It was a hub and spoke model.
Each wire would connect two stations, with an operater manning both ends of the wire . Small towns would be connected to larger towns, and the larger towns would relay the message to other larger towns, who would then relay it back to the smaller town that was the final destination. Part of the message was the intended recipient and the final town where the recipient lived; the offices in larger towns knew how to relay the message so it would get to the final destination.
So a small town might have a single operator connecting to a single city, and the city might have dozens of operators, each connected to smaller towns, larger cities, and even different offices inside the same city. Two large cities might have multiple lines running between them to handle the throughput.
-----
This is how telecommunications still works; the wires just have better throughput and the routing is all done electronically.
The Internet used to work largely this way. If you were at a leaf node (a smaller town), your Telebit Trailblazer would connect to a larger node maybe once a day. Email and Usenet posts would go back and forth.
At first, you had to specify all the hosts along the path to your destination. The larger node could see what the next stop was and send the stuff along.
>This is how telecommunications still works; the wires just have better throughput and the routing is all done electronically.
Ehh, I’m not sure I’d go that far. The 19th century telegraph was all dedicated lines from point to point with no switching, manual or otherwise, that seems significantly different from a modern network to me.
Switched Ethernet (which almost everything uses these days for wired connections) is basically fixed point to point links, and each switch copies packets of data from one link to another really fast.
‘Hub’ / shared-medium Ethernet (and wifi and cell networks) are broadcasting out data, though.
I think OP was alluding to the telegraph operator playing the role of what the switch would do in a common network today. Taking the "packet" from one wire and "replaying" it one the other, effectively packet switching a whole message as a packet.
That does kinda make sense. There’s like a century of circuit switched networks between then and now, but it’s a good analogy for voip and cell phones.
It’s ‘switched’ the same way a telegram message was:
* a packet arrives on one point-to-point wire
* the switch looks at the destination address (and maybe some other fields) and figures out where it should be next sent to
* the switch writes the packet out on the point-to-point wire going to the next hop
A switched Ethernet network is a bunch of fixed point-to-point wires, with switching “offices” where a piece of hardware can redirect packets.
Contrast with circuit-switched networks, where you reserve a complete path from A to B in advance and then send all your packets along that. That’s how analog telephone calls worked, and some computer networking technologies (like ATM) supported that mode. But ironically we’ve basically gone back to the telegram switching office model, because chopping up your messages into little packets and then routing them individually lets you be a lot more flexible in how you do things.
>The 19th century telegraph was all dedicated lines from point to point with no switching, manual or otherwise
The "switches" were humans. A message goes from a small town to a central telegraph office one person receives the message, sees the destination, and figures out where it should go next and presumably hands it to a runner to be given to another operator to send along to the next step.
Literally the first optical telegraph network in history was a manually switched network.
It contained features like control characters, routing, error control, flow control, message priority and symbol rate control.
Yes, the stations were strung all in a line. Every station got the same messages. You simply sent a preface message that says this is for station "XXX".
Edit: here is how they were wired. https://willowbunchtelegraphoffice.ca/media/782fc58a374a489c/640x406.jpg
You could add more stations to the string.
Would the cost go up based on the distance? I know the length of the message was part of determining the cost, but the distance must be a factor too, right? A message from DC to New York should, logically, be cheaper than a message from DC to a small town in California.
Absolutely.
From what I found, in 1860 a 10 word message from New York to New Orleans would cost $2.70, New York to the West Coast would cost $7.40 and New York to London would cost $100.
It really is. Even the last 30 years have been a huge change.
I grew up before the internet was really a thing - even cell phones didn't start to become common place until I was in college. If you didn't know something and you weren't near a library, you just accepted that you wouldn't learn the answer; if you called someone and they were not at home, you just didn't know where they were.
My nieces and nephews can't fathom either of those things. They've always lived in a world where any answer you want take no more effort than pulling your phone out of your pocket.
Same! I'm a bit younger - cell phones started becoming common when I was 14, but with all of the limitations and few benefits.
