Innovation & Wealth › Industrial revolution › Railways and the railway age
Electric telegraph
1837 (Cooke & Wheatstone; Morse)· Innovation· Innovations & industries
Well documentedSolid records, texts or physical evidence.
Electric signals sent along wires let messages cross countries in minutes, separating the speed of information from the speed of transport.
See it on the Innovation & Wealth map →What happened
In 1837 William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone patented a needle telegraph in Britain, first used commercially along the Great Western Railway; Samuel Morse's code and Washington–Baltimore line followed in 1844. Railways used it to signal trains, and their rights of way carried the wires. Western Union came to dominate US service. A lasting transatlantic cable opened in 1866, cutting news from Europe from about ten days to minutes. The Pony Express folded in 1861 when a coast-to-coast line opened.
Impact on society and the economy
Prices, news and orders could now move faster than goods, creating global commodity markets, news agencies such as Reuters, and the first telecom monopoly.
How we know
Patents, company records, surviving instruments, and studies showing cotton and wheat price gaps between distant cities narrowed sharply after cables opened.
Still debated
Credit is shared and disputed among Cooke, Wheatstone, Morse, Joseph Henry and earlier experimenters, and Morse's partner Alfred Vail may have devised much of the code.
Connections (3)
▸Railways and the railway age ran alongside Electric telegraphWell documented
The connection
Railways and the telegraph grew together. The first commercial telegraph ran beside the Great Western Railway in 1838–39, and railways soon used it to signal trains and control single-track lines. Railways provided rights of way for wires; the telegraph made dense, safe schedules possible. In 1845 it caught a fleeing murderer, John Tawell, whose description beat his train to London.
When and how
Paddington to West Drayton, west London, 1838–39; later along railways across Britain and the US.
How we know
Railway company records, Cooke and Wheatstone's contracts, and newspaper accounts of the Tawell case.
Debates
American railroads ran for two decades before the Erie first dispatched trains by telegraph in 1851; how quickly each came to depend on the other varied by country.
▸Electric telegraph was overtaken by Alexander Graham Bell and the telephoneWell documented
The connection
Bell was trying to send several telegraph messages over one wire when he found he could transmit speech. The telephone borrowed the telegraph's wires, poles and business model; Western Union first fought Bell, then handed over its phone business in 1879. Over the following decades, calls replaced telegrams for most business.
When and how
Boston, 1875–76 (Bell's 'harmonic telegraph' experiments); the 1879 Western Union–Bell settlement; Western Union sent its last telegram in 2006.
How we know
Bell's notebooks, his patent and the 1879 settlement document the link; industry statistics show phone traffic and revenue far outgrowing the telegraph's in the 1900s.
Debates
Whether Western Union blundered by passing on Bell's patent is debated; the famous memo calling the phone 'of no value' is almost certainly fictional.
▸Electric telegraph tied together the markets of First globalization: trade, migration, empireMostly agreed
The connection
Undersea cables, starting with a lasting transatlantic line in 1866, let prices, orders and news cross oceans in minutes instead of weeks. Merchants could match supply and demand across continents, banks could move money and governments could direct empires, so markets for grain, cotton and gold began moving together.
When and how
Transatlantic cable 1866 (Cyrus Field, laid by the Great Eastern); cables to India 1870 and Australia 1872; by 1900 a global network, mostly British-owned.
How sure are we?
Studies of New York and Liverpool cotton prices show the gap between them shrank sharply once the 1866 cable opened.
Debates
How much the telegraph mattered relative to steamships and railways, which cut the cost of moving goods rather than information, is hard to separate.