samuel morse developed and patented the electrical telegraph in the united states in 1837.
who developed and patented the electrical telegraph in the united states in 1837?
samuel morse
meanwhile, william cooke and professor charles wheatstone had learned of the wilhelm weber and carl gauss electromagnetic telegraph in 1833. they 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. aided by his 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. he theorized 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 stretch of telegraph. however, within a few years, cooke and wheatstone's multiple-wire signaling method would be overtaken by morse's cheaper method.
samuel morse
an electrical telegraph consisted of two or more geographically separated stations (often called telegraph offices) connected by wires, usually supported overhead on utility poles. there were many different electrical telegraph systems invented, but the ones that became widespread fit into two broad categories. the first was needle telegraphs in which a needle pointer is made to move electromagnetically with a pulse of electric current from a battery or dynamo down the telegraph line. early systems used multiple needles requiring multiple wires. the first commercial system, and the most widely used needle telegraph, was the cooke and wheatstone telegraph, invented in 1837. early equipment sets used five needles to point to the letter being transmitted, but the cost of installing wires was more economically significant than the cost of training operators so a single-needle system with a code that had to be learned became the norm.
electrical telegraph