FACTORALY - E40 TELEGRAPH

Episode Date: May 30, 2024

The telegraph revolutionised communication for peace, war and finance, not to mention birthdays and weddings. Simon's feeling poorly this time, so our friend Greg Dwyer stands in for him and telegraphs an excellent performance (as usual). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello everybody! Hello! And Simon, you sound very strange today. What's the problem with your voice? Bit of a sore throat. So we thought we'd make amends. Basically, you might remember a few episodes ago, we were a bit nasty about the Australians and about going to Australia. So we thought, since Simon is feeling a bit under the weather, we would get in an Australian to co-present with me this week and stand in for Simon. Hello, Gregory. Hello. Just happened to be in town. Isn't that lucky?

Gregory Dwyer is yet another voiceover. Who likes trivia. Yeah. Yeah, he's another one of us. That's what we want. Well, I heard something on the Bush Telegraph that you were going to do this special episode. Oh, dear, Greg.

See, the thing is, we asked Greg if he'd stand in in and he said yes, but only if he could pick the subject. And the subject that he's picked is the telegraph. And we thought, yeah, that fulfills the criteria. That is boring. It's dull. And possibly we can make it interesting for half an hour. Well, possibly. I mean, you know, I just travelled around Australia and I actually encountered several of these interesting old stations, which does make one wonder, how did it come about? Yes. Well, I'm sure you have some fascinating facts for us about the telegraph. Well, I do. Why don't you start off with telling me where telegraph comes from? Okay.

Well, that's usually Simon's classic opening, where he says the meaning of the word and the source. Well, it's an early 18th century French word, telegraphé, which is tally at a distance, and graphé as to write, I believe. And, of course, it means basically you're indicating ahead of time one's intentions or ahead of where you can be. And then, of course, it gets used in phrases to indicate ahead of time one's intentions or ahead of where you can be and then of course it gets used in phrases uh to indicate ahead of time yes um you know to telegraph a message and and it's sort of become part of the language going you've got things like a boxer telegraphing his blows you know i was just thinking the same thing i was thinking about you know when we were sparring earlier um and you telegraphed quite a few of your left hooks to me, I kind of worked out where they were coming from.

Most people, of course, today think it refers to the message sent over the wire by creating signals, by making and breaking an electrical connection. Is that the telegraph or is that the telegram? Because I thought that the telegraph was the equipment, if you like, and the hardware. Most people think of telegraph as in the wire. Yes. A telegram is what it was written on or pasted onto. Yes.

To be delivered. Yes. Do you know what the most expensive telegram in the world was? Oh, what, per word? Per word. Okay, go on. What's the most expensive telegram in the world was? Oh, what, per word? Per word. Okay, go on. What's the most expensive telegraph in the world? It was actually only four words.

Okay. And it was sent in 1844 between Baltimore and Washington. And that was when Samuel Morse was demonstrating the telegraph would work. And the government had authorized a $30,000 construction of the line from Baltimore to Washington. So that means each word costs $7,500. Yeah, I guess that's true. But you could reuse it. I think the difference between a telegram or using the telegraph and using semaphore was that there was actually an end product of using the telegraph. You ended up with something written down.

So you had a record of something. That's very good. I mean, when you look at the 1850s, when they actually got the Morse was able to be put onto like ticker tape. Yes. So they could read it and cut it out so they could see exactly what was written rather than relying upon the hearing as they had up until that time yeah but the morse code guys i mean they were pretty amazing they could uh i think the top one could do 84 words per minute wow the average was about 35 but the really specialist people could do 84 words a minute and that's you know as fast as a lot of typists yeah that's true and from what i

remember everybody had like you could tell who was sending the telegram because they each had their own way of touching their own distinct style yes yes absolutely but i think i was a bit surprised by how far you could send a telegram without it being boosted right so oh so there would be booster stations to to the signal, I guess. Yeah. In the 1950s, sorry, the 1950s, the 1850s, they came up with a device that could literally repeat and boost the signal further on. Right. So they didn't have to have an operator taking down the message and then replaying it.

