Okay, don’t laugh. I’m sure I’m going to smack myself in the head when somebody answers this question, but I’m willing to take the risk.
Last night the spouse and I were watching “Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows.” At one point, Watson sneaks into a telegraph office at a large weapons plant to send a telegraph to Holmes’s brother Mycroft. He starts tapping out Morse code.
Spouse wondered aloud how a telegraph message knows where to go, and I realized I had no idea either. How do you specify where the message is supposed to go? Is there something similar to a phone’s switchboard? Does each recipient have some kind of identifying number? I tried a few Google searches but they seem focused more on how the actual technology works, rather than how to target the messages.
Sorry to start off with a WAG, but I suspect that it was mostly hardwired lines with only 2 telegraph stations, or manual switches where you first sent in instructions to the switching staff.
For instance, in Manchester, I want to send a message to Liverpool. When I go to the telegraph station, it’s initially connected to the switching office in London. I tap out ‘Connect me to Liverpool stop’, and wait while someone receives the message and re-connects my line to the Liverpool telegraph office. Then I can send my message and the telegraph station in Liverpool goes tap-tap-tap as it comes through.
In many cases telegrams were manually relayed. This allowed telegrams to be transmitted to the next operator without waiting for the line to clear over the entire distance. In the early days, transmission line theory was poorly understood, and there were limits to how long a line could be tolerated with the poor matching, earth return, etc. Later on this was worked out, allowing trans-Atlantic lines etc. Two of the formulas used in transmission line work is still known as “the telegrapher’s equations”
Submarine lines, and of course wireless links used different media and equipment from terrestrial telegraph, so these would always constitute another relay or two.
Very long lines might have poor bandwidth, and require much slower transmission, so manual relays were the only way to accommodate this without slowing the whole network.
Businesses, such as newspapers or brokerages with high traffic would have professional telegraphers on the payroll to reduce delays and expenses. A manual relay would almost certainly have occurred in the example given, a private line would have run from a large company, or wealthy household to the local telegraph office. A clerk, or butler with modest proficiency would transmit the telegram to a very annoyed (due to slow speed and poor fist) telegraph office clerk, who would then pass it into the regular traffic stream. Receiving Morse is much harder than sending, so in most cases, the telegram boy would be dispatched for incoming traffic, even when the destination had a private line.
The word count was not just used for billing, but it was also transmitted with each telegram and verified by each relay operator…rather like check-sums are used in today’s computer communication. Context could be used for checking plain English, but a lot of businesses used commercial code books to cut word count, so the telegrams were just gibberish until decoded.
Rail lines, and many rural areas would be served by a single multi-drop line, which worked sort of like a telephone party line. Each operator on the line would have a callsign (usually two letters) and you would start by sending the call sign of the receiving station and waiting for a reply. This is probably the start of the tradition of assigning alphabetic call signs to radio and television stations.
Kevbo, you seem to know a lot about this topic, and probably know the answer to the OP’s question. However, you seem to have forgotten to actually answer it (at least in a way that I could understand).
I assume the “to:” address was part of the message, just like email. As mentioned in other posts, either it was point-to-point to a distribution office, or as you used to hear in stories about the old west, there was a “party line” down the track, and I assume the person at the head of the line was responsible for forwarding telegrams to the appropriate destination (either his head office on the other line, or relay to major city with distribution point.)
That part is easy–you gave an address, just as if you were mailing a letter. If the recipient were a private person, who didn’t have a telegraph station in their house, the last leg from the telegraph office in the destination city to the recipient would have to be covered by a person, carrying a typewritten transcript of the message.
How the telegraph company used the address to get the message from the originating office to the destination office, I have no idea.
If you’re really interested in this, get the book 'The Victorian Internet". I don’t remember right now who the author is, but with that name it should be easy to find. A facinating account of the invention, development, and use of the telegraph.
OK, A telegram has a header that specifies the originator, the recipient, the word count, etc. Once it starts being transmitted, the header also has a route.
A private line (to a business or wealthy household) would connect ONLY to the nearest local telegraph office. In a smallish city, that telegraph office would have only a link to the nearest big city. Big city offices would have links to every nearby big city in every direction, and possibly direct links to a few more distant big cities. The wires to the big cities would have drops at smaller towns along the route. An operator at one of the smaller towns could wait for a lull in the main-line traffic, or in an emergency could break into the line. (better have a good reason! breaking news maybe)
There was NOT a switchboard in the telephone sense for making a full-length electrical connection from source to destination. There would be a switchboard for routing various lines to various telegrapher’s desk’s within the office.
A telegraph office would have a number of telegraphers each working at a desk connected to just one …maybe two three at the most lines if they were not high traffic. It would also have a station chief who acted as sort of a traffic cop. The station Chief was also a telegrapher, and might handle a low traffic line, or just fill in for no-shows etc. On a very slow night in a low traffic office, the station chief might possibly be working alone. That would be rare.
