A History of Telegraphy: Its Technology and Application (review)

The electric telegraph revolutionized communication. With its instantaneous action and its wires crisscrossing diverse landscapes, towns, and cities, the telegraph came to symbolize a new technological age. Although it has received considerable scholarly attention, the history of telegraphy—compared to that of railroads, say—is yet to be fully appreciated. The title of this book by Ken Beauchamp, a longtime telecommunications engineer, promises a comprehensive history. But Beauchamp actually presents only what he himself describes as "a brief record of the growth of the techniques of telegraphy over two centuries of development" (p. xix). This record consists of an encyclopedic collection of facts, lists, and descriptions of apparatus and techniques, compiled mostly from published primary records without any discernable critical or historiographical sensibility.

The book looks at both wire and wireless telegraphy from its beginnings to the end of World War II, but completely leaves out telephony, a form of telegraphy. While Beauchamp makes a great effort to include a wide range of topics, he often treats them in total isolation from their social and political contexts. Indeed, even a quick glance at his references leaves one with the inescapable impression of an author confined to an archive and cut off from the outside world. He is almost completely unfamiliar with—or else turns a blind eye to—the recent scholarship in the field. This disengagement prevents Beauchamp from making any explicit argument.

Yet, by plowing through masses of detail on apparatus and processes (much of which will be unintelligible to nonspecialists and unnecessary to specialists), a reader can make two observations. First, telegraphy was in a state of continual change. Although we may have an impression that the conceptual design of the system was complete by the late 1840s, in fact what remained most enduring after that was the Morse code. Changes in the system were mostly market driven, directed toward lower costs and greater accuracy, mobility, and speed. Beauchamp is not concerned with the dynamics of these changes or with the incentives of the agents of change, however, nor does he attempt to evaluate "success" or tell how rival systems and apparatus were promoted by their inventors or eliminated by relentless competition. The only exception to this superficiality pertains to certain innovations and modifications brought about by the military or by the pressure of the war.

Indeed—and this is the second observation—the military applications of the telegraph constitute most of the book, the best portion of which concerns wireless telegraphy at sea. The effective use of wireless was a defining factor in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5. The Russian navy's equipment was manufactured by the German Telefunken, while Japan's came from the British Marconi Company, which naturally exploited the Japanese victory to boost its commercial prospects. The military, as Beauchamp shows, was a major patron of the wireless telegraph, and made great efforts to turn it into an efficient military technology. Although navies and air forces were behind much research and development in wireless telegraphy, as in radio, Beauchamp pays little attention to the interwar period, which some scholars have identified as crucial.

In actuality, the electric telegraph was invented and developed for the most part outside the military. Railroad and shipping companies, merchants, news media, and postal services played a much greater role than the military, at least until the twentieth century, in shaping telegraphy and its applications. But these get little attention here. Another problem with the book concerns the large number of technical and factual errors. What is illustrated as the famous Morse receiving instrument of 1837 is in fact a 1904 replica. Although it is true that the European and Indian Junction Telegraph Company was established to build the Ottoman section of the Indo-European overland line, as Beauchamp states, it was the Ottoman government that finally carried out the project. Many more examples...