Right. It received the electrical current and it sent it further on. 250 miles was the sort of basic working range. That's a lot of wire. It is. But the interesting thing was on a good calm evening, it could go 2,000 miles. Wow. Because of the temperature change. Okay. It meant that the conductivity was much stronger. Bad weather, yes, it brought it down to you know the 250 miles on an average good

good sort of day it could go 400 miles yeah but on a good cool clear night it could literally go up to 2 000 miles on a single signal gosh that's an awful long way i was going to ask you a question what does a mythical being a greek king a of action, and a waterfall have to do with the telegraph? No idea. Okay. In 1858, it was the British and American vessels, the Agamemnon, the Valorius, the Niagara, and the Gorgon, who in the middle of the Atlantic went in opposite directions, two ships each direction, laying out the first undersea cable between the United States and England. Right, right. And it was laid in July. In August, the President James and Queen Victoria exchanged introductions

and messages, and it failed in September. Oh, oh well. But then we have that same problem with the internet here don't we yeah you sort of look at that but you think about it that the first one they laid was 340,500 miles of copper and iron wire wow and it was insulated with 300 tons of gutter percha which is you know latex from the malaysian rubber trees yeah. Over 2,500 nautical miles. So it worked for two months. Interesting.

So, I mean, that's when you lay it under the sea. When you have telegraphs going across the countryside, across the land, you have telegraph poles to do that with, don't you? You do. Can you explain to me why so many people hit telegraph poles in cars? They seem to be something

that gets in the way of cars quite a lot. Now, there could be an interesting correlation there. How far apart are the telegraph poles they usually hit? Oh, that's a good question. I don't know how far apart a telegraph pole has to be. For example, if you're in a city, you'll see that the telegraph poles are about technically 50 metres apart. Okay. And when you get out into the country, it gets up to 200 metres apart. Right. So when you're out in the country it gets up to 200 meters apart right so when you're out the countryside if you're going to crash into a telegraph pole you'd have to sort of be pretty strange that you couldn't avoid one pole yes so you think more people hit telegraph poles in cities than in the countryside logically it's logically yes on the subject of telegraph poles, though, did you come across a guy called Martin Evans?

I didn't. So Martin Evans has a thing called the Telegraph Pole Appreciation Society. He's been doing it since 1997. And he has quite a few members of the society. And basically, he goes around looking at telegraph poles and going, this is a really nice one. And this one isn't so great. And he just appreciates the beauty of the telegraph pole. Very strange. One of the little rabbit holes I did accidentally fall down while sort of looking into this was the

brackets used to mount the insulators for the telegraph. Oh, yeah. Well, there's white things. Yeah, that's the insulator. And then the arm that they sat on was called an Oppenheimer arm. Oh, right. Why? Well, that's what I couldn't find out.

But, you know, I was immediately relating this name and I did eventually track down it was a company that manufactured, was run by an organization, Oppenheimer. Got it. As in metalworks. Yes. Interesting. So absolutely nothing to do with the organization oppenheimer got it as a metal works yes interesting so absolutely nothing to do with the famous oppenheimer no no connection none at all in fact it was some some hundred years before he was born so there you go wow wow but i mean i i guess as as a system that because it was so there's such long distances between bits. I guess it was pretty vulnerable to breaks or people destroying them if they wanted to destroy them or tapping into them. And tapping into them was probably the biggest thing.

If you look at during the Battle of Gettysburg, for example, it was crucial that Abraham Lincoln was able to consult with his generals. And just prior to the Civil War sort of getting fully involved, they installed 15,000 poles across the North so that he could maintain constant communication. And they actually had telegram wagons that would go out and connect somewhere along these lines they'd put up. Yes. And they would have a little mobile communication station. And that was one of the few times where, yes, a signal could be interrupted. And, of course, if anyone wanted to stop the signal, they just had to go to a different part and cut it. Yes.

Or I guess much more sensibly would be to intercept the signal and find out what he was trying to tell people. And listen in. Yes. Because listening in can't be that difficult if it's for like a single wire. And you just have to tap into that and work out what's going on. You talked about war. Yes.

