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The Electric Telegraph: A Social and Economic History. David and Charles. ISBN 0-7153-5883-9. OCLC 655205099. Mercer, David, The Telephone: The Life Story of a Technology, Greenwood Publishing Group, 2006 ISBN 031333207X; Schwoch, James (2018). Wired into Nature: The Telegraph and the North American Frontier. University of Illinois Press.
Earth-return telegraph is the system whereby the return path for the electric current of a telegraph circuit is provided by connection to the earth through an earth electrode. Using earth return saves a great deal of money on installation costs since it halves the amount of wire that is required, with a corresponding saving on the labour ...
The earliest true telegraph put into widespread use was the Chappe telegraph, an optical telegraph invented by Claude Chappe in the late 18th century. The system was used extensively in France, and European nations occupied by France, during the Napoleonic era. The electric telegraph started to replace the optical telegraph in the mid-19th century.
By 1900, the telegraph had become an integral part of American life, linking people and businesses across the country and around the world. In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. After 1920 it replaced the telegraph as the primary means of communication between cities.
A flat rate was charged (unlike all later telegraph services which charged per word) of one shilling, but many people paid this just to see the strange equipment. [18] From this point on, the use of the electric telegraph started to grow on the new railways being built from London.
Alexander Graham Bell was a professor of elocution at Boston University and tutor of deaf children. He had begun electrical experiments in Scotland in 1867 and, after emigrating to Boston from Canada, pursued research into a method of telegraphy that could transmit multiple messages over a single wire simultaneously, a so-called "harmonic telegraph".
But the telegraph was still too costly for general purposes. In 1845, however, Cooke and Wheatstone succeeded in producing the single needle apparatus, which they patented, and from that time the electric telegraph became a practical instrument, soon adopted on all the railway lines of the country. [2]
Sir Charles Wheatstone (/ ˈ w iː t s t ə n /; [1] 6 February 1802 – 19 October 1875) was an English physicist and inventor best known for his contributions to the development of the Wheatstone bridge, originally invented by Samuel Hunter Christie, which is used to measure an unknown electrical resistance, and as a major figure in the development of telegraphy.