Usually telegrams would originate either from a walk-in at a telegraph company office, via a link from a railroad line, from a messenger boy, or via a private line from a business or wealthy household. In all cases, only the source, destination person, city, and address and word count would be given.
At the originating telegraph company office, the first stop would be to the a station chief’s desk, who would assign a route for the telegram to get to the destination office. (office nearest the recipient). This route would then be included in the header info. (non-real example: SF,DN,SL BT…SanFransisco via Denver via SaintLouis, via Boston) As the telegram progressed among the several relays, the present station would be noted, and the telegram would go to the desk of the telegrapher connected to the next station up the routing chain.
Depending on traffic a typical given telegrapher would be working the line(s) to one or maybe two distant cities…maybe more on a very slow night shift. Page-boys would bring telegrams from the station chief to his desk, and he would transmit them, he would alternately receive telegrams from that city and these would get routed to the desk of the appropriate telegrapher, or to the front-desk clerk for typing if this were the destination city. When a wire went down (this would be known within one telegram) then all the traffic thorough that city would have to be re-routed around that dead wire by the station chief. Traffic into that city could also be re-routed via an extra step to bypass the down wire.
Station chiefs would know the routing for all the usual destinations off the top of their head, and would have directories to consult for unusual destinations. In big cities with multiple offices, the telegram would go first to a main office, then the station chief would route it to an appropriate satellite office based on the street address.
That is how it would work in a big city. In a small town with a rail line, the station-master would serve as the telegraph clerk. Dedicated lines were needed for train-orders, but there was a lot of leftover band-width, so railroads did telegram service as a side-line, sort of sub-contracting to Western Union.
If a small town didn’t have a railroad, there might be a low traffic line dropped to a general store or some such. This was tricky, as there needed to be someone who could receive Morse well to take incoming telegrams. That might be only part time service, and telegrams would stack up up-stream until the operator came on duty.
In the heyday of the telegraph, telegraphers were in high demand, and paid pretty well for the times…many a young man trained to fill these positions. Carpal Tunnel syndrome was an occupational hazard, known as “glass arm” in those days, and there was a good trade and patent wars over semi-automatic keys (“bugs”) to reduce the stress on a telegraphers arm.
Followup question about the private lines at the local office - would all of those always be hooked up to a different receiver? Would they have somebody whose job for a time was monitoring several of these ‘lines’ that weren’t particularly likely to go off at any particular time, but note down the message and which line if something did happen?
If a private line were one-way, as they mostly would be except for newspapers and brokerages and the like, then a number of them could actually be one loop, (one line, all sets in series) and the sounder switched out except when in use. By one way, I mean the private line users would not be monitoring the line for incoming traffic. Incoming traffic still involved a boy showing up at your door.
Something like a newspaper or brokerage might have a dedicated desk/telegrapher in the local office, and be able to handle two-way traffic. Otherwise there would just be a means to monitor the line opening at the local office, of which there were several options.
Using relays, a number of low-traffic private lines could be connected to one sounder, or other means to alert the local office when the rich fellow wanted to send a telegram. They could then route the “call” to an available telegrapher. If the amateur were good enough, he could send the actual telegram. Many times, though, Jeeves was only able to send a call-sign, and boy would be dispatched to accept a hand-written telegram.
Eventually clockwork mechanisms were invented so that Jeeves just had to throw one lever to send the master’s call-sign. This never really caught on for telegrams, but the system was widely used for fire call boxes, summing a fire company rather than a telegram boy.
A fellow named Edison worked out a way to make a self decoding telegraph, and the stock ticker was born. These used timed pulses rather than Morse code, but it was a similar idea.
Thank you, that’s fascinating stuff. The telegraph loop seems to have similar implications to the telephone party line - if you kept your sounder switched in, then you could hear when other customers on the loop were sending telegrams, or requests for at-the-door pickups.
If I ever write a story in the age of telegraph, this kind of detail would be great to put into it.
A single point-point telegraph loop would have two sounders in series with a battery and two keys (a fancy switch) .
The normal idle condition for the line is a complete circuit. The keys have a shorting switch which is closed for receiving, or when the line is idle, so the other end can “call”. You could interrupt the other party by opening your key while they were sending. This would make their sounder stop working, and they would know you were trying to break in. This was handy if you missed a word or something.
There were special, lower power sounders if you had a few stations on the line. These were not quite as loud, but kept things simple.
A long line with a large number of drops would have a sensitive relay in the line instead of a sounder at each drop. These required much less power than a sounder. There would be a battery (typically Ni-Fe ) to supply local power to run the sounder, which was controlled by the relay.
I’m sure I’m going to smack myself in the head when somebody answers this question, but I’m willing to take the risk.