The other thing that they telegraphed did was make sure that news travelled very quickly as well. And also, I guess, not only news, but sort of financial news as well. So I think that's why sort of New York became the hub because everything from all over America, all the wires basically terminated in New York so that the stock exchange in New York could actually know what was going on with the farms and know what's going on in the West Coast and stuff like that. Indeed.

And it's that speed of response compared to the older methods of sending messages. Yeah, I guess that's true. In fact, New York to Chicago was where they had the first telex machine, which was an advancement again on the Morse, where it would receive the electrical signal sent from one typewriter and replay it in the typewriter at the other end. Yes. And, of course, that was sort of first used in the financial area for that very reason. I remember my first office had a Telex machine. This is actually back in 1856.

Yes, I remember my first office back in 1856. Well, I actually did work as a telegram delivery boy when I was 12 years old. Oh, really? On the bicycle, racing through town, delivering urgent printed out telegrams from the telex. An angel of death. Yes. During the Second World War, if you had a loved one that was killed in action, you would normally get a telegram from the Ministry of War. And it would be delivered by a telegram boy.

And they were called angels of death because normally when you heard one or saw one going to somebody's front door and knocking on the door, you would know that somebody in that house has probably been killed in action. And it's interesting that communication from that point of view, because the Americans did it the other way, where you'd only get a military person delivering the telegram to the house. And it wasn't until, of course, they became fully involved and the numbers became so great that they basically resorted to using the telegram people also there to deliver the messages. Right. So they would use military personnel rather than post office personnel. The post office, yes. Yeah. It's been used in war sort of quite a lot.

I mean, there's a great thing called the Zimmerman telegram. Did you come across this Zimmerman telegram? Zimmerman, yeah. So basically, the Germans contacted the Mexicans in the Second World War to say, if you help us to defeat the Americans, should they enter the war, which they hadn't at this point, we would be very grateful to you. And if you were successful, and we were successful in defeating the Americans, then we will grant you back Mexico, Texas, Arizona and New Mexico. And this telegram from the German military was actually

intercepted by British intelligence. And they discovered this and thought, all right, okay, we need to have a little word with the Mexican ambassador and make sure that this doesn't happen. I discovered a link between war and Australia and the telegraph, which is quite impressive, I think. Do you tell? So in World War One, there was a telegram sent to the Governor General in Australia on August the 5th, 1914. And the telegram said, tipsified Germany stop glyphic. And tipsified Germany stop glyphic was code for war has broken out between Germany and Britain. So they used code words in, I guess because Morse could be, you know, tapped.

You needed to use, you had to use lots of code words. And so tipsified. Tipsified was actually used quite frequently, tipsified meaning at war. I'm not quite sure why, but why not? There are two telegrams that I remember reading about, which I thought was quite interesting. And the first one is apocryphal and definitely not true, as far as I'm aware, which is that a journalist wrote to Cary Grant's publicist. And because you paid by the word for a telegram, he wanted to keep the telegram really short and sweet. So he just needed to know Cary Grant's age. So he sent a telegram and said, how old Cary Grant? And Cary Grant intercepted this at his publicists and sent back a telegram saying, old Cary Grant, fine.

How are you? Which I thought was brilliant. And the other one I heard talking of the Telegraph, there is actually a newspaper called the telegraph. But there was a great one where there was the sports correspondent of the telegraph was waiting around for the results of the Arc de Triomphe horse race. He was waiting for the telegram to come in, in 1914. And suddenly the telegram kicked off and he got a telegram and it said, Archduke Ferdinand assassinated. And he looked at it and he went, not a British horse in the first three. And he spiked the story. Misleading in the best of cases.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. But there have been some wonderful telegrams. There was that. Do you know the one from Spike Milligan? The breakfast one? So Spike Milligan, I think it's the laziest telegram ever sent. Basically, at Spike Milligan's house, there was a telegram boy arrived at the front door

and handed Spike Milligan's wife a telegram. And when she opened it, it said, I would like a boiled egg, two slices of toast and a cup of tea. Thank you very much, Spike. And basically Spike Milligan was upstairs in the house. And he just couldn't be asked to call down to his wife. So he sent her a telegram. For which he would have had to have made a phone call.

