Imperial Telecommunications :: essays research papers fc

Imperialism has existed in the world since the beginning of government exclusively together, but this practice took a dramatic turn in the last mentioned half of the nineteenth century. New inventions, modern thinking, and stronger governments all make imperialism easier. this instant thousands of miles could be conquered in a matter of months an empire could have a stronger hold on a colony than ever before. The result was that by the end of the century, at least one European nation had a claim to nearly every piece of land on the Earth. In the early nineteenth century, it would take a message 5-8 months to travel from England to India. Steamships emasculated that time to six weeks each way, but furthermore galvanizing telecommunications made that time, for all practical purposes, instantaneous. This new form of communication gave imperialists the ability to curb their empire, being able to govern a colony thousands of miles away. The web of cables that was so eagerly constru cted around the world gave the European empires an advantage that earlier nations neer could have imagined. The following pages will cover the history and effects of electrical telecommunications from its beginning through the first world war. They will describe the radical technology and inventors behind the wire following this the implication of this technology, mainly by Britain and France, into everyday practice will be discussed along with its effects. And finally, the effects on politics and economics leading up to the First World war will be discussed. Samuel Finley Breese Morse (Fig. 1), a North American mountain lion and inventor, got the idea for the telegraph while traveling from Italy to America. He began work and secure the first successful telegraph in 1838, along with a system of rules of dashes and dots of electric pulses to represent letters (Stall sec. 1). The first message on a commercial telegraph cable was sent on May 24, 1844, from capital of the United States DC to Baltimore. Morse sent the message What hath God wrought himself to his accomplice Albert Lewis Vail at the Baltimore & Ohio railway station. Plans to expand the network to Philadelphia, New York, and Boston began forthwith (2). Meanwhile in England, two gentlemen William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone (Fig. 2) had been working on the needle telegraph (Fig. 3). After years of experiments and patents, they finally built a one-needle telegraph that was so efficient and so simple that it was used in England for nearly eighty years to come (8).