What Hath God Wrought?

As you know from reading my articles, I am interested in how people gather and process information. Inexorably intertwined with this is the means by which information is transmitted and received. In that regard, this past week we passed though a milestone of sorts, one that might interest you. Western Union discontinued commercial telegram service.

On January 27, 2006 they terminated a service that began with the immortal words "What Hath God Wrought," whereby, on May 24, 1844, Samuel F.B. Morse ushered in the age of telegraphy.

With this brief transmission from Baltimore to Washington D.C. for the first time in human history, it was possible for two people who could not see each other to communicate. In this same era came the invention of the railroad where it finally became possible for man to travel faster than a horse could gallop.

Of course, we don't think about this very much today but it turned out that being able to communicate with someone you couldn't see was a very clever and valuable asset. Arguably it was one of those watershed events where the world was never the same afterwards.

Interestingly, Morse spent most of the rest of his life fighting people who challenged his patents or tried to exploit copycat versions or who claimed they had invented it first. Everything turned out alright at the end, but you can get an idea of his troubled life by looking at the title of a recent biography, "Lightning Man: The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse" by Kenneth Silverman. I have read it and find it, like most true to life stories, far more interesting than fiction.

In this day of cell phones and instant messaging, even when you aren't near a 120 volt outlet, it's hard to remember the advances in communication that have occurred since Morse's invention. The next ones were Alexander Graham Bell's invention of the telephone, Marconi's discovery of how to transmit without wires, by radio, and de Forest 's invention of the vacuum tube which made cheaper, more reliable radio equipment possible.

It's hard to remember that, as recently as my childhood, when you wanted to make a long distance phone call, you called the operator and asked to be connected to a particular number. You then hung up and maybe five minutes later you'd get a call back with the operator saying, "Your party is on the line." Long distance calls were expensive back then, with a three minute call costing about ten times the minimum wage at the time.

Then came dial telephones, although you still had to call the operator for long distance calls. They would have to call the Routing Department to find out how to connect to what we now know as an area code. Next came the ability to call long distance directly from your own phone. I can remember that!

I got my first cell phone in 1983 and my number indicated I was person number 742 to get one in Orange County . It cost $3,000, sat under the front seat of my car, weighed about 6 pounds, but it also put out five watts, ten times the power of current hand-held devices, so calls were never dropped. When the analog infrastructure disappeared a couple of years ago, I finally got a digital phone like the one you have.

At this point I'd like to point out that communications has fascinated me so much that I have been a ham radio operator since the age of 14. Back then, we were still in the era of five dollar long distance calls and many ham radio operators were engaged in relaying telegram-like messages, particularly from U.S. servicemen overseas to their families at home. It was great fun then as a kid and it is today too, although e-mail had pretty well taken over the messaging.

After a long hiatus, I got my license again a few years ago and I really enjoy communicating with my ham friends, and I have them all over the world, literally. And, interestingly, we talk using Morse code, just like old-time telegraphers did a hundred years ago. How fast is our communication? Well, most of the time, we "talk" at about 30 words per minute, about as fast as most people type.

In a good bit of fun, the Tonite Show with Jay Leno recently featured a showdown between a team of instant messagers who had won a nation-wide competition and another team of hams, one of whom is a friend. I would not bring this up if the hams lost, and they didn't. But it did demonstrate to millions of people who thought that Morse code was dead, that it really is alive and well and that keepers of that flame are still on duty.

For more information about ham radio, I invite you to go to the website of the American Radio Relay League at www.arrl.org. For those who might like to see a little bit more about my activities in ham radio, check out www.savvyborrower.com/amateur.htm where you can see a few stories about my trips to the Bahamas and other activities.

I hope you enjoy them and the next time you pick up your phone to make a call, think for a minute about Samuel F.B. Morse and be thankful for what he started.