Well, yes, exactly. And the reason why telegrams, I guess, were important was because very few people had telephones or they had party lines and things like that. But I think Spike Milligan just used it for the hell of it. It would be the sort of thing you would expect from that gentleman. Yes. Did you come across the shortest ever telegram? Well, I thought that was the first one, the God's Wrath. That was the U.S. Congress letter.

No, that's quite long by comparison. Is that quite long? Yeah. Right. So the shortest telegram, it's been attributed to two people. So it's either Victor Hugo or Oscar Wilde. Let's assume it's Oscar Wilde

because it's much more fun that way. So Oscar Wilde sent his publicist just the character question mark. And the publicist sent back just the character exclamation mark. And that's the shortest telegram that there's ever been between two people. And I'm not exactly sure what the exclamation mark means. That does leave you wondering, doesn't it? Yeah, the four word one that was at the beginning there,

that was the message to the US Congress was what hath God brought. And then I think you said that after the atomic bomb, the same words were sent? I think so. Yes. Yeah. I mean, there are some other ones where telegrams in the Titanic were something quite interesting. Apparently, Titanic survivors were charged. Well, it's a $3.12 minimum. So basically, they were charged a dollar a word to send telegrams from the boat, the Carpathia that picked them up. And a guy was charged $3.12 to send the word safe to his mum. When the Titanic went down, there were lots of telegrams coming from the Titanicanic most famously we are sinking fast stop passengers are being put into boats and that was that was that was one of the last um telegrams

from actual titanic but it's a very interesting story about alfred vanderbilt who um was aboard the lusitania in 1915 he was he was also supposed to to be on the Titanic, but he didn't go on the Titanic. He went on the Lusitania instead. And before he got on the Lusitania, he and eight other people received telegrams which said, Lusitania is doomed. Stop. Do not sail on her. Stop.

Morte. Oh, dear. And the Lusitania was obviously sunk at sea. So quite – So the question were, who were the eight people receiving – Well, who sent the telegram and who were the other people? There's a wonderful one Mark Twain sent when his obituary was published erroneously in a newspaper. And he sent them a telegram saying, reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.

Yes. That is such a classic. And of course, his dry wit to respond in such a manner. Yeah, exactly. Sometimes you sort of look at the numbers of things involved and documents that have been, shall we say, transmitted over time. And you could imagine being passed a way to block the lines to stop transmission was to get a telegrapher to start typing the Bible. Oh, because it's only one-way traffic. It's only one-way traffic. And of course, when one person is sending something of such length, nobody else is able to send a signal through. And of course, when one person is sending something of such length, nobody else

is able to send a signal through. And of course, it was a great way to delay. For example, in America, there was an instance where someone was trying to get a bill proposed, and they were unable to attend the vote. So the opposition managed to sit someone down and block by sending out sections of the Bible in long continuous streams. Wow. So like an electronic filibuster. Exactly. Wow. But in America, they use the telegraph for all sorts of strange things. There was a guy called William Story, and he lived in Arizona. And he wanted to marry a woman

that he met called Clara Choate. And there was nobody around to marry them. So he was desperate to try and marry this woman. And he found somebody in San Diego, a guy called Jonathan Mann, who got hold of Clara's dad so that he could give her away. And they basically did a whole Telegraph wedding. They got married by Telegraph. So William and Clara story. Certainly not in the presence of the minister.

Yes. Well, sort of in the electronic presence of the minister. There's two other sorts of telegrams that we haven't mentioned, which I guess, Greg, because you're not from around here, you don't know about British traditions of the telegrams that people used to send to weddings. No. When you got married if somebody couldn't make the wedding ceremony they would send a telegram. So I thought that's quite an interesting use of telegrams.

It's like a way of saying I'm prepared to spend money to tell you that I'm sorry I can't be there, but I can't be there. And the beauty of it is they still have that tradition, even though telegrams are no longer sent. When you hear a best man's speech, quite often they say, oh, I've got a few telegrams here. Yes, but they're not telegrams, are they? They're emails or WhatsApp messages or something like that.

