Eli5: How did telegraphs function?
In: Technology
Electric telegraphs simply connected a voltage at one end of a wire that caused an electromagnet to attract a piece of metal at the other end, causing a click. The spacing between the clicks, short or long, were read as dots and dashes making letters and numbers in Morse Code. Later versions used different codes, similar to modern ASCII, that could print the letters automatically so people didn’t have to know Morse.
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