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??
In: Technology
>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.
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