From Telegraph to Fiber

The first working “telegraph” used no wires at all. In France, Claude Chappe built a chain of towers on high ground between Paris and Lille. Each tower had a pair of telescopes and a two-armed signal (a semaphore) on top. Each arm could take seven positions, giving 49 signs for letters and symbols. Operators read the tower before them and copied its signal for the next one. In August 1794 the line brought Paris news of a battle at Condé-sur-l’Escaut in less than an hour.

Neat fact Chappe coined the word “semaphore,” from Greek words meaning “bearing a sign.” Lines like his were copied across Europe.

Many people tried to send signals with electricity before it became practical. One well-documented try: in the summer of 1816, Francis Ronalds strung about eight miles of thin iron wire back and forth on frames in his garden in Hammersmith, west of London, and sent signals through it with static electricity. He also buried a wire in a glass-lined trough to test signalling underground. Static gives only a quick spark at a time, so it was a dead end, but the idea of “writing at a distance” was in the air.

Neat fact The British telegraph history we rely on says a 15-year-old Charles Wheatstone was taken to see Ronalds’s garden telegraph in 1817. Twenty years later, Wheatstone co-patented the first practical British telegraph.

William Cooke, a businessman, and Charles Wheatstone, a London professor, received their British patent for an electric telegraph on June 10, 1837. Their instruments used magnetic needles that swung to point at letters on a board. The railways were the first customers. A line along the Great Western Railway, 13 miles from Paddington to West Drayton, was completed on July 9, 1839, for the railway’s own use. On May 16, 1843, the line, by then extended to Slough, opened to the public for paid messages: Britain’s first public telegraph service.

Neat fact The Science Museum calls Cooke and Wheatstone’s system the world’s first practical telegraph. In their five-needle design, any two needles swing together to point at a letter.

In America, Samuel Morse took a simpler approach: one circuit, a key that makes short and long pulses, and a code of dots and dashes. A test line was strung between Washington and Baltimore, and on May 24, 1844, Morse sent “What hath God wrought” from the U.S. Capitol to his partner Alfred Vail in Baltimore. Morse code, and the idea that one wire could carry any message, spread fast.

Neat fact The Library of Congress keeps the original tape. The Smithsonian has a souvenir copy dated May 25, 1844, which Vail sent back to Morse the next day.

Brothers Jacob and John Watkins Brett had permission from France to join England and France by wire. On August 28, 1850, the tugboat Goliath paid out a single copper wire covered in gutta-percha (a natural, rubber-like latex from Southeast Asian trees) from Dover to Cap Gris-Nez. It had no armor, so lead weights were tied on to sink it. Signals got across, but the cable failed almost at once, worn through on rocks near the French shore.

Neat fact A popular tale says a French fisherman hauled up the cable and cut off a piece, thinking it was a strange seaweed with gold in the middle. The Atlantic-Cable.com historians call this a myth that started in an 1865 book.

The Bretts’ company tried again with a much tougher design: four copper wires, each insulated with gutta-percha, bundled with tarred yarn and wrapped in ten galvanized iron wires. It was laid from the old warship Blazer in late September 1851, from near Dover to Sangatte, near Calais. After a short extra length was spliced in, the line was fully working on October 17, 1851, and public messages followed that November. It was the first commercially successful undersea cable.

Neat fact The 1851 design (a copper core, insulation, padding and an iron armor jacket) set the basic pattern for undersea cables for about a century.

Cyrus Field, a New York businessman, took up the idea of a telegraph from Newfoundland to Ireland in 1854. He raised money in New York and, in 1856, in England. The U.S. and British navies lent ships. The first attempt began in August 1857 with the USS Niagara and HMS Agamemnon. The cable broke and was lost at sea, and the season ended in failure.

Neat fact Field traveled to Britain many times in the twelve years between taking up the project in 1854 and success in 1866.

After more failures in the early summer of 1858, the ships tried a new plan: meet in mid-ocean, splice the two halves of the cable together, then steam apart. Niagara and Agamemnon made the splice on July 29, 1858. Niagara headed west to Trinity Bay, Newfoundland, and Agamemnon east to Valentia, Ireland. Both ends were ashore by August 5, 1858. Field wired the news that the electrical signals through the whole cable were perfect.

Neat fact Field’s telegram gave the distance from the telegraph house at Valentia to the one at Trinity Bay as 1,698 nautical miles, more than two-thirds of it in water over two miles deep.

Getting words through was slow work. On August 16, 1858, the first official message went from the company’s British directors to their American colleagues: “Europe and America are united by telegraph. Glory to God in the highest; on earth peace, good-will towards men.” That afternoon, Queen Victoria’s 98-word greeting to President James Buchanan began. It took about 16½ hours to send. Buchanan’s longer reply took about 10 hours. Before the cable, a message between London and Washington took perhaps twelve days by steamship and land telegraph.

Neat fact The recorded tape of the Queen’s message is kept at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight.

Within weeks the cable was failing. Effective messages stopped around September 1, 1858, and only a few scattered words got through after that. The company’s chief electrician, Wildman Whitehouse (a former surgeon), had used large induction coils that are estimated to have produced about 2,000 volts, trying to force a stronger signal through. The physicist William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) took the opposite approach: small currents and his very sensitive mirror galvanometer, which read the faint signal as a tiny spot of light. The Queen’s message actually went through after Thomson’s instruments were put back. Whitehouse was dismissed.

Neat fact A British government inquiry, the Joint Committee of 1859–61, took evidence on what went wrong. Whitehouse blamed manufacturing faults and strain on the cable; most accounts blame his high voltage at least in part. Modern writers note the cable probably had flaws from making and handling that would have doomed it anyway.

