The Telegraph

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The Telegraph The first telegraph-like device
preceded the actual electronic telegraph by
about 50 years, and was called semaphore
(invented by Claude Chappe, who was French, in
the period following the French Revolution in
1789). It sent line of sight signals from
hills and towers either within cities or between
ships close to shore. The telegraph in contrast,
was electronic. Thus, its invention by
Samuel Morse in the 1830s marked a revolution in
the way people communicated the introduction of
electronic media. Telegraphy was the model on
which all modern electronic communication
systems (including the computer) were
built. Significantly it separated
communication from transportation. The message
no longer had to be physically carried over a
distance.
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Thus, it allowed for the general acceleration of
not only media, but life itself giving us a
sense of time speeding up that we still feel in
our lives today. It also created the first great
industrial era monopoly Western Union, which
controlled all telegraph operations in
America. It marked the first joining of science
and business, as an innovation rising from the
new scientific field of electrical
engineering. Many heralded the telegraph as the
means by which a divided, human community could
be united into one by an electronic circuit
that bound everything. This binding role was
heralded as a religious phenomenon, a
manifestation of Enlightenment ideals, and an
example of the technological sublime the
apparent god-like ability of technology to change
the world (and thus, a central element of our
modern world).
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The telegraph also changed language by
introducing the telegraphic style Because
every word added to the cost of sending a
telegraph, transmissions were shortened. This
created a language that was stripped of colour,
inflection, etc., which still remains the
standard today in the language of news wire
services like Canadian Press and the Associated
Press, and even television newscasts. This
sparse language in turn adds to the illusion that
the news is objective, stripped down to the
bare facts. The telegraph led to the creation of
standard time (Greenwich Mean), since it
allowed for the first time communication across
international time zones (with the construction
of the transatlantic buried telegraph cable
connecting the U.S. and U.K.)
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The telegraph could be used to control the
physical movement of things, like the railway,
and eventually, with the invention of wireless
telegraph, shipping. Wireless telegraphy was
similar to radio technology except that it used
no vacuum tubes (they hadnt been invented
yet). They allowed messages to be sent ship to
ship, or ship to shore, without electrical
wires. The invention of the wireless telegraph
contributed to one of the worlds first major
Media Events. The event occurred on April 14,
1912, when a luxury liner owned by the White
Store Corporation struck an iceberg off the coast
of Newfoundland. What ship are we talking
about?
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The Titanic The telegraph was critical in the
sinking of the Titanic both as a means of
communicating between ships, and as a way of
transmitting the news of the sinking ship to
shore. The Titanic disaster was made worse by
the fact that the only ship close enough to pick
up survivors or to transfer passengers to, the
Californian, did not receive, or at least did
not respond to, the Titanics telegraph
messages. The first ship on the scene, The
Carpathia, did receive the telegraph message, but
was 58 miles away. It took 4 hours to reach the
Titanic, arriving about 2 hours after the ship
had sunk. A media event is a cultural event
where history and media come together, It is
either created or substantially controlled by the
media.
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Other media events include the War of the
Worlds radio broadcast, the 1963 assassination
of John F. Kennedy, the O.J. Simpson trial, and
the 1969 moon landing. In the case of the
Titanic, a combination of telegraph, telephone,
wireless, and the yellow press created a media
event out of the disaster (over 1400 people
died). The wireless operators on board there
were two, both employees of Marconi Maritime
communicated the events on board to other ships
as they unfolded, which were transmitted along by
other wireless operators on other ships and on
land. Thus, the world heard about the Titanics
sinking almost as it happened. Take note of the
fateful role the telegraph operators play in the
film, A Night to Remember.