A Modern Parallel
"This mode of instantaneous communication must inevitably become an instrument of immense power, to be wielded for good or for evil, as it shall be properly or improperly directed."
-Samuel F.B. Morse, 1838
-Samuel F.B. Morse, 1838
"The telegraph was the first practical use of electricity, and a forerunner of today's e-mail."
-Interview with Jim Wilson, Telegraph Expert & Consultant on the movie Lincoln
"I really see the telegraph as the original technology, the grandfather of all these other technologies that came out of it: the telephone, the teletype, the fax, the Internet."
-Telegraph Historian Thomas Jepsen
-Telegraph Historian Thomas Jepsen
"Telegraphers, hired by the thousands to relay every kind of information, created a new language, one of strange abbreviations that only they, and perhaps some wire service journalists, understood. It had a Twitter-like feel to it."
-Historian Bill Deverell, USC-Huntington Institute on California and the West.
-Historian Bill Deverell, USC-Huntington Institute on California and the West.
"A worldwide communications network whose cables spanned continents and oceans, it revolutionized business practice, gave rise to new forms of crime, and inundated its users with a deluge of information. Governments and regulators tried and
failed to control the new medium. Attitudes toward everything from newsgathering to diplomacy had to be completely rethought. Meanwhile, out on the wires, a technological subculture with its own customs and vocabulary was establishing itself.” - Tom Standage on the Telegraph, "The Victorian Internet" 1998 |
"The dots & dashes formed the elements of an alphabetic binary code."
-R.W. Burns, Communications: An International History of the Formative Years