Peninsula Telegraph-Recorder

About the Peninsula Telegraph-Recorder

The goal of this weblog is to have a convenient place to clip and publish bits of telegraph related history and arcana. It is organized chronologically, in the sense that there are categories that correspond to decades, with the clippings filed away to the proper decade.

The blog is not particularly active, but occasionally I remember something that should be here and I put it here. 

Some relatively large pool of material to draw from comes from the delicious tag telegraphy, the pinboard tag t:telegraphy, and the vast pre-1922 word hoard of Google Books on telegraphy. 

At various times this effort has been the backing store for project work, including an invited talk at UPA 2009 entitled "WYSSA Means "All My Love, Darling": A Social History of the Internet from the Carrier Pigeon to Antarctic Morse Code".

The Peninsula Telegraph-Recorder, I suspect, would make a good name for a newspaper, with a suitably ancient heritage, and considerably ambiguity about which peninsula is referenced.

A "cowardly and concealed attempt" to spoil a demonstration of the Marconi system

LATE one June afternoon in 1903 a hush fell across an expectant audience in the Royal Institution's celebrated lecture theatre in London. Before the crowd, the physicist John Ambrose Fleming was adjusting arcane apparatus as he prepared to demonstrate an emerging technological wonder: a long-range wireless communication system developed by his boss, the Italian radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi. The aim was to showcase publicly for the first time that Morse code messages could be sent wirelessly over long distances. Around 300 miles away, Marconi was preparing to send a signal to London from a clifftop station in Poldhu, Cornwall, UK.

Read on at The New Scientist about Nevil Maskelyne, who interrupted Marconi's demonstration by transmitting on the same frequency. Or read an original 1903 account, from The Electrical World And Engineer:

For some weeks the correspondence columns of our London contemporary, The Electrician, have been the medium of a controversy which in bitterness of spirit displayed by the participants and, per contra, in amusement to the disinterested reader is unique. The controversy had its origin in a letter written to the London by Prof Fleming who complained of a "cowardly and concealed attempt" to spoil a demonstration of the Marconi system of telegraphy at a lecture delivered by him on June 4 before the Royal Institution. A Mr Nevil Maskelyne immediately admitted that he was an accomplice in the aforesaid attempt, the disturbance consisting in the simple "interjection of the word 'rats'". 

Baseball games recreated by telegraph

Original from the Modesto Radio Museum:

The first baseball radio broadcast was on August 5, 1921. The game was broadcast by KDKA of Pittsburgh, and the Pittsburgh Pirates defeated the Philadelphia Phillies, 8-5. It was broadcast by Harold Arlin, KDKA's announcer. That year, KDKA and WJZ of Newark broadcast the first World Series on the radio.  However, the broadcasters were not actually present at the game, but simply gave reports from a telegraph wire (recreation).

In those days many radio stations often did not have the budgets or technology to broadcast games live from the park. Instead, stations would re-create the games in studio.  A telegraph operator would transmit the information back to the studio from the ball park where broadcasters and engineers would recreate game action from the ticker tape. Crowd noise, the crack of the bat, the umpire on the field and other sounds of the game were all manufactured in the studio as the game was being played live elsewhere.

The rest of the article has details of how this practice continued into the 1950s, with a Western Union telegrapher as a key to getting the play by play action right.

The wireless telegraph comes to Bangor, Maine, 1911

A nice piece in the Bangor (Maine) Daily News discusses the arrival of the wireless telegraph to ships in 1911.

The United Wireless Company had a receiving station in Quincy, Mass., where messages were received from steamers up and down the East Coast. The operator on board the Belfast was Donald R. Hall, who attended “Massachusetts technological college.”

Leaving Boston, the first message Hall sent to Quincy was the time of departure. Off the twin lighthouse at Thacher’s Island, Hall informed Quincy of the vessel’s speed and safety. This information was relayed from Quincy to the steamship office in Boston. At about the same time, a weather forecast was received by Hall from a wireless station at the Charleston Navy Yard. Stock quotations, marine news, world and national news and even baseball scores were also transmitted to the boat.

More on United Wireless from Stone Vintage Radio:

The United Wireless Telegraph Company was the largest wireless company in the United States, beginning with its late-1906 formation, until its takeover by Marconi in 1912. It actually was the reorganization of the Amalgamated Wireless Securities Company, which had been organized in 1904. The newly formed United Wireless company was promoted as a consolidation of the most prominent U.S. and British radio firms, combining American DeForest with the Marconi's Wireless Telegraph Company. The incorporation of American DeForest was correct; United Wireless leased Deforest’s assets for $1 a year. The Marconi Company, on the other hand, roundly denounced United Wireless claims about gaining control of the Marconi companies as not true.

Early Radio History has the story of the next phase of United Wireless: its takeover by Marconi Wireless as settlement over patent infringement, combined with the expose of widespread fraud.

In addition to stock fraud, United Wireless was also guilty of extensive patent infringement. It was sued by the Marconi company, and had no defense. Receivers appointed to oversee United Wireless' financial affairs entered into negotiations with Marconi for the company to be taken over, and a short time later the settlement was reported in United Wireless Arrangements / Wireless Suit Settled in the March 26, 1912 Wall Street Journal, with the final details reported by Wireless Liquidating Co. from the paper's October 1, 1912 issue. A review of the transaction, United Wireless Under New Name, which appeared in The Financial World on August 3, 1912, estimated that United Wireless stockholders had gotten back perhaps ten percent of their ill-fated investments.

