telegraph

Dictionary: tel·e·graph   (tĕl'ĭ-grăf')

1. A communications system that transmits and receives simple unmodulated electric impulses, especially one in which the transmission and reception stations are directly connected by wires.
2. A message transmitted by telegraph; a telegram.

1. To transmit (a message) by telegraph.
2. To send or convey a message to (a recipient) by telegraph.
3. 1. To make known (a feeling or an attitude, for example) by nonverbal means: telegraphed her derision with a smirk.
   2. To make known (an intended action, for example) in advance or unintentionally: By massing troops on the border, the enemy telegraphed its intended invasion to the target country.

To send or transmit a telegram.

A low-speed communications device that transmits up to approximately 150 bps. Telegraph grade lines, stemming from the days of Morse code, cannot transmit a voice conversation. In 1843, the U.S. Congress authorized $30,000 to build a telegraph line between Baltimore and Washington, DC. The wire was strung onto 700 poles which were placed approximately 300 feet apart. On May 24, 1844, at the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Samuel Morse tapped out "What hath God wrought" via telegraph to his assistant Alfred Vail who was waiting at a Baltimore railroad station, some 40 miles away.

The Days of the Morse Code

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Telegraph (from Gr.: tēle, far, and graphē, writing). In 1832, Baron Schilling, a Russian diplomat, linked the Summer Palace of the tsar in St Petersburg to the Winter Palace using a telegraph with rotating magnetized needles. In 1833, Germans Karl F. Gauss and Wilhelm Weber made significant experiments with an electric telegraph. Englishmen William F. Cooke and Charles Wheatstone patented the five-needle telegraph in 1837 with a panel imprinted with letters and numerals to which the five needles pointed singly or in pairs. The Wheatstone telegraph linked Liverpool with Manchester, England, in 1839.

The development of the electromagnet about 1837 provided the American Samuel F. B. Morse with a way to transmit and receive electric signals. Together with Alfred Vail, Morse developed the simple operator key and refined their signal code, which became Morse code. Morse inaugurated a telegraph link between Baltimore, Maryland, and Washington, DC in May 1844. Probably the best-known group of codes was ‘SOS’, the international distress code—Save Our Souls. Vice Adm Philip Colomb's flash signalling adopted by the Royal Navy in 1867 was an adaptation of the Morse code to lights. The British in the Crimean war made the first application of the telegraph communications in war in 1854. In the Indian Mutiny the newly established telegraph, which was controlled by the British, was an important factor in the outcome of the conflict.

In the American civil war, wide use was made of the electric telegraph by both sides. The North equipped special telegraph wagon trains with insulated cable and poles that linked those lines with permanent civilian telegraph systems where messages could be transmitted. During the Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian wars, the field telegraph enabled Moltke ‘the Elder’, the Prussian COS, to exercise command over his distant armies. The British would, soon after, organize their first field telegraph trains in the Royal Engineers.

With growing telegraph traffic, improvements were required. The duplex circuit, developed in Germany, made it possible for messages to travel simultaneously in opposite directions on the same line. Thomas Edison devised a quadruplex in 1874 that permitted four messages to travel at once, two going in either direction.

The telegraph was more suited to long-distance fixed communications than for relay of messages and orders over short distances or on the battlefield. Telegraph lines were vulnerable to being cut and could not be erected at the speed of marching and manoeuvring armies. By the end of the 19th century, the world was criss-crossed by telegraph lines, including numerous cables beneath the Atlantic Ocean. The invention of the teletypewriter and its development of the teleprinter, linked to the telegraph system, added a further dimension to communications. Teleprinter circuits would later be used extensively during WW II. The telegraph was the first instrument to transform information into electrical form and transmit it reliably over long distances. With the advent of electronic mail and faxes, the telegraph has all but been replaced in today's world of electronics.

— Danny M. Johnson

n. 1. a system for transmitting messages from a distance along a wire, especially one creating signals by making and breaking an electrical connection: news came from the outside world by telegraph.

2. a device for transmitting messages in such a way.

send (someone) a message by telegraph: I must go and telegraph Mom. | she would rush off to telegraph news to her magazine.

telegrapher n.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

For more information on telegraph, visit Britannica.com.

Fires, smoke signals, and drums have been used since antiquity to transmit messages over long distances. The term telegraph was coined by Claude Chappe to describe such methods, a version of which was invented by him and his brothers to signal each other while in school. In 1793 Chappe introduced in France a form of this system for the transmission of messages based on stations with towers using a code to transmit signals by the position of crossed arms. Today this kind of system is called a semaphore ("sign bearer"), not a telegraph ("far writer").

The idea of the electric telegraph was born when the first experimenters with electricity noticed that electric charges could travel through wires over distances. In 1753 in Scotland Charles Morrison described a system of 26 wires for transmitting the 26 letters of the alphabet. Electrostatic charges traveling through these wires deflected suspended pith balls at the receiving station. However, this was never developed as a practical system.

During the early 19th century, several scientists experimented with the transmission of messages through electric wires. At this time scientists had gained access to a steady, low-voltage source of electricity. Karl Friedrich Gauss and Wilhelm Weber transmitted signals over wires and detected them with sensitive galvanometers around 1833. In England Charles Wheatstone developed a telegraph with a five-needle galvanometer that indicated the transmitted letters. The Wheatstone telegraph actually came into use, linking Liverpool with Manchester in 1839. In Germany Carl Steinheil developed a telegraph that printed coded messages on a ribbon.

