I understand how like morse code “works” sending the message across long distances. But how could the sender know how to get the message to their right destination? And once it got there, how did the receiving party decode the message? In movies the receiver is always just tapping the telegraph device and is like “sir we have a message from the front lines!!” but how does it work??
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It was a hub and spoke model.
Each wire would connect two stations, with an operater manning both ends of the wire . Small towns would be connected to larger towns, and the larger towns would relay the message to other larger towns, who would then relay it back to the smaller town that was the final destination. Part of the message was the intended recipient and the final town where the recipient lived; the offices in larger towns knew how to relay the message so it would get to the final destination.
So a small town might have a single operator connecting to a single city, and the city might have dozens of operators, each connected to smaller towns, larger cities, and even different offices inside the same city. Two large cities might have multiple lines running between them to handle the throughput.
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This is how telecommunications still works; the wires just have better throughput and the routing is all done electronically.
They started out point-to-point. You would send a message down a line. The person at the end of the line would relay the message down another line and so forth, until it reached the appropriate destination.
>And once it got there, how did the receiving party decode the message?
The telegraph operator on the receiving end just translates the message letter by letter. The code is just a sequence of letters, so once you’ve learned it well enough, it’s like listening to someone spell the message for you. Like if they called you on the phone and said, “Ess Eee Enn Dee <pause> Tee Aitch Eee <pause> Ess Ohh Ell Dee Eye Eee Arr Ess <pause> Aitch Ohh Emm Eee” for “send the soldiers home”. But faster, because the operators have done it so much they can translate the letters very quickly.
If you were sending *secret* messages over the telegraph, you’d encode the message as some other combination of letters, and send that. And then the recipient would decode it in the usual method, which is entirely separate from how the telegraph operates.
It was a very manual version of how the internet works today.
Any given telegraph station was only connected to a few other stations, sometimes only one. So sending a message worked like this:
* Give telegraph operator a message.
* The telegraph operator chooses the best next station to send the message.
* Until the closest possible station is reached:
* The operator sends a message to the next station.
* The next station writes the message down.
* The next station’s operator chooses a new next station and sends the message.
* Eventually the message is “close” to the destination. A person on horse is dispatched to deliver the message.
So a message could still get from, say, California to New York pretty fast compared to trying to use trains or horses for the full trip. It might take up to an hour for the message to get to New York, then another half-hour to get to the best station, then maybe 2 hours for the rider to deliver the message. But 3.5 hours to get a message across the continent was AMAZING at that point in time, and honestly is still a pretty neat trick today.
It worked pretty well because telegraph stations tended to be train stations. Since trains connected major places, sending telegraphs along those routes helped get messages to places fast. It was convenient to run the lines near train tracks (since land rights were already given) and it was also helpful for the train companies to communicate schedule and safety information between stations.
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