[SKRIVA] Om telegrafi

(Postade detta på en engelskspråkig lista, men ni får också se det. Jag är övertygad om att SKRIVAiternas engelskakunskaper duger! Det har förstås varit trögt med trafiken på många listor kring jul, men litet mer trafik på engelska listor; därför skrev jag det på engelska. --AE)
I read a book - Telegrafiboken by K V Tahvanainen - about the history of telegraphy in Sweden and to some extent abroad. I did my military service as a radio telegraphist and am also in general interested in technology/science history, so I read it with great interest. The possibly first distance messaging system (if we don't count homing pigeons) was the French optical telegraph opened in 1793. And the second such system was probably the Swedish optical telegraph, operated ca 1794 to 1871. (The last section of the optical telegraph lingered on a a long time after the electric telegraph came, since it wasn't commercially profitable to replace. The Swedish optical telegraph wasn't commercial, but for the navy, and ends of the lines were often out in the archipelago to warn if an enemy fleet was approaching.) After the Dane Örsted in 1820 described how electricity could influence a compass needle, several people began thinking of how this could be used for messaging. The Germans Gauss and Weber developed some sort of system in 1835, but as we all know the first successful system was developed by Samuel Morse in America. He too had his first model of telegraphy machinery ready in 1835, but it took until 1844 until he had his first longer test line (64 km between Washington and Baltimore). Electric telegraphs was then introduced in the US in a broader scale from 1845 and on. The Swedes came a few years later, but followed the development. One von Heland, working for the optical telegraph system, wrote a report about electrical telegraphs in 1846 and together with one Fahnehjelm the same year designed his own test system. This system consisted of numbered keys that could transmit sets of numbers that corresponded to the numbers of the existing optical telegraph. The idea was that the same code book thus could be used. Their system was demonstrated in 1846 between different rooms in the parliament, in presence of the king and the queen (who enjoyed themselves with sending messages between the rooms; it is said the machinery worked flawlessly). The director of the optical telegraph system, general Akrell, became very interested. But it took some time to get a working system in regular operation. They needed to investigate the technology and get it *right* from the beginning. It would cost not unsubstantial amounts of money. There were also fears that the lines could be sabotaged (perhaps by people who wanted the metal wire). It was decided that the Morse system was the way to go (wise!). They bought one Morse-style telegraphy machine in Germany which was more or less copied by local craftsmen, and began to lobby in parliament to build a telegraphy network. They had a further demonstration with the then two telegraph machines they owned in 1852, and in 1853 the first test line was built between Stockholm and Uppsala (to the north, a distance of ca 80 km). And they got it right from the beginning. Unlike the Danes, they went for a rised wire on poles. (The Danes began with underground wires isolated by rubber. But they degraded very fast and had to be replaced.) The Uppsala line became a big success. The Uppsala papers wrote that they now could get news from the capital in a blink of an eye. The king's address to open the parliament in 1853 was e g telegraphed (which took 61 minutes with 65 chars/min.) To introduce the new service, it was also free to use during the first time (anyone could walk into the telegram office and try the new technology). The line was soon extended to the southwest, to Gothenburg (Sweden's second biggest city) and further to Helsingborg, where it could connect to the Danish system. A cable to Denmark was laid in late 1854 and when it opened in 1855 Sweden had telegraph connection with Europe. The number of telegrams exchanged over the Denmark cable was in 1855 18 318, in 1856 25 343 and in 1857 54 321. Already in 1859 virtually all the country was covered by a telegraph network (except the sparsely populated northern inland; the northern coast had a line, going to Finland). The lines would where it was practical be coordinated with the railways, which had also begun to be built around the same time. The problem with people stealing the wires proved less important. And they didn't use coppar wiring (which would be more expensive and more attractive to steal), but zinced iron wires (originally 4,3 mm but later 5 mm). Nine years after the start, in 1862, the telegraph lines in Sweden covered 7 689 km and there were 71 telegraph stations (that would further extended, of course). In 1866 there was the first Transatlantic cable. In 1869 the telegraph companies in Sweden, Denmark and Norway had a meeting and formed the Great Nordic Telegraph Society, to intergrate their systems and handle laying cables over the Baltic and North Seas (to England, Germany, Russia and so on; this co-operation wasn't formally dissolved until 1961 when it had become redundant). Strangely enough, telegraphy as beeps or sounds you hear in your ears, didn't arrive until the 1870's. In 1871 the Royal Swedish Telegraph Administration (Kungliga Telegrafverket) got what is called "knockers" which through mechanical "knocks" made the signals audible. Before this it seems telegraphy was a matter of reading tracks on a paper tape. 