The electromagnet, a magnet whose field appears when current is on and disappears when it is off, was discovered in the 1820s. The American painter Samuel Morse first became acquainted with an electromagnet when it was shown to him by a young chemist he met on a transatlantic ship. Morse realized that a magnet turning on and off by transmission of a current from a distant source could be used to send messages. He soon enlisted America's greatest scientist of the time, Joseph Henry, to develop ways to cause an electromagnet to work at a distance. The electric telegraph became truly functional with the idea of using a code of dots and dashes to transmit the letters of the alphabet; this method was conceived by another collaborator, the American engineer Alfred Vail.

Despite this technical help, Morse is given credit for the invention because he put together a practical system and got people to accept it.

Morse patented his telegraph in 1837 and officially inaugurated a link between Baltimore, Maryland, and Washington, DC, on May 14, 1844, by transmitting the message "What hath God wrought." The message was transmitted by a telegraph key, a special switch that allows an electric current to be rapidly switched in and out; it was printed in the dot-dash code on ribbons of paper. In 1844 Vail determined that an operator could learn to hear the differences between dots and dashes; this became the preferred way to decipher messages.

Morse's telegraph quickly spread in the United States, and later it superseded the existing systems of Wheatstone and Steinheil in Europe. In 1862, 240,000 km (150,000 mi) of telegraph cable covered the world, of which 77,000 km (48,000 mi) were in the United States and 24,000 km (15,000 mi) in Great Britain. Europe and the United States became linked by an underwater telegraph cable in 1866.

During the 20th century, the use of the telegraph declined, mainly because of lower prices for telephone and telex services. Also, wireless telegraphy, the first form of radio that used the same codes as ordinary telegraphy, was available. "Telegrams" increasingly were transmitted by telex or telephone instead of as actual telegrams. During the 1980s telegraph services disappeared altogether in most countries.

Look up telegraph in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Telegraph may be:

Telegraphy, class of means of long-distance communication:

• Electrical telegraph, a form of telegraph that uses electric signals
• Printing telegraph, a form of electrical telegraph that uses plain text instead of Morse Code
• Optical telegraph, a semaphore-based system
• Hydraulic telegraph, a telegraph based on seeing how much water ran between given signals
• Teleprinter
• Engine order telegraph
• Telautograph

Contents 1 Geography 2 Periodicals 3 Miscellaneous 4 See also

Geography

• Telegraph Hill, various places
• Telegraph, Texas
• Telegraph Avenue in Oakland and Berkeley, California
• Telegraph Road, U.S. Route 24 in Michigan

Periodicals

• De Telegraaf, Netherlands
• The Telegraph (Alton), Illinois
• The Telegraph (Kolkata), India
• The Telegraph (Macon), Georgia, United States
• The Telegraph (Nashua), New Hampshire
• The Telegraph (magazine), Bob Dylan fanzine
• The Belfast Telegraph, Northern Ireland
• Community Telegraph, Northern Ireland
• Coventry Evening Telegraph, England
• The Daily Telegraph, Great Britain
• The Daily Telegraph (Australia)
• Jewish Telegraph, Britain
• Telegraph (Brisbane), Australia
• Telegraph Herald, Iowa
• Telegraph and Argus, England
• The Catholic Telegraph, Ohio, United States

Miscellaneous

• Telegraph (song), a 1983 single by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark
• Telegraph (album), an album by Drake Bell
• Telegraph, Telegraph Records, music label

See also

• Telegraphing (sports), betraying one's intentions to an opponent
• Telegraphing (entertainment), undercutting suspense in the design or performance of a creative work
• Telegraphic speech, stage in speech developmental
• Telegraph style, a clipped way of writing to abbreviate words
• Telegraphese, an elliptical style of writing
• Telegraph Melts, 1986 album
• Telegraph plant, shrub

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Dansk (Danish)
n. - telegraf
v. tr. - telegrafere
v. intr. - sende et telegram

Nederlands (Dutch)
telegraaf, telegraferen

Français (French)
n. - télégraphe
v. tr. - télégraphier
v. intr. - télégraphier

Deutsch (German)
n. - Telegraf, Anzeigetafel
v. - telegrafieren, drahten, signalisieren

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - τηλέγραφος
v. - τηλεγραφώ

Italiano (Italian)
telegrafare, telegrafo

Português (Portuguese)
n. - telégrafo (m)
v. - telegrafar

Русский (Russian)
телеграф, телеграфировать

Español (Spanish)
n. - telégrafo, telegrama
v. tr. - telegrafiar
v. intr. - telegrafiar

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - telegraf
v. - telegrafera

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
电报, 电报机, 打电报给, 用电报发送, 电汇, 打电报

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 電報, 電報機
v. tr. - 打電報給, 用電報發送, 電匯
v. intr. - 打電報

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 전신, 통신, 전신기
v. tr. - 타전하다, 전신 주문으로 보내다, 전신으로 알리다
v. intr. - 전보를 치다, 신호하다

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 電信, 電報, 電信機
v. - 電報を打つ, 電報で知らせる

idioms:

• telegraph service    電報サービス

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) وسيله او نظام لنقل الرساءل برقي, التلغراف (فعل) يرسل برقيه, يبرق‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮מברקה, טלגרף‬
v. tr. - ‮הבריק, שלח מברק‬
v. intr. - ‮הבריק, שלח מברק‬

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