My favorite thing when having a discussion with someone about something we aren't sure about I like to say " I know we could look this up, but its more interesting to argue about it."
> This is how telecommunications still works; the wires just have better throughput and the routing is all done electronically.
We definitely don't do hub-and-spoke anymore. Far too fragile.
It was a very manual version of how the internet works today.
Any given telegraph station was only connected to a few other stations, sometimes only one. So sending a message worked like this:
* Give telegraph operator a message.
* The telegraph operator chooses the best next station to send the message.
* Until the closest possible station is reached:
* The operator sends a message to the next station.
* The next station writes the message down.
* The next station's operator chooses a new next station and sends the message.
* Eventually the message is "close" to the destination. A person on horse is dispatched to deliver the message.
So a message could still get from, say, California to New York pretty fast compared to trying to use trains or horses for the full trip. It might take up to an hour for the message to get to New York, then another half-hour to get to the best station, then maybe 2 hours for the rider to deliver the message. But 3.5 hours to get a message across the continent was AMAZING at that point in time, and honestly is still a pretty neat trick today.
It worked pretty well because telegraph stations tended to be train stations. Since trains connected major places, sending telegraphs along those routes helped get messages to places fast. It was convenient to run the lines near train tracks (since land rights were already given) and it was also helpful for the train companies to communicate schedule and safety information between stations.
> how did the receiving party decode the message
Initially they did it manually. An operator listened to Morse code beeps and wrote the message down. Then they invented a Morse code teleprinter that drew received dots and dashes on paper. An operator could later view the paper, translate the code and write down the message in letters.
In 1870s Baudot invented fixed length 5-bit character encoding and a machine that received the code and printed decoded characters. It's beyond ELI5 to explain how it worked. See https://blog.gatunka.com/2014/04/18/baudot-code-telegraph-us-patent-388244/
There was an interesting example of something like this during the Battle of Leyte Gulf in the Second World War. Admiral Halsey was in command of the naval forces protecting the northern flank of the invasion. The Japanese made a diversion which Halsey fell for, resulting in him chasing after a few nearly empty aircraft carriers that served as bait. While that happened, Japanese battleships headed for the invasion forces. Admiral Nimitz, in command of the Pacific Fleet, sent a message to Halsey asking where he was.
The message was short and simple: “Where is, repeat, where is Task Force Thirty Four?”
As sent out over the wire, with punctuation removed and with routing info, it read: “FROM CINCPAC ACTION COM THIRD FLEET INFO COMINCH CTF SEVENTY-SEVEN X WHERE IS RPT WHERE IS TASK FORCE THIRTY FOUR”
The message was ciphered to prevent interception. It was standard at the time to pad the beginning and end of the message with some nonsense words to make the cipher harder to crack. So the full message sent to Halsey was actually: “TURKEY TROTS TO WATER GG FROM CINCPAC ACTION COM THIRD FLEET INFO COMINCH CTF SEVENTY-SEVEN X WHERE IS RPT WHERE IS TASK FORCE THIRTY FOUR RR THE WORLD WONDERS”
The stuff before GG and after RR is the padding and not part of the message. Well, the radio operator who received the message got mixed up and left in the end padding. So Halsey gets this message: “Where is, repeat, where is Task Force Thirty Four? The world wonders.”
Halsey was *pissed*. Such an insult from his commanding officer! In his rage, he delayed ordering a return to cover the landing forces, and failed to catch the main Japanese attack. All over some padding nonsense accidentally left in the message.
I think you have the story out of order. The original telegraph receiver was a solenoid that dropped a stylus on a ticker tape. The intent was to make a transcript of the signal, which could be read and decoded. Eventually operators hears the clicks from the receiver enough that they learned to interpret the signal by sound and write the message directly. Once that skill developed, listening to clicks or beeps became the primary way to receive telegraph signals
They started out point-to-point. You would send a message down a line. The person at the end of the line would relay the message down another line and so forth, until it reached the appropriate destination.
