet to be introduced by Bell. Bell would eventually acquire many of these local companies, though thousands would remain in existence for decades. Bell’s long-distance subsidiary, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (later AT&T) put up lines that reached from New York to Chicago in 1892 and to San Francisco in 1915. By the First World War, the Bell-AT&T combine would become the dominant telephone network provider in the United States. European nations, burdened by government-owned telegraph networks, lagged far behind.
Though long-distance telephone became a reality early on thanks to repeaters along the major trunk lines, crossing oceans was a greater challenge. After World War II, cable companies developed repeaters that could be installed along a submerged cable and that permitted the transmission of voice as well as dots and dashes. Several copper-core telephone-and-telegraph cables were laid across the Atlantic between 1955–56 and 1978 and across the Pacific in 1964 and after. They were soon made obsolete, however.
Unlike telegraphy, which was born in a time of war and was later improved by scientific discoveries in electricity, radio arose from scientific researches in electromagnetism and was later developed to serve both commerce and warfare.
Guglielmo Marconi is rightly praised as the inventor of radio, but he based his invention on several major discoveries, especially the electromagnetic theory of light by James Clerk Maxwell and the demonstration thereof by Heinrich Hertz. What Marconi did was use electromagnetic waves to transmit information in code. His invention closed the gap in telegraphic communication, namely with ships at sea. After moving to England in 1896 and patenting his invention, he quickly attracted the attention of the British Admiralty, of major shipping lines, and of the maritime insurer Lloyd’s of London.
Marconi’s success soon bred competitors and stimulated further technological advances. Inventors knew that radio waves could bend around obstacles, yet reaching around the curvature of the earth, for instance, across the Atlantic Ocean, would require very long radio waves produced by extremely powerful transmitters and emitted by enormous antennas. By 1907 Marconi had achieved that goal and was able to compete with the cable companies for transatlantic traffic.
Meanwhile, others sought to overcome a flaw in the Marconi system—namely, the radio waves produced by sparks that sounded like the static emitted by lightning. Several inventions—the alternator, the electric arc, and the vacuum tube—produced continuous, that is, pure, waves. In 1906, using an alternator, Reginald Fessenden was able to transmit the human voice. The first transatlantic telephone conversation became possible nine years later, albeit at enormous expense.
As companies competed to build ever more powerful long-distance stations transmitting kilometric waves (that is, up to 300 kHz), they left shorter wavelengths to amateurs to play with. After World War I, using the newly invented vacuum tubes, amateurs found they could communicate around the world, though too erratically and unreliably for commercial use.
While experimenting with waves as short as ten meters (up to 30 MHz), Marconi and others discovered three important features: with parabolic antennas, such waves could be concentrated in a “beam” rather than being scattered in all directions; although they traveled in a straight line, they were reflected off the ionosphere, hence could bounce around the world at certain times of day; and, most importantly, their equipment cost one-twentieth as much to build and operate as long-wave stations. From the mid-1920s on, shortwave wireless began to replace the enormous and costly long-wave systems and even telegraph cables. From then on, shortwave radio became ubiquitous around the world, even in airplanes.
Since World War II, telecommunications have been transformed as radically as they had been by the introduction of electricity in the nineteenth century. Several innovations combined to make telecommunication rapid, global, and inexpensive. In this section we will consider three innovations: microwaves, satellites, and fiber optics.
Microwaves, that is, very short waves (between one meter or 300 MHz and one millimeter or 300 GHz), were first produced in the 1930s. These waves travel in straight lines, even through clouds and fog, but are reflected by most solid objects. Hence they were first applied to radar installations used to detect enemy airplanes during World War II. Starting in the 1950s, strings of towers were erected between cities, for microwaves could transmit telephone calls and television programs much more cheaply than cables could. Later, they were used to communicate with satellites.
