Or at least “explain it like I am an 8th grader.” I am a middle school science teacher and am struggling with explaining these concepts in a simplified way that my students can understand. They have some prior knowledge about waves and how they travel. I appreciate any help you can provide!
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Telephone vs. telegraph. They both use the same infrastructure, but in very different ways.
Telephone is analog: The sound wave is captured and turned into an electrical signal shaped exactly like the sound wave, which is sent down the wire and converted back. An old phone connected to a landline is nothing more than a microphone and a speaker, which connects to a corresponding speaker and microphone on the other end.
Telegraph is digital: You send on/off pulses and come up with an encoding scheme, such as Morse code. It’s exactly like having a light switch on one end, and a light bulb on the other, and flicking the light on and off to send a message.
The fact that you can represent an analog signal via a digital signal (the sampling theorem) is sort of separate and tends to confuse things. The key thing is that analog uses the exact voltage to convey information, digital uses high/low (on/off) in discrete pulses.
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