They aren’t connected via a very long wire, are they?
P.S I’d like to understand the physics behind it, not how Morse code works.
In: Technology
They did have long wires, yes. You had long telegraph wires that would eventually span the entire globe. The longest ones were crossing the atlantic. Before the telegraph system there were the semaphore system which used a system with two flags waved in different positions. There were big semaphore towers that could be seen for miles using big mechanical arms to spell out the letters. This system allowed people to send messages fast across the country and even to some degree around the world. But with the electricity and the telegraph system that used the morse codes or other types of codes message speed would increase from minutes to seconds. It should be noted that most people did not have a telegraph station at home. There were usually just one telegraph station in each city and messages might have needed to be relayed through several of these telegraph stations as most did not have a direct connection to each other. So you would normally write a short telegraph, send it with a runner to the nearest telegraph station, they would pass it along the wire until it reached the city you were sending the telegram to, and then it would get written down and sent by a runner to the destination.
Telegrams did also use wireless technology where it was required. First they used similar systems of visible communication that the semaphore system did but with shutters that opened and closed in front of a spotlight or just a piece of canvas. This was mostly used on ships but it did also transition to airplanes and tanks. Some of the last such systems were deployed in tanks during WWII. When radio was invented it was natural for ships to switch to radiotelegraph. However as frequencies had not been discovered they were all sending on top of each other. Part of the problem for Titanic was that their passengers sent so many telegrams that it prevented the captains in the entire North Atlantic from sending weather reports and ice reports to each other and the ship closest to the Titanic and actually able to rescue them even turned off their radio and went to sleep because of the noise of all the telegrams going from the Titanic to land meaning they never received the CQD/SOS distress messages.
As telephones were invented and became more common a lot of the old telegraph wires were converted to phone wires. And as digital communication was invented those were eventually replaced with fiber optic lines. However most of them still takes the same routes as the old telegraph wires. That includes the transatlantic wires which still to this day uses the same beaches.
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