The idea of launching artificial satellites dates back to the nineteenth century. Only in the 1950s were rockets available that could put a human-made object into orbit, the first being the Soviet Sputnik in 1957. The first direct communication satellites were launched in 1962–63; by 2000, there were over two thousand of them. We can distinguish three distinct types. Low Earth Orbit (or LEO) satellites, orbiting between 160 and 2,000 kilometers above the Earth, are inexpensive to put into orbit but move fast relative to the surface of the Earth and therefore need to be numerous and communicate with costly tracking stations. Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) satellites, between 2,000 and 35,786 kilometers above the Earth, move more slowly relative to the surface but cover a larger area. And Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) satellites remain directly 35,786 kilometers above a fixed point on the planet. For a time GEOs were used for transoceanic telephone calls but suffered from annoying delays while signals traveled up to a satellite and down again. Since the 1990s they have been used mostly to beam television programs.
The third innovation is fiber-optic cables. Not only does light travel faster than an electric current, but it can also carry much more information. The challenge was to confine a light beam in a strand of glass that could carry it around corners and over long distances without scattering or fading. The first cables encasing a strand of superpure glass were developed in the 1970s. By the late 1980s, the technology of fibers and repeaters had advanced sufficiently for companies to lay cables between distant cities and across oceans. The first transatlantic fiber-optic cable, TAT-8, laid in 1988, was capable of carrying forty thousand simultaneous telephone conversations. The world’s cable network reached 250,000 kilometers of cables by 2002 and has been growing ever since. Today, the cost of communicating between any two places on Earth is almost insignificant; what costs is switching and administrative expenses.
Making these innovations possible, indeed tying them together, is the *digital revolution, which allows any medium to be digitized and processed by computers. The *internet, with which computers everywhere communicate with one another, can therefore carry all types of information: voice, data, images, and video. With satellites and fiber-optic cables, the internet now reaches almost every place on Earth that governments allow.
All the technologies described in the previous section belong to infrastructures of which most customers are unaware. In the 1980s came a new consumer device, the most revolutionary since the invention of the telephone: the mobile or cellular phone.
Inventors and companies had long been interested in detaching the telephone from its wire. Portable two-way radios (“walkie-talkies”) became available after World War II, but they were heavy and expensive and had a limited range, and the radio networks that served them could handle only a few calls at once; they were used mainly by the military and by police and public works departments. These restrictions were lifted in 1979 when the Nippon Telephone and Telegraph Company introduced a cellular network in which a radiotelephone automatically switched from one transmitter to another as the user moved around. As improvements made handheld devices cheaper, faster, and more versatile, mobile telephony quickly spread around the world. Mobile networks were so much easier and cheaper to build than landlines that they penetrated even into the poorest countries. By 2014, there were eighty-five mobile telephones per one hundred inhabitants in the developed countries, and thirty per one hundred in the poorer countries of the world.
Meanwhile, mobile telephones morphed into smart phones. These handheld devices combined mobile telephones, text messenger devices, GPS devices, clocks, cameras, video games, internet-accessible computers, and dozens of other features. The first full-featured smart phone, the Apple iPhone introduced in 2007, was soon followed by many others. Smart phones became one of the most popular inventions in history, with 1.2 billion sold in 2014 alone. They allowed people not only to communicate, but to find their way, play games, check up on their “friends,” send texts and emails, shop online, and stay entertained around the clock, even while walking down the street, eating lunch, or driving a car. They are the indispensable tool of modern life.
The innovations introduced since World War II have made telecommunication faster, cheaper, and more ubiquitous, especially over long distances. The promise of the telegraph in the nineteenth century, that it would overcome time and distance, has now been achieved, or soon will be, for most of the world’s people. But telecommunication has gone far beyond transmitting messages from point to point. As costs plummet, it is bringing information of all kinds, in almost infinite quantities, within reach of almost everyone, subject only to political restrictions. How the relations between politics and information will play out is an issue for future generations to resolve.
Daniel R. Headrick
See also commodification; digitization; encrypting/decrypting; globalization; networks