For most of history, news moved at the speed of a horse. Then a wire carried a sentence from Washington to Baltimore in an instant, and within fifty years a voice followed it. These stories cover the inventors and their rivals, the machines, the operators who ran the networks, and the firsts that people still get wrong.
Every tile in a Telegraph and Telephone game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Inventors and Rivals
nine stories
1The partner who may have written Morse code
On the tile: Alfred Vail1838
Morse's first code was a numbered dictionary. Every English word got a figure; the operator looked up each word, sent the digits, and the clerk at the far end looked them up again. The dot-and-dash alphabet that replaced it came out of the workshop of Alfred Vail, a machinist whose father's ironworks in New Jersey supplied the money and the metal. Vail's 1837 partnership with Morse put the patents in Morse's name, and Vail spent his later years complaining that the credit had gone with them.
A signal fades as it travels, so a long telegraph line needs something that listens for a weak current and releases a fresh strong one in its place. Joseph Henry built exactly that in 1835: the electromagnetic relay, which let one current amplify another. Without it, Morse's telegraph would have stayed a dream rather than becoming a possibility. Henry spent his last thirty-two years as the first Secretary of the Smithsonian, and largely determined the shape that institution took.
3The telegraph that could not spell C, J, Q, U, X or Z
On the tile: Five Needles1837
Britain's first practical telegraph needed no code at all. William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone's 1837 instrument swung any two of five needles until they pointed at a letter on a diamond-shaped grid, so an untrained clerk could simply read it off. The catch was arithmetic. Five needles could indicate only twenty letters, and C, J, Q, U, X and Z were left out to save the expense of another needle and another wire. Senders spelled around the gaps.
4The ten dollars that might have changed everything
On the tile: Meucci1871
Antonio Meucci, an Italian immigrant living on Staten Island, could not raise the money for a full patent. In December 1871 he filed a caveat instead, a one-year renewable notice of an invention to come, and after 1874 he let it lapse for want of the ten-dollar fee. In 2002 the House of Representatives resolved that his work in the invention of the telephone should be acknowledged, noting that a maintained caveat would have blocked Bell's patent.
Elisha Gray had spent years inventing for the telegraph, and his backers steered him toward the acoustic telegraph rather than the telephone, so he told nobody about his scheme for transmitting voice sounds until February 1876. On February 14, Bell's lawyer filed a full patent application at the United States Patent Office and Gray filed only a caveat, a notice of an invention to come. Bell's patent issued on March 7. Which paper reached the clerk first has been argued over ever since.
Bell's telephone worked over short lines and went faint over long ones, because the voice itself had to supply the power. Edison's answer was a button of lampblack carbon under the diaphragm: sound squeezed the button, the button changed its resistance, and a battery on the line did the pushing. He also settled a question of etiquette. On August 15, 1877, Edison told a Pittsburgh telegraph executive the proper greeting for answering the instrument: hello.
Almon Strowger was an undertaker in Kansas City. The story goes that a rival undertaker's wife worked the local telephone exchange and kept steering callers to her husband, and that Strowger decided the answer was to take the human being out of the middle. Museums that tell the tale file it under legend. What is certain is the machine: he patented his stepping switch in 1891, and the first automatic telephone exchange opened in La Porte, Indiana, in 1892.
Emile Berliner built a transmitter in which a voice acting against two terminals varied the pressure of their contact, and so varied the current in step with the sound. That is a microphone. After months of negotiation the young Bell Telephone Company bought the rights in 1878 for fifty thousand dollars, a fortune then, and hired the inventor as its chief engineer. Berliner went on to invent the gramophone, which is why recorded music arrived on flat discs rather than cylinders.
9From the first phone call to battleships and Shakespeare
On the tile: Thomas Watson1876
Thomas Watson was the young machinist in the next room when Bell called him in 1876, and he did not stay in telephones. Watson started an engine works south of Boston that grew into a shipyard and turned out cruisers and battleships for Theodore Roosevelt's navy. He and his wife then studied geology at MIT, and a genus of fossil snail was named Watsonella after him. Later he toured with a company of Shakespearean players.
An undersea cable needs insulation that seawater cannot get through, and in the nineteenth century only one material would do the job. Gutta-percha is a natural plastic made from the sap of trees that grow in what is now peninsular Malaysia. It softened in hot water, molded around a copper core and set hard. By the 1890s the cable industry was consuming four million pounds a year, and the trees were pushed toward extinction before plantations caught up.
A signal that had crossed the Atlantic in 1858 arrived at about a hundred-thousandth of the current in a light bulb. William Thomson, later Lord Kelvin, hung a tiny mirror with a magnet cemented to its back inside a coil of wire, shone a lamp on it and let the reflection fall on a scale card some distance away. A twitch too small to see became a spot of light sliding along the card. It took two clerks: one to watch the light and call the letters, one to write them down.
