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
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.
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