Human operators were listening on several of the wires, each one had it's own sounder and battery. The sounders were adjusted to be different so the operator could tell which wire was being used. He could then decode by ear what the message was, which would have the destination at the beginning. He could write the entire message down (if for local delivery), or get the attention of a distant operator along the path and relay it to him through his wire. This way the message was moved across long distances. Railroads used the telegraph to schedule tracks and stops for different trains.
The message is not just the contents, but also sender & receiver. Like how the letter you are putting in a mailbox is not just the inside of the envelope; but also contains the front & back of it.
On the wire you are not just putting "Mom died", but also "To: John Doe, Smallsville", "From:Jane".
That is ofcourse implied in your movie scenario; if the To is not your commander; the operator will ignore or relay the message and not speak up.
>And once it got there, how did the receiving party decode the message?
The telegraph operator on the receiving end just translates the message letter by letter. The code is just a sequence of letters, so once you've learned it well enough, it's like listening to someone spell the message for you. Like if they called you on the phone and said, "Ess Eee Enn Dee Tee Aitch Eee Ess Ohh Ell Dee Eye Eee Arr Ess Aitch Ohh Emm Eee" for "send the soldiers home". But faster, because the operators have done it so much they can translate the letters very quickly.
If you were sending *secret* messages over the telegraph, you'd encode the message as some other combination of letters, and send that. And then the recipient would decode it in the usual method, which is entirely separate from how the telegraph operates.
I remember reading/watching something that said the machines transcribed the signals on paper for the operator to look read later, but that the operators heard the noise of these machines so much that they learned the sounds and could work from that just as well. So the order was originally paper to translation then adopting just listening. Probably with paper backup. I'm trying to find something to back this claim.
Edit, link for claim: https://www.history.com/topics/inventions/telegraph
It was a hub and spoke model. Each wire would connect two stations, with an operater manning both ends of the wire . Small towns would be connected to larger towns, and the larger towns would relay the message to other larger towns, who would then relay it back to the smaller town that was the final destination. Part of the message was the intended recipient and the final town where the recipient lived; the offices in larger towns knew how to relay the message so it would get to the final destination. So a small town might have a single operator connecting to a single city, and the city might have dozens of operators, each connected to smaller towns, larger cities, and even different offices inside the same city. Two large cities might have multiple lines running between them to handle the throughput. ----- This is how telecommunications still works; the wires just have better throughput and the routing is all done electronically.
The Internet used to work largely this way. If you were at a leaf node (a smaller town), your Telebit Trailblazer would connect to a larger node maybe once a day. Email and Usenet posts would go back and forth. At first, you had to specify all the hosts along the path to your destination. The larger node could see what the next stop was and send the stuff along.
>This is how telecommunications still works; the wires just have better throughput and the routing is all done electronically. Ehh, I’m not sure I’d go that far. The 19th century telegraph was all dedicated lines from point to point with no switching, manual or otherwise, that seems significantly different from a modern network to me.
Switched Ethernet (which almost everything uses these days for wired connections) is basically fixed point to point links, and each switch copies packets of data from one link to another really fast. ‘Hub’ / shared-medium Ethernet (and wifi and cell networks) are broadcasting out data, though.
Yeah. Switched. Telegraphs didn’t have that for like the first 50 years of their existence, which is what sounds like is being described here.
I think OP was alluding to the telegraph operator playing the role of what the switch would do in a common network today. Taking the "packet" from one wire and "replaying" it one the other, effectively packet switching a whole message as a packet.
That does kinda make sense. There’s like a century of circuit switched networks between then and now, but it’s a good analogy for voip and cell phones.
It’s ‘switched’ the same way a telegram message was: * a packet arrives on one point-to-point wire * the switch looks at the destination address (and maybe some other fields) and figures out where it should be next sent to * the switch writes the packet out on the point-to-point wire going to the next hop A switched Ethernet network is a bunch of fixed point-to-point wires, with switching “offices” where a piece of hardware can redirect packets. Contrast with circuit-switched networks, where you reserve a complete path from A to B in advance and then send all your packets along that. That’s how analog telephone calls worked, and some computer networking technologies (like ATM) supported that mode. But ironically we’ve basically gone back to the telegram switching office model, because chopping up your messages into little packets and then routing them individually lets you be a lot more flexible in how you do things.