Western Union's great expense was wire, so Thomas Edison worked out how to make each one do four jobs. His 1874 quadruplex carried two messages in each direction simultaneously by telling them apart in two different ways: one pair by the strength of the current, the other by its direction. No new poles, no new copper, four times the traffic. By 1878 the company was operating thirteen thousand miles of quadruplex line.
A telegraphist's shift has been estimated at 240,000 to 318,000 flicks of the wrist, and by the early 1900s the trade had an epidemic. Telegraphists' cramp, first described in 1875, brought stiffness, spasm and sometimes the end of a career to between about six and fourteen percent of the workforce. Horace Martin's answer was the Vibroplex, a key worked from side to side whose pendulum rattled off the strings of dots by itself. His 1904 patent gives the object plainly: to spare the operator the nervous strain of the ordinary key in rapid work.
Elisha Gray is remembered for the telephone he did not get. What he did get was a telegraph that carried handwriting. His 1888 patent puts the sending pen in two circuits, one for each direction it travels, so every small step the writer makes goes out as a pulse; magnets at the far end walk a second pen through the same steps, and the message arrives in the sender's own hand. Banks, railroads and the military used the machines. The fax had a working ancestor in the 1880s.
William Gray polished precision machinery in Hartford, and the origin story his own company printed in the 1930s is that he once needed a telephone to call a doctor for his sick wife and was refused the use of one. His answer was a coin-controlled apparatus, patented in 1889 and installed that year in a bank at Main Street and Central Row. It ran on the honor system. You talked first; then the operator told you what to deposit and listened to the bells the coins struck to hear that you had.
In 1880 Alexander Graham Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter patented a machine that sent speech on a beam of light. A voice vibrated a mirror, the mirror wobbled the reflected sunlight, and a selenium cell at the far end turned the flickering back into sound. No wire ran between the two ends. Bell called the photophone his most important invention of all, and then waited most of a century for the rest of the world to take the idea seriously.
In 1924 Britain's Royal Fine Art Commission held a competition for a telephone kiosk, and the winner was Giles Gilbert Scott, one of the country's most prominent architects. The K2 he drew has a shallow domed roof that is unmistakably Soanean, and the source most often named for it is the Soane family tomb in a London churchyard. Scott wanted the box painted silver. The Post Office painted it red, and the red is what the world remembers.
Edison did not invent the stock ticker. What he built for the Gold and Stock company in 1871, the Universal Stock Printer, solved a harder problem: keeping every ticker on a line in step with every other one, so a machine that slipped out of alignment could be brought back without sending anyone around to fix it. Printing telegraphy was the trade he came from, and those synchronizing improvements were a great commercial success.
Boston's telephone exchange began with teenage boys at the board, on the reasonable theory that telegraph messengers already knew the work. It went badly. They were impatient, they played jokes and they swore at subscribers. On September 1, 1878, Emma Nutt took a seat at the Edwin Holmes Telephone Dispatch Company and became the first woman telephone operator in the world. Her sister Stella became the second a few hours later. Emma stayed more than thirty years.
Sarah Bagley worked the looms at Lowell, founded the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association and campaigned for a shorter working day, none of which endeared her to the mill owners. In 1846 she took a job nobody expected her to get and became the first woman telegraph operator in the country. Over the next two years she was put in charge of telegraph operations at Lowell and then at Springfield, Massachusetts, before returning briefly to the weave room.
The American forces in France needed switchboard operators who could work in French and English close to the front, so the Signal Corps chose 233 women out of about ten thousand applicants and sent 223 of them overseas. They connected calls at five times the speed of the men they replaced. When the fighting stopped, the Army held that their work had never been official military service. Veteran status came in 1977, after a lawsuit and an act of Congress, at the end of a sixty-year fight.
Early callers asked for people by name, and the operator simply knew the town. Moses Greeley Parker, a physician in Lowell, Massachusetts, looked at a measles epidemic and saw the flaw. If the town's four operators fell ill, a substitute brought in to cover could not connect calls she had no way to look up. His remedy was to give each of the company's two hundred-odd subscribers a number. The idea left one mill town and now sits in everybody's pocket.
For most of the last century a country telephone line was shared, so when it rang nobody grabbed it. You listened to the pattern of long and short rings to find out whether the call was yours. Privacy was theoretical. One Vermont family always knew when a certain neighbor was listening in, because canaries chirped in the background whenever that house was on the line. The households worked out a code, built around remarks about the weather, for anything they wanted to keep to themselves.
