Telegraph

1600’s to 1700’s Businesses started to use printing techniques all over Europe and the business sheets later turned into non-business news and the newspapers were born along with advertising. Printing expanded in the 1700’s and letters increased as more and more people could read and write and postal services were created. In the late 1700’s a French engineer named Claude Chappe devised a means of long distance communication. It was a visual telegraph and messages could be read across European cities. These messages were read from tower to tower using a telescope.

Telegraph

New inventors revolutionized communication and a steam engine to power press was devised by a German man called Friedich Evening. Newspapers produced in mass, made communication even faster between communities of the world. However, rapid communication did not develop until the electric telegraph was invented and allowed messages to be sent over wires in seconds. Morse also developed an apparatus which was able to send information via the cables in the form of a code made up of dots and dashes; this system is known as the Morse code and is still being used widely by Radio Officers on board ships.

The telegraph could send messages only where wires were strung. In 1858, an underwater telegraph cable was laid across the Atlantic Ocean. But the cable failed after a few weeks. The first successful transatlantic cable was laid in 1866, largely due to the efforts of Cyrus W. Field, an American millionaire, and Lord Kelvin, a British physicist. This underwater cable made it possible to send a message across the Atlantic in minutes.

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