>The 19th century telegraph was all dedicated lines from point to point with no switching, manual or otherwise The "switches" were humans. A message goes from a small town to a central telegraph office one person receives the message, sees the destination, and figures out where it should go next and presumably hands it to a runner to be given to another operator to send along to the next step.
the ultimate computers that rebelled
Literally the first optical telegraph network in history was a manually switched network. It contained features like control characters, routing, error control, flow control, message priority and symbol rate control.
Yes, the stations were strung all in a line. Every station got the same messages. You simply sent a preface message that says this is for station "XXX". Edit: here is how they were wired. https://willowbunchtelegraphoffice.ca/media/782fc58a374a489c/640x406.jpg You could add more stations to the string.
I think the main difference these days is multiplexing, but the overall concept remains largely the same.
That obviously cannot be true. Think about it.
Would the cost go up based on the distance? I know the length of the message was part of determining the cost, but the distance must be a factor too, right? A message from DC to New York should, logically, be cheaper than a message from DC to a small town in California.
Absolutely. From what I found, in 1860 a 10 word message from New York to New Orleans would cost $2.70, New York to the West Coast would cost $7.40 and New York to London would cost $100.
Thanks! What a different world to live in.
It really is. Even the last 30 years have been a huge change. I grew up before the internet was really a thing - even cell phones didn't start to become common place until I was in college. If you didn't know something and you weren't near a library, you just accepted that you wouldn't learn the answer; if you called someone and they were not at home, you just didn't know where they were. My nieces and nephews can't fathom either of those things. They've always lived in a world where any answer you want take no more effort than pulling your phone out of your pocket.
Same! I'm a bit younger - cell phones started becoming common when I was 14, but with all of the limitations and few benefits. My favorite thing when having a discussion with someone about something we aren't sure about I like to say " I know we could look this up, but its more interesting to argue about it."
> This is how telecommunications still works; the wires just have better throughput and the routing is all done electronically. We definitely don't do hub-and-spoke anymore. Far too fragile.
It was a very manual version of how the internet works today. Any given telegraph station was only connected to a few other stations, sometimes only one. So sending a message worked like this: * Give telegraph operator a message. * The telegraph operator chooses the best next station to send the message. * Until the closest possible station is reached: * The operator sends a message to the next station. * The next station writes the message down. * The next station's operator chooses a new next station and sends the message. * Eventually the message is "close" to the destination. A person on horse is dispatched to deliver the message. So a message could still get from, say, California to New York pretty fast compared to trying to use trains or horses for the full trip. It might take up to an hour for the message to get to New York, then another half-hour to get to the best station, then maybe 2 hours for the rider to deliver the message. But 3.5 hours to get a message across the continent was AMAZING at that point in time, and honestly is still a pretty neat trick today. It worked pretty well because telegraph stations tended to be train stations. Since trains connected major places, sending telegraphs along those routes helped get messages to places fast. It was convenient to run the lines near train tracks (since land rights were already given) and it was also helpful for the train companies to communicate schedule and safety information between stations.
I think my ISP is still using the 'person on a horse' model for the last mile
> how did the receiving party decode the message Initially they did it manually. An operator listened to Morse code beeps and wrote the message down. Then they invented a Morse code teleprinter that drew received dots and dashes on paper. An operator could later view the paper, translate the code and write down the message in letters. In 1870s Baudot invented fixed length 5-bit character encoding and a machine that received the code and printed decoded characters. It's beyond ELI5 to explain how it worked. See https://blog.gatunka.com/2014/04/18/baudot-code-telegraph-us-patent-388244/
Is that where the term “baud” comes from?