Budapest had broadcasting before radio existed. Beginning about 1893, subscribers to Telefon Hirmondo kept a pair of earpieces on the wall and listened to a fixed daily schedule: stock quotations, reports from parliament, general news at intervals through the day, and a concert from five to six in the evening. An American magazine visiting in 1901 counted 6,200 subscribers and a service running from half past ten in the morning until half past ten at night.
Before cables went underground, every subscriber needed a wire running the whole way to the exchange, and in Stockholm they all converged on one structure. The tower built in 1887 gathered about four thousand telephone wires into an iron spire above the rooftops, and the photographs look like a web thrown over the city. Stockholmers thought it an eyesore. By 1913 the network had gone underground and the tower had nothing left to carry.
Walter Phillips was a telegraph operator and journalist who published a code in 1879 giving press dispatches standard abbreviations for the phrases reporters used all day. SCOTUS stood for the Supreme Court of the United States. POT stood for President of the, and operators naturally finished it with US. Newspapers picked the habit up from the wire. POTUS is in print by 1894, a year earlier than the Oxford English Dictionary's own first example.
On November 10, 1951, the mayor of Englewood, New Jersey, pulled his rotary dial around ten times instead of the usual seven. Eighteen seconds later the mayor of Alameda, California, was on the line about three thousand miles away, with no operator anywhere in between. Until then a long-distance call had been a negotiation passed along a chain of switchboards. After Englewood, it was something an ordinary subscriber did with one finger.
On May 24, 1844, Samuel Morse sat in the Capitol and tapped out a message to a railroad station in Baltimore, more than forty miles away. The words were not his. Annie Ellsworth handed him a slip of paper carrying a passage her mother had chosen from the Book of Numbers: What hath God wrought. The message went down the wire in dots and dashes and was repeated back from Baltimore, which is the part that proved it worked.
In August 1850 the Brett brothers dropped a wire across the Channel from Dover toward the French coast, and for a day England and France were joined. One of the messages that went through was addressed to Prince Louis Napoleon, who had taken a close interest in the scheme. Then it died: a fisherman is said to have snagged the cable with his anchor and cut it free. An improved cable designed by Thomas Crampton followed in 1851 and opened to the public that November.
The first Atlantic telegraph cable worked, but barely. In August 1858 Queen Victoria sent President James Buchanan a message of 98 words, and pushing it through roughly two thousand miles of cable took close to sixteen hours, about ten minutes a word. Cities held parades anyway, because the alternative was a steamship and ten days. The cable carried 732 messages in all, grew steadily weaker, and failed within a few weeks of the celebrations.
The story goes that Bell upset a jar of battery acid on March 10, 1876, burned himself, and called for help, which would make the first telephone call an accident. That version is repeated everywhere, and it may be true. What is documented is narrower. Bell's notebook for that day records the experiment and the sentence Mr. Watson - come here - I want to see you, and says nothing about a spill.
Rutherford B. Hayes was the first president with a telephone in the White House, and even the date is slippery: the National Archives puts the first one at May 10, 1878, the White House Historical Association at May 1879. Its number was 1. The instrument lived in the telegraph room, with an extension on a secretary's desk, so a president who wanted to speak used one or the other. Not until March 1929, under Herbert Hoover, did a telephone reach the Oval Office desk.
6A fire on Wimpole Street made an emergency number
On the tile: 9991937
In November 1935 a house fire on Wimpole Street in London killed five women, and the review that followed asked a simple question: how is an ordinary person supposed to summon help quickly. The committee wanted one number, easy to remember, that would also work from a public call box without anyone first finding coins. On June 30, 1937, London got 999. It was the first emergency telephone number anywhere, and Britain still dials it.
Telegraph cables had crossed the Atlantic since 1858, but a cable that could carry speech took nearly a century more. TAT-1 went into service on September 25, 1956, running between Clarenville in Newfoundland and Oban in Scotland. It opened with twenty-nine telephone circuits between London and New York and six more between London and Montreal. Ninety-eight years after Queen Victoria's dots and dashes, a conversation could cross the ocean on a wire.
8The first cell phone call went to the competition
On the tile: Sixth Avenue1973
On April 3, 1973, Martin Cooper of Motorola stood on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, between 53rd and 54th streets, and placed a call to Joel Engel at Bell Laboratories, the rival team chasing the same prize. The handset weighed two and a half pounds and needed ten hours on the charger for well under an hour of talk. For a call that opened the next fifty years, the hardware sat awkwardly in one hand.
On December 3, 1992, a 22-year-old engineer named Neil Papworth typed two words at a computer and sent them over the Vodafone network to a colleague's handset: Merry Christmas. Richard Jarvis read it at an office party. He could not reply, because the phones of that year had no way to send a message back. Texting spent its first stretch as a one-way street before it became the way most of the world talks.