From
Link
Meanwhile, William Cooke and Professor Charles
Wheatstone learned of the Wilhelm Weber and Carl Gauss electromagnetic telegraph
in 1833, and had reached the stage of launching a commercial telegraph prior to
Morse, despite starting later. In England, Cooke became fascinated by electrical
telegraphy in 1836, four years after Morse, but with greater financial
resources. Cooke abandoned his primary subject of anatomy and built a small
electrical telegraph within three weeks. Wheatstone also was experimenting with
telegraphy and (most importantly) understood that a single large battery would
not carry a telegraphic signal over long distances, and that numerous small
batteries were far more successful and efficient in this task (Wheatstone was
building on the primary research of Joseph Henry, an American physicist). Cooke
and Wheatstone formed a partnership and patented the electrical telegraph in May
1837, and within a short time had provided the Great Western Railway with a
13-mile (21 km) stretch of telegraph. However, Cooke and Wheatstone's
multiple-wire signaling method would be overtaken by Morse's cheaper method
within a few years.
So, Morse did not have the first patent,
but was an
innovator.
In a letter to a friend, Morse describes
how vigorously he fought to be called the sole inventor of the electromagnetic
telegraph despite the previous inventions.(1848).
(Where have
we seen this behaviour before?)
I have been so constantly
under the necessity of watching the movements of the most unprincipled set of
pirates I have ever known, that all my time has been occupied in defense, in
putting evidence into something like legal shape that I am the inventor of the
Electro-Magnetic Telegraph!! Would you have believed it ten years ago that a
question could be raised on that subject?
Pirates! They
are everywhere!
Morse also at one time adopted Wheatstone and
Carl August von Steinheil's idea of broadcasting an electrical telegraph signal
through a body of water or down steel railroad tracks or anything conductive. He
went to great lengths to win a lawsuit for the right to be called "inventor of
the telegraph", and promoted himself as being an inventor, but Alfred Vail
played an important role in the invention of the Morse Code, which was based on
earlier codes for the electromagnetic telegraph.
The ego of an
inventor-innovator.
US Patent 1,647, Improvement in the mode of
communicating information by signals by the application of electro-magnetism,
June 20, 1840
And all of telecommunications and computing today is
just
improvements in the same spirit as that patent.
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You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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