Time to step forward a bit in the history.
Radio telegraphy came just before the First World War, and that was lucky, becase the warring parties tended to cut each other's overseas cables. The British for instance cut five German cables, so the Germans had to relay at least some of their traffic through Stockholm (called "the Swedish detour"). The infamous Zimmerman telegram was relayed through Stockholm, for instance. (That was a telegram to the German ambassador i Mexico, with a suggestion that Mexico would join Germany and attack the US and conquer Texas and Arizona. The British intelligence caught it and it helped getting America into the war.) Beside radio telegraphy there were other technical developments. You could now for instance split lines into channels for two telegrams at the sime time, and then four, and so on. You could use telephone wires for telegraphy. You could use the Wheatstone fast writing system, where telegrams where first coded on perforated paper tapes and then transmitted at much higher speed. You began having the possibility for "picture telegrams", something like a telefax but with a decent grey scale. Another development (from around 1930 and on) was the teletypes and teleprinters, which was the first deviation from the Morse code and the beginning of what would later become computer communication. The Morse code is a base-3 system (long, short, pause; one could argue it is base-4 since there are at least two different pauses) but a teletype uses a binary system (off, on, resembling short and pause in Morse code) and characters are encoded into sets of five on or off. When the first computers came in the 1940's, they could be connected to teletype systems and used their signalling system. In World War II telegraphy once again played a very important role. And Stockholm once more became a relay station. In the 1920s Sweden had built a massive transmitter, the Grimeton long wave station with good, steady connections to the US, and short wave transmissions had also began proving its worth. (The Grimeton station is now a protected national monument and is still operational but not operated. The last customer was the navy, which used the long waves for contact with its submarines.) An author called Stockholms telegraph station "not only Europe's but also to some extent the whole world's telegraphy central. When cables and diplomatic connections were broken around the world, it was the radio central high up on Skeppsbron /a street/ that was called to duty ... Nice, neutral, ambitious service to all countries." A couple of examples of the activites of the Stockholm war telegraph services. The 22nd of April 1945 Stockholm had lost connection with a German station, but instead came to hear an Italian station. The transmission began "Ich danke ihnen duce fuer ihre geburtstagswuensche", signed Adolf Hitler - a message from Hitler to Mussolini where he thanked for birthday congratulations. The rest of the message is full of stupid rants about how the bolsheviks now will be defeated in a giant last battle... Even more dramatic is what happened august 5th, where the operational diary of the Stockholm station reports: "The radio central relayed messages between Japan and the US concering opening radio connections ... 11.46 AM the Telegraph Administration's radio central, Skeppsbron 2, got a message to Tokyo concerning opening a connection to San Francisco. 11.56, ten minutes later, the messaged reached Tokyo and 12.01 PM Stockholm had Japan's receipt on the telegram. Approximately the same time, the radio central heard Tokyo calling San Francisco." The first Atomic bomb was dropped the next day. To me, it sounds like a last attempt of the Americans to issue a warning/ultimatum ("surrender...or!"), but first they had to go through Stockholm to urge the Japanese to open their stations for a messaging. 

Now, what happened with telegraphy?
New technology killed it off, of course. Telephones were much easier to use, and cheaper. The actual transmissions of telegrams became more and more intergrated with telephone, teletype and later computer networks. As late as in the 1960's there were still telegram messengers in Stockholm, often riding a bicycle (the kind of guys you can see in old films: "A telegram for you, sir!"). In Sweden at least (I don't know about the rest of the world) some sharp mind came up with the idea of offering "luxury telegrams" delivered on nice, colour printed forms, intended for contratulations for weddings, birthdays etc. They became very popular and at times stood for 80% of all telegram traffic! That way telegrams could continue to have some volume up to at least the 1970's. The Royal Telegraph Administration became the Tele Administration. For a time they struck a deal with taxi companies and newsagents, to work as telegram distributors. In 1974 the Tele Administration opened a new computerised telegram system called ATESTO. The book I read only has info up to 1996, but it is said that this year all telegram activity from the Tele Administration (which is now called TeliaSonera) was "oursourced" to a private company, RiksTelegram AB, wich would take care of ordinary telegrams and so called luxury telegrams. At the same time, in 1996, the last formal telegraph station, the one in Stockholm, closed. RiksTelegram recive telegrams by phone, telex, telefax, even paper mail (and probably E-mail) and will also deliver them by the same means - but not by a messenger. And it's incredibly expensive (1996 prices 110 kronor, 15+ dollars, plus 5 kronor or ca 1 dollar per word) and if they're still in operation, they probably distribute it internally through the Internet anyway. The traffic is low; the book says it was only 5000 telegrams/month in 1995. That is 10 years old info. If you can *now* actually send what was used to be called a telegram, I don't know. Most people have E-mail and mobile phones (with so called SMS texting capability), so who needs it? But once upon a time, telegraphy was a revolution, just as important as the invention of printing or the development of the Internet. Telegraphs were the Internet of the steam and coal era. It is said that the news about the murder of Abraham Lincoln took two weeks to reach Sweden (but through the telegraph network, it probably reached most of Europe almost at the same time). That was in 1865 - but in 1866 the first Transatlantic telegraph cable opened, and any news from then on would spread instantly. That's a big difference! I remember the radio telegraphy from the Swedish army. (I was never among the best and a few years later got myself transfered to the civil defence anyway.) I learned that later, in the 1980s, the army skipped all Morse code, and it is now only used by radio amateaurs. There is one advantage with Morse code: it gets through. If the signal is weak, if there's a lot of static and disturbance, morse code will get through when no other signal will. A human operator has more sensitive ears than (as yet) any machine and can identify even weak signals. That's why radio amateurs use it; they have weak transmitters but may still get in touch. If World War III comes or a comet drops on us and EMPs kills most micro circuitry and the air fills with static and civilisation is on the brink of collapse, the most certain way of communicating over longer distances will be a ti-ta-ti-ta-tit. 
  Which BTW means "end of message".

--Ahrvid

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