this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2024
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And couldn't reach across oceans, required special training, and only accommodated short messages because of the tedious nature of signaling.
You could definitely send telegraphs overseas, and sending or receiving them required no training.
If you mean paying someone to send them, then sure. But it required learning Morse code, and learning to use a keyer.
You couldn't send them overseas until after ~~the invention of radio. Before that the signal traveled along a wire~~ they laid the transatlantic cable.
The first transatlantic telegraph cable was laid down in 1854 and radio waves weren't even theorized until 1873... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_telegraph_cable
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio#History
I had no idea radio was such a recent discovery.
Whoops!
No worries, we can't all know everything all the time.
I kinda suspected I might be wrong about that as I was typing it, and then I was like "Nah! That's just silly. Of course they didn't run a cable across the entire Atlantic Ocean in the 1800's!". But I was wrong. That's actually really impressive.
During a short window, a samurai could've faxed president Lincoln (though I believe the samurai and Lincoln would have had to be in the same country)
You should look into how it was done. Weirdly enough, it's pretty similar to how we lay cable now.
I remembered this article if you're interested in how we lay cable underwater today. It's even more wild since it's fiberoptic cable. https://www.theverge.com/c/24070570/internet-cables-undersea-deep-repair-ships
The only way you were keying in a telegram yourself is if you worked for them.