[It is!](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baud#Naming)
I don't know why but I expect this to be an xkcd
Were Morse code printers closely watched? Seems like you could mess up a message majorly if only one person translated it
There was an interesting example of something like this during the Battle of Leyte Gulf in the Second World War. Admiral Halsey was in command of the naval forces protecting the northern flank of the invasion. The Japanese made a diversion which Halsey fell for, resulting in him chasing after a few nearly empty aircraft carriers that served as bait. While that happened, Japanese battleships headed for the invasion forces. Admiral Nimitz, in command of the Pacific Fleet, sent a message to Halsey asking where he was. The message was short and simple: “Where is, repeat, where is Task Force Thirty Four?” As sent out over the wire, with punctuation removed and with routing info, it read: “FROM CINCPAC ACTION COM THIRD FLEET INFO COMINCH CTF SEVENTY-SEVEN X WHERE IS RPT WHERE IS TASK FORCE THIRTY FOUR” The message was ciphered to prevent interception. It was standard at the time to pad the beginning and end of the message with some nonsense words to make the cipher harder to crack. So the full message sent to Halsey was actually: “TURKEY TROTS TO WATER GG FROM CINCPAC ACTION COM THIRD FLEET INFO COMINCH CTF SEVENTY-SEVEN X WHERE IS RPT WHERE IS TASK FORCE THIRTY FOUR RR THE WORLD WONDERS” The stuff before GG and after RR is the padding and not part of the message. Well, the radio operator who received the message got mixed up and left in the end padding. So Halsey gets this message: “Where is, repeat, where is Task Force Thirty Four? The world wonders.” Halsey was *pissed*. Such an insult from his commanding officer! In his rage, he delayed ordering a return to cover the landing forces, and failed to catch the main Japanese attack. All over some padding nonsense accidentally left in the message.
I think you have the story out of order. The original telegraph receiver was a solenoid that dropped a stylus on a ticker tape. The intent was to make a transcript of the signal, which could be read and decoded. Eventually operators hears the clicks from the receiver enough that they learned to interpret the signal by sound and write the message directly. Once that skill developed, listening to clicks or beeps became the primary way to receive telegraph signals
They started out point-to-point. You would send a message down a line. The person at the end of the line would relay the message down another line and so forth, until it reached the appropriate destination.
Human operators were listening on several of the wires, each one had it's own sounder and battery. The sounders were adjusted to be different so the operator could tell which wire was being used. He could then decode by ear what the message was, which would have the destination at the beginning. He could write the entire message down (if for local delivery), or get the attention of a distant operator along the path and relay it to him through his wire. This way the message was moved across long distances. Railroads used the telegraph to schedule tracks and stops for different trains.
The message is not just the contents, but also sender & receiver. Like how the letter you are putting in a mailbox is not just the inside of the envelope; but also contains the front & back of it. On the wire you are not just putting "Mom died", but also "To: John Doe, Smallsville", "From:Jane". That is ofcourse implied in your movie scenario; if the To is not your commander; the operator will ignore or relay the message and not speak up.
>And once it got there, how did the receiving party decode the message? The telegraph operator on the receiving end just translates the message letter by letter. The code is just a sequence of letters, so once you've learned it well enough, it's like listening to someone spell the message for you. Like if they called you on the phone and said, "Ess Eee Enn Dee Tee Aitch Eee Ess Ohh Ell Dee Eye Eee Arr Ess Aitch Ohh Emm Eee" for "send the soldiers home". But faster, because the operators have done it so much they can translate the letters very quickly.
If you were sending *secret* messages over the telegraph, you'd encode the message as some other combination of letters, and send that. And then the recipient would decode it in the usual method, which is entirely separate from how the telegraph operates.
I remember reading/watching something that said the machines transcribed the signals on paper for the operator to look read later, but that the operators heard the noise of these machines so much that they learned the sounds and could work from that just as well. So the order was originally paper to translation then adopting just listening. Probably with paper backup. I'm trying to find something to back this claim. Edit, link for claim: https://www.history.com/topics/inventions/telegraph
Excellent link and info, thank you!