Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
6 'The Telegraph' song-sheet
cover. Written and performed
by George Leybourne
(1842-84, also known as
'Champagne Charlie') in the
1860s.
the
s, by the British scientists Sir Charles Wheatstone
and Sir William Fothergill Cooke, and the American painter, Samuel
Morse. Morse developed an intricate code involving sending short
signals for numbers, which could then be looked up in a codebook.
Morse's colleague Alfred Vail developed a far more practical system
involving sending combinations of short and long signals to
represent letters of the alphabet. This was named (rather unfairly)
Morse Code. The electric telegraph and Morse Code were first
widely adopted as a solution for the 'crisis of control' in what was
then possibly the most complex system ever built, the railways. Both
in Britain and the United States the early railways were troubled
by large numbers of accidents as well as problems with efficiency,
mostly owing to the difficulty of coordinating different trains on
the same line. The telegraph offered a means of coordinating and
organizing the railways, thus initiating one aspect of what James
Beniger calls the 'control revolution',
17
which for Beniger represents
1820
s and '
30