So there's also the telegrams that one now doesn't get from the king that one used to get from the queen because they don't do it anymore. When you're 100 years old, you've got a telegram from the queen to say congratulations, well done on making it to 100. But they don't do that anymore, unfortunately. My aunt was 100 this year and she got like a birthday card from King Charles. A birthday card? Yeah, not a telegram. Not a telegram. She did get a birthday card.

So long as it's a tastefully selected one. And nowadays you have to apply for them. Ironically, you have to apply for them online. So it's not as though the king's got a diary that kind of goes, oh, look, Irene, she's 100 on Tuesday. Maybe we should send her a card. So, Greg, since you're standing in for Simon, and Simon at this point would normally do something about the Guinness Book of Records, do you have any Guinness Book of Records facts for us about Telegraph?

I do. Good. There was a man who was hanged by the electric Telegraph. What? That is how he was known. On 1st of January in 1845, a gentleman called John Taywell travelled to Salt Hill near Slough, UK and poisoned his mistress, Sarah Hart. Now, he left to catch the train back to London, but he was spotted by a neighbour who told the vicar, who told the stationmaster, and there was, at that station, a Cook-Wheatson two-needle telegraph system installed. And it connected to Paddington, where a police officer,

Sergeant William Williams, was handed the message at Paddington and arrested John, who was convicted and hanged. Wow. So that was the use where a telegraph actually got a man hanged. I think the same thing applied to Crippen, didn't it? That when they sent a telegram to the ship that he was on, and he was the first criminal to be captured with the aid of wireless telegraphy, apparently. There you are. So Hawley Harvey Crippen was, basically, he was trying to cross the Atlantic aboard the Montrose. And his girlfriend, Leneve, was disguised as a boy. And the captain recognized them. And just before steaming beyond the range of his shipboard transmitter he had his

telegraphist Lawrence Hughes send a wireless telegram to the British authorities have strong suspicions that Crippen London cellar murderer and accomplice are among saloon passengers moustache taken off growing beard accomplice dressed as boy manner and build undoubtedly a girl had had Crippen travelled third class, he probably would have escaped the captain's notice, but he didn't. He decided to go first class. So the telegraph has its uses. Yes, catching criminals. It's a very rapid rise, though, from 1775, where Benjamin Franklin sent electricity down a line, through to it being used to transmit such messages. Yes. I mean, I think in America it stopped on January the 27th, 2006, which is actually a lot later than I thought it would be. That stopped, but they still continued in India with another system.

Yeah, but you didn't get the yellow envelopes, did you? Like those nice Western Union yellow envelopes. They were the things to look forward to. So how many telegrams do you think were sent, let's say, in 1929? Okay, 1929, I would say 50,000. Keep going. 500,000. Keep going. 5 million. Keep going. In fact, 200 million telegrams were sent in 1929. Gosh. Now, if you think what happened, for example, in the US in 1929. There was a bit of a crash, I believe. Bit of a crash, yes. I think there are a lot of messages flying backwards and forwards. But as I said, you can still actually get, send a telegraph today. In fact, there are still 17 million telegrams being delivered every year. What? And that was on the 27th of January 2023. There's a company that took over. They're called the International Telegram Company. Okay. But when Western Union sort of stopped theirs in 2005, which was led into the 2006,

the last 10 telegrams sent in the U.S. included birthday wishes, condolences on the death of a loved one, notification of an emergency, and a couple of people trying to be deliberately the last person to ever send an American telegram. Well, that's all I've got on Telegraph. How about you? Yeah, I've definitely sent my sort of out of fax. You have. You've cut your wires. Clipped and trimmed. and made this episode, which he chose, as interesting as it has been.

Thank you so much, Gregory. It's been great fun, the last 24 hours looking into the many rabbit holes. But all the best, Simon. Look forward to hearing you back on. Yes, wish you better. And that's it from us. And I tell you what, Gregory, what we should do is you and I should try and say factorially at the same time. All right.

So here we go. Thank you very much. And it's goodbye from… Factorily. Bye now. Bye.