• 1837 - Charles Wheatstone patents "electric telegraph"
• 1844 - Samuel Morse demonstrates "Morse code" -- but this is the old version, where a number is assigned to each possible word. Alfred Vail helps him later with a "variable-length letter code".
• 1845 - General Oceanic telegraph Co. registered in NYC to link Europe and North America (was this just another stock swindle?)
• 1847 - Gutta-percha (an inelastic latex) is discovered. It serves as a reliable insulator in water (reliable, but not great capacitance).
• 1849 - England to France telegraph cable goes into service -- and fails after 8 days.
• 1850 - Morse patents "clicking" telegraph.
• 1851 - England-France commercial telegraph service begins. This one uses gutta-percha, and survives.
• 1858 - First transatlantic telegraph messages via wire. Cyrus Field (a 35-year-old retired merchant) & John Pender formed a British company, "The Atlantic Telegraph Co." The cable deteriorated quickly, and failed after 3 weeks.
• 1861 - First USA transcontinental telegraph cable begins service.
• 1868 - First commercially successful transatlantic telegraph cable completed between UK and Canada, with land extension to USA.
• 1874 - Baudot invents a practical Time Division Multiplexing scheme or telegraph. Uses 5-bit codes & 6 time slots -- 90 bps max. rate. Both Western Union and Murray would use this as the basis of multiplex telegraph systems.
• 1875 - Typewriter invented.
• 1880 - Oliver Heaviside's analysis shows that a uniform addition of inductance into a cable would produce distortionless transmission.
• 1901 - Donald Murray links typewriter to high-speed multiplex system, later used by Western Union.

click to hear a telegraph (40K)