The archives of the Marconi company are at the Bodlean Library at the University of Oxford. MS. Marconi 391 includes these contents:

documents relating to the United Wireless Telegraph Company, including press article about fraud allegations, 1910; indemnity bonds given by United Wireless Telegraph Company to H.W. Nelson Ltd, with related correspondence with Marconi's Wireless Telegraph Company (which took over United Wireless), 1912; and a booklet about an alleged Marconi Wireless swindle involving the United Wireless Telegraph Company, published by J. Hugh Bauerlein, 1919

Global personal communications, as seen in 1861 by essayist Andrew Wynter

The Nervous System of the Metropolis, from Andrew Wynter, MD, 1861:

By combining beforehand different lines in this manner, two different persons may converse together across the island, sitting in their own drawing rooms; nay by only extending the connection of these lines with the submarine cables across the sea, a person may converse with his friend traveling day by day at the other end of the globe, provided only that he keeps on some telegraphic line that is continuous with the main electric trunk lines of the world. This may appear to be an idle dream but that it will certainly come to pass we have no manner of doubt whatever.

Wynter was a medical man and essayist; his The Electric Telegraph gives an 1860 view of the British telegraph network, prefiguring global communications:

America will shortly carry her line of telegraph to the Pacific shore, and run it up the coast as far as San Francisco. Can there be any reasonable doubt that, before the end of the century, the one line advancing towards the West and the other towards the East — through China and Siberia — will gradually approach each other so closely that a short cable stretched across Behring Straits will bring the four quarters of the globe within speaking distance of each other, and enable the electric fire to " put a girdle round the world in forty minutes?" 

Distant Writing: A History of the Telegraph Companies in Britain between 1838 and 1868

Distant Writing is a web site from Steven Roberts with a history of British telegraph companies between 1838 and 1868.

On June 10, 1837 W F Cooke and Charles Wheatstone obtained their first patent for the electric telegraph, a comprehensive set of claims that left few loop-holes for any challengers. Just over thirty years later, by the Telegraph Act, 1868, the British parliament acquired for the General Post Office a national network comprising 16,879 miles of telegraph line and 2,155 telegraph stations, with the services of the 5,339 people employed in the tele-graph industry.

Among the documents in this collection are a fine collection of British telegraph company stamps, used to pay for messages, and a set of telegraph maps of Britain from 1852 to 1868. 

 

Zimmermann Telegram, 1917; from the National Archives

The National Archives has an online exhibit on the Zimmermann Telegram, with images of the original and also the deciphered version, in their Emergence of Modern America 1900-1930 collection for teachers.

In January of 1917, British cryptographers deciphered a telegram from German Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmermann to the German Minister to Mexico, von Eckhardt, offering United States territory to Mexico in return for joining the German cause. This message helped draw the United States into the war and thus changed the course of history. The telegram had such an impact on American opinion that, according to David Kahn, author of The Codebreakers, "No other single cryptanalysis has had such enormous consequences." It is his opinion that "never before or since has so much turned upon the solution of a secret message." In an effort to protect their intelligence from detection and to capitalize on growing anti-German sentiment in the United States, the British waited until February 24 to present the telegram to Woodrow Wilson. The American press published news of the telegram on March 1. On April 6, 1917, the United States Congress formally declared war on Germany and its allies.

The message, as decoded, starts out

We intend to begin on the first of February unrestricted submarine warfare.

More in Barbara Tuchmann, The Zimmermann Telegram, first published in 1958.

McDonnell Bodkin: The Capture of Paul Beck, 1911

The story features a "clever girl detective", Dora Myrl; a love story; and trickery and deceit in the sending of telegrams in cypher.  Read on Google Books. More about the author: Matthias McDonnell Bodkin on Wikipedia.

 

1921 Shay Geared Locomotive code

This ingenious parts catalog gives a number, a name, and a code word for each part in a Shay Geared Locomotive, allowing you to order parts by a compact name even if you don't know what the thing is called.

 

The original text is 1921 Shay Geared Locomotive Engine and Parts Catalog, as noted by Google Books.

Walter A. Wood Harvesting Machines code, 1906

When is a pie a scythe?

In scanning one of the parts catalogs I discovered that each part had its own telegraph cipher. Perhaps I have been reading too many murder mystery novels, but my first thought about this cipher systems was related to German spies. I thought “Did the US government not want Germany to know where all of our grain was grown, so they directed these manufacturers to encode their ordering system?”

The sample encoding given changes Scythe, complete, six feet into Pie.

Lincoln and the telegrapher

from American Heritage magazine, April 1961, "Lincoln and the Telegrapher"

Samuel F. B. Morse’s telegraph, when the Civil War came, proved to be an essential weapon—permitting the commander in chief personally to direct his armies. No one was more aware of its importance than Abraham Lincoln, who came each morning to the War Department telegraph office across the street from the White House; and few men had a more intimate picture of the wartime President than the telegrapher Albert Chandler, whose recollections appeared forty years later in the now-dejunct Sunday Magazine. We are obliged to E. B. Long of Chicago, a Civil War authority, for rediscovering them.

For more, see Lincoln in the Telegraph Office, David Homer Bates, 1907.