The Victorian Internet Read Online Free PDF

quantities for sale to the public. And as a young man, he had dabbled
     with various other inventions, including a new kind of water pump, devised in 1817, which he sold to a local fire brigade.
     But none of his schemes, which typically combined artistic ingenuity with public-spiritedness, had ever been successful; the
     hapless Morse seems to have stumbled from one moneymaking idea to another as the mood took him.
    As the Sully made its way across the ocean, the passengers on board got to know each other quite well, and, two weeks into the voyage,
     a philosophical discussion at the dinner table one afternoon turned to the matter of electromagnetism. Dr. Charles Jackson
     of Boston, one of the passengers, knew a good deal about the subject and even had an electromagnet and some other electrical
     bits and bobs with him on board the ship. In the midst of an explanation, one of the passengers asked Jackson the very question
     that Nollet's experiment had been trying to answer: How fast did electricity travel along a wire, and how far could it go?
    As the electrified monks could have testified back in 1746, and as Dr. Jackson explained, electricity was believed to pass
     through a circuit of any length instantaneously. Morse was thunderstruck. "If the presence of electricity can be made visible
     in any desired part of the circuit," he is reputed to have said, "I see no reason why intelligence might not be instantaneously
     transmitted by electricity to any distance." This, of course, was exactly the reason that so many scientists had spent the
     best part of a century trying to harness electricity as a means of signaling, but Morse didn't know that. He left the table,
     went up on deck, and started scribbling in his notebook. Convinced that he was the first to have had the idea, he instantly
     became obsessed with a new scheme: building an electric telegraph.
    Perhaps fortunately, Morse was unaware that other would-be telegraphers had failed after being unable to get signals to travel
     over long wires. Assuming that the electric side of things would be fairly straightforward, he started thinking about the
     other half of the problem: a signaling code.
    The arms or shutters of an optical telegraph can be arranged in a large number of different combinations, but an electric
     current can only be on or off. How could it be used to transmit an arbitrary message? As he paced the deck of the Sully, Morse swiftly rejected the approach of using a separate electrical circuit for each letter of the alphabet. Next, he considered
     the possibility of using the clicking of an electromagnet to send numbers in the same way as a church bell, which indicates
     the hour by the number of chimes. But with this system, it would take nine times as long to send a 9 (9 clicks) as it would
     to send a 1 (1 click).
    Before long, Morse had the idea of using short and long bursts of current—a "bi-signal" scheme that later evolved into the
     dots and dashes of what we now know as Morse code. He decided upon a series of short and long bursts corresponding to each
     of the digits from o to 9, and sketched them in his notebook. Sending a series of digits, he decided, could then be used to
     indicate a word in a numbered codebook.
    Next, Morse turned to the matter of creating a permanent record of an electric signal so that it could be translated from
     dots and dashes back into the original message. Together with Jackson, he sketched out a way to record incoming signals on
     paper automatically, by marking a paper tape with a moving pencil controlled by an electromagnet.
    After six weeks at sea, Morse arrived in New York a changed man. He met his brothers Richard and Sidney on the dock and started
     telling them about his new scheme almost immediately. "Hardly had the usual greetings passed between us three brothers, and
     while on our way to my house, before he informed us that he had made, during his voyage, an important invention, which had
     occupied