Re: Re[2]: 150 th anniversary of Morse

[David Farber <farber@central.cis.upenn.edu>]

Posted-Date: Mon, 30 May 1994 11:04:45 -0400
Mime-Version: 1.0
Date: Mon, 30 May 1994 11:04:41 -0500
To: farber@central.cis.upenn.edu (David Farber)
From: rjs@farnsworth.mit.edu (Richard Jay Solomon)
Subject: Re: Re[2]: 150 th anniversary of Morse
Cc: mike@whammo.media.mit.edu


>Author:  mike@whammo.media.mit.edu%SMTP at x400po
>Date:    5/29/94 7:10 PM
>
>
>What is amazing is that barely a decade after that,
>the first transatlantic cables were strung, shortening
>the transit time of a piece of news from 2 months
>to about 2 seconds.


No. The 1858 cable only lasted 2 weeks before it was permanently abandoned
due to an undersea break. Another Atlantic Cable was laid after some
difficulties, and opened in 1868, some 24 years after Morse's telegraph.
The baud rate was about 2 bits per second, or less than 30 words per
minute. Because of electrical interference and downtime, it could take
literally hours for a coherent message to be transmitted, and sometimes
when traffic was heavy, a cablegram would be backed up days, even a week or
more in the queue. But it was faster than a ship, though affordable only by
rich governments, potentates, wealthy newspapers and magnates. Ordinary
folks would never use it. In fact, ordinary people couldn't even afford
domestic telegrams. Only major pieces of news (war and assassinations)
would transit the ocean in a minute; everything else still took days or
weeks.


In the late 19th Century, the U.S. government built its own cable system
(no, not all U.S. telegraphs were private) to Land's End in the U.K. to
avoid commercial disruptions. It rented time on its cable to other
governments, but the U.S. State Department had priority. It was radio --
private, non-common carrier radio at that -- which gave those who could
afford their own transmitters and networks the ability to know what was
going on in the world quickly. That was some 80 years after Morse.


The nanosecond world for the general public had to wait another century or
more after Morse, and it was the direct-dial telephone, with discount
off-peak rates forced by the FCC in the 1960s, which made even domestic
long-distance communications affordable. Cheap international, almost
instantaneous, telecom had to wait for the Internet.


The world doesn't change as quickly as it seems from the chronologies...


Richard Solomon