This article was first published in The Montreal Gazette.
Our history can be painted with some broad strokes. We had the Ice Age, the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Age of Discovery, the Age of Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. Today, we are living in the age of communication.
We are connected through cellphones, radio, TV, podcasts and the internet. We talk, we tweet, we link, we text, we email, we Facebook and we badger AI with our questions. Information flashes around the world at the speed of light. We have certainly come a long way since the use of carrier pigeons in ancient times and since Pheidippides in 490 BC had to run from the battlefield of Marathon to Athens to announce a military victory over the Persians.
The first scientific method of long-range communication was invented in 1792 in France by Claude Chappe, whose “semaphore system” consisted of a series of towers, each within line of sight of others. A wooden mast fitted with two crossarms, which could be pivoted to various positions to spell out text messages in semaphore code, topped the towers. An operator in the next tower read the message through a telescope and then passed it on to a further tower. The first message relayed by the semaphore system was in 1794 from Lille to Paris and announced the recapture of Le Quesnoy from European forces during the French Revolutionary Wars. A statue in Paris commemorates Chappe and some of his towers still exist.
In 1799, Alessandro Volta invented the battery and, twenty years later, Hans Christian Orsted noted that a compass needle moves when placed next to a wire that has current flowing through it. This observation gave an idea to Charles Wheatstone and William Cooke that led to the first truly effective telecommunication system, the telegraph. Sending a current through a wire moved a needle at the other end of the wire, and varying the current caused the needle to rotate to different extents and point at letters on a chart. By 1837, five wires were used to spin five needles so that even complex words could be spelled out. A number of such systems were devised and once telegraph wires were hung on posts along railway lines, messages could be quickly sent.
One of the most famous pioneering messages was sent on Jan. 1, 1845. John Tawell murdered his mistress in Slough and hopped on a train to London to escape. When the Slough police realized he was on the train, a detective walked over to the local Cooke-and-Wheatstone telegraph office and wired a description of the suspect ahead to Paddington Station in London. Police were waiting for Tawell when he stepped off the train. It was the first time in human history a criminal was caught using telecommunications, and it instantly proved the immense societal value of the telegraph to the British public.
But crossing water was a problem. Cables could not be laid in water because there were no insulating materials that were adequate. Then, in 1847, came the breakthrough. Werner Siemens in Germany developed a method of permanently insulating wires by pressure-coating them with gutta percha, the latex derived from the sap of a tree native to Asia. By 1851, a cable had been laid across the English Channel. It would save India for Britain.
A major mutiny broke out in India in 1857 and the British needed extra troops. The message for help raced across India by telegraph, moved by ship to Egypt, crossed Egypt by land, and across the Mediterranean by ship to Italy, where it went to London not by carrier pigeon but by wire. It took 40 days. Before the telegraph, it would have taken three months. The troops were dispatched and the mutiny put down.
The technology of the telegraph was improved by American Samuel Morse, who came up with a way to use only one wire. Tapping a key that caused current to flow quickly or for slightly longer times transmitted a series of dots and dashes — the so-called Morse code. At the other end, a needle responding to the changes in current punched out the dots and dashes on a paper strip. In 1844, Morse sent his first telegraph message from Washington to Baltimore spelling out, “What had God wrought?” Once wires were strung across America, the Pony Express was put out of business.
Wires obviously could not be strung on poles across the Atlantic, so the alternative was a submerged cable. In 1858, the HMS Agamemnon and the USS Niagara started out from the middle of the ocean going in opposite directions and managed to lay a cable that connected Ireland to Newfoundland. The cable, manufactured in England, had copper wires in the centre insulated by gutta percha and was surrounded by steel wires for protection. On Aug. 16, 1858, Queen Victoria sent a greeting to U.S. President James Buchanan, the first message ever sent by cable across the Atlantic! Unfortunately, the cable failed after a few weeks, but in 1866, the SS Great Eastern was successful in laying down an improved cable. The phrase “two weeks to two minutes” was widely used to illustrate how the transatlantic telegraph radically shortened communication times between Europe and North America. News could now be quickly transmitted by “wire service.”
On Jan. 14, 1878, the public heard about the next great step in communication. Newspapers described how Alexander Graham Bell had demonstrated his invention, the telephone, to Queen Victoria at Osborne House, her vacation residence on the Isle of Wight. Her Majesty found the experience to be “quite extraordinary” and had all her residences connected by telephone by 1897.
In 1956, the first telephone cable was laid down across the Atlantic and was followed 32 years later by the first optical fibre cable through which messages could be transmitted far more quickly. Today, undersea cables criss-cross the world’s oceans, transmitting data at the speed of light, powering everything from emails and financial transactions to video streaming. Satellites are more expensive and carry only a fraction of all communications. Cables are the nervous system of the world.
We are indeed living in the age of communication. Unfortunately, misinformation can be just as easily communicated as trustworthy information. We have instant access to the wisdom of the world’s best scientists, but we are also flooded with the foolishness of flat-Earthers, inept politicians, anti-vaccine zealots and promoters of bogus cancer remedies.
