Replica Murray Optical Telegraph, 1795
Replica Cooke and Wheatstone 5-needle Telegraph, 1839
Grosser Kurfürst Morse Key
Grosser Kurfürst Battleship
Throughout history, man has demanded and devised ever faster ways of sending and receiving important news and information. Once out of immediate personal contact range, other means of communicating had to be found.
It was easy enough to send a message if there was a line of sight, but over longer distances, information had to be laboriously written down and carried by messenger from sender to recipient.
During the Napoleonic Wars, Claude Chappe in France, designed a semaphore optical telegraph and in Britain, Lord George Murray produced an equally impressive shutter system. These two telegraphs were capable, for the first time in history, of sending complete messages over long distances at great speed. It is said that a test message was transmitted from Admiralty in London to Plymouth and acknowledged in less than ten minutes….. The year was 1796 and the distance covered was over 400 miles!
Optical shutter and semaphore systems remained in use until the introduction of the electric telegraph in 1839. When William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone first met in 1837, each was already interested in the electric telegraph. They realised that it had the potential to control the chaotic movement of trains on the new railway networks that were starting to criss-cross the country. Within 2 years, they had designed a 5-needle alphabetic telegraph, which was incorporated into a 12-mile stretch of the Great Western Railway at the huge cost of £2,817. 10s.
The telegraph took the form of a diamond-shaped board containing the letters of the alphabet and 5 pointers or ‘needles’, which indicated the letter being transmitted. Owing to the layout, it was possible to use only 20 letters - so the operator had to resort to phonetic spelling! By 1844, Cooke and Wheatstone had developed a 2-needle, coded instrument – exactly at the time Samuel Morse was demonstrating his faster and more efficient coded telegraph in the United States.
During a chance meeting in 1832, Samuel Morse was shown a device that included an electromagnet. Talk turned to telegraphs and the challenge of using an electromagnet as the receiving element in a telegraph system.
Morse was an artist, not an engineer - but he had an enquiring mind and, with technical advice and assistance from Leonard Gale, a chemist friend, he planned a system of signs, consisting of dots and dashes.
Another friend, Alfred Vale simplified this code and also helped financially. In 1837, they demonstrated a telegraph machine through about 50 metres of wire and in 1844 Morse built a 37 mile-long line between Washington and Baltimore. The clumsier pointer system soon gave way to Morse’s code and by 1868, 16,000 miles of telegraph line had been erected in Britain alone!
In 1847 Michael Faraday and Weiner von Siemens developed a rubber sleeve for insulating cables, enabling them to be laid underground and even underwater. A cable laid under the Atlantic in 1858 corroded and snapped after a few days; the voltage was too high for the insulation. In 1866, a much stronger and thicker cable, designed by Lord Kelvin, was successfully laid between Ireland and Newfoundland. A very large vessel was required to carry such an enormous load: Brunel's "Great Eastern" was chosen and completed the task in two weeks.
Developments in Wireless Telegraphy meant that communication with ships at sea was suddenly possible: no longer was a ship out of contact when it disappeared over the horizon!
By the early 20th century, there was a legal obligation for all British shipping to be supplied with Morse keys – though there was no requirement for constant manning of the Marconi (‘Radio’) Room until after the Titanic disaster. As a result of this, all passenger ships had to carry three Radio Officers and maintain a 24-hour watch.
One of the greatest ‘Treasures’ of the Museum’s collection is a 100 year-old Morse key, unique in being the only surviving specimen from Kaiser Wilhelm II's Imperial High Seas Fleet. It was manufactured in 1912 and fitted to the powerful spark transmitter on the 25,000 ton battleship Grosser Kurfurst, and used throughout WW1. In 1919, with the rest of the Fleet, Grosser Kurfurst was interned in Scapa Flow. All Morse keys were removed to prevent inter-ship communication, but this one remained hidden aboard the battleship. Morale in the Fleet was very low and "Soldiers' Councils" existed on most ships as sources of agitation and potential mutiny. It is possible that the Soldier's Council had hidden the key, for inter-ship communication in the event of a general mutiny. On 21 June 1919, the order was given to scuttle the entire Fleet. The key was subsequently recovered in 1937, in a salvage operation conducted by Metal Industries Ltd, and presented to James Ferguson, a press photographer from the Daily Record who had joined the dive and was the first man to take photographs at these depths. James Ferguson subsequently passed the key to a Mr. Hunter, whose widow donated it to Harry Matthews in 1987, after hearing Harry in a radio broadcast...
Museum of Communication