It took until 1865 to try again. By then the company had a new, stronger cable and the giant steamship Great Eastern to lay it. She paid out cable westward from Ireland in July 1865. On August 2, 1865, the cable snapped and sank in mid-ocean. Several tries to hook it from the seabed failed, and the season ended.

Neat fact During the 1865 voyage, broken flakes of the brittle armor wire pierced the insulation more than once. At first some suspected sabotage; the cause turned out to be the wire itself. The 1866 cable used softer, galvanized armor wire.

The Great Eastern sailed west from Valentia on July 13, 1866, with a new cable, and the laying went smoothly. On July 27, 1866, she arrived at Heart’s Content, Newfoundland, and the cable was landed. Then she went back to sea. In early September, after weeks of grappling in mid-ocean, her crew lifted the lost 1865 cable from the seabed, spliced on new cable and finished it to Newfoundland. By the end of that summer, two working cables crossed the Atlantic.

Neat fact Atlantic-Cable.com notes that since July 27, 1866, there has always been at least one working telecommunications cable under the Atlantic between Europe and North America.

The Pacific is far wider than the Atlantic, so it took longer. A government-backed cable, championed for years by the Canadian engineer Sandford Fleming, ran from Bamfield on Vancouver Island to Fanning Island, then to Fiji and Norfolk Island, and on to Australia and New Zealand. The last section, from Fiji to Fanning Island, was finished on October 31, 1902, and the first messages crossed on November 1.

Neat fact The Bamfield–Fanning Island section was 3,459 nautical miles long. Historians count it among the longest telegraph cables ever laid.

The American cable started on our own coast. On December 14, 1902, about 40,000 people watched its shore end land at Ocean Beach in San Francisco, near the Cliff House. The section to Honolulu opened for business around the turn of the new year. Then came Honolulu to Midway, Midway to Guam, and Guam to Manila. The final link was made on July 4, 1903, and that day President Theodore Roosevelt sent greetings to Governor William Taft in Manila.

Neat fact The same night, Roosevelt sent a message around the world on the cable network, from Oyster Bay, New York, and back. Trade magazines of the time put the trip at roughly 10 to 12 minutes (accounts differ).

Telegraph cables carried dots and dashes. A voice needs much more, and over a long cable it fades unless it is boosted along the way. TAT-1 solved that with underwater amplifiers called repeaters, built around vacuum tubes. It used two cables, one for each direction, between Oban, Scotland, and Clarenville, Newfoundland, each about 1,950 nautical miles long with 51 repeaters. It went into service on September 25, 1956, with 36 telephone circuits.

Neat fact The vacuum tubes in TAT-1’s repeaters never failed in 22 years of service, from 1956 to 1978.

TAT-8 was the first fiber-optic cable to cross an ocean. Instead of electric current in copper, it carried pulses of laser light in hair-thin glass fibers. Built by a group led by AT&T, British Telecom and France Telecom, it ran 5,846 km along the seabed between North America and Europe and entered service on December 14, 1988. It could carry about 40,000 phone calls at once.

Neat fact IEEE’s historians say TAT-8 carried ten times as much as the last copper cable across the Atlantic. A 1988 report it cites says science writer Isaac Asimov took part in the dedication.

It is easy to think the internet travels by satellite, but almost all of it between continents goes through cables on the ocean floor, the great-grandchildren of the 1851 Channel cable. As of February 2025, the research firm TeleGeography counted about 570 submarine cable systems in service, with dozens more planned. When you stream a video from another continent, it most likely went through glass fibers on the seabed.

Neat fact The often-repeated claim that cables carry “over 99%” of intercontinental traffic is one TeleGeography says it can confirm, though it notes an exact figure is hard to calculate without satellite data.

Before late 1861, the fastest news between the East and California came by the Pony Express. Riders relayed mail between St. Joseph, Missouri, and Sacramento, where it went on to San Francisco by boat. On October 24, 1861, Western Union joined its eastern and western lines and completed the first telegraph across the continent. A message that had taken riders more than a week could now cross the country in moments. Two days later, on October 26, the Pony Express officially closed.

Neat fact The Pony Express lasted only about 19 months, from April 1860. Its riders’ best time, carrying President Lincoln’s first inaugural address, was 7 days and 17 hours.

Alexander Graham Bell, then 29, was working on a “harmonic telegraph” that would send several messages down one wire at once using different pitches. With his assistant, Thomas Watson, he chased a bigger idea: sending the human voice. Bell’s patent, No. 174,465, was issued on March 7, 1876. Three days later, on March 10, his notebook records the experiment in which Watson heard him through the instrument: “Mr. Watson — come here — I want to see you.”

Neat fact The famous story that Bell reached the patent office a few hours ahead of rival inventor Elisha Gray is true as far as it goes, but IEEE’s historians say it is not the whole story: priority then depended on the date of invention, not of filing. Court fights over Bell’s patents went on for eighteen years, and all were settled in his favor.

In 1877 Bell and his two backers, Gardiner Hubbard and Thomas Sanders, formed the Bell Telephone Company. The first commercial switchboard opened in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1878. In 1882 the company, by then American Bell, bought control of the Western Electric Company, which became its equipment maker. On March 3, 1885, American Bell set up the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, AT&T, to build long-distance lines; they reached Chicago in 1892. On December 30, 1899, AT&T took over American Bell’s assets and became the parent of what came to be called the Bell System.

Neat fact After Bell’s second patent expired in 1894, more than six thousand independent phone companies started up within ten years, and U.S. telephones went from about 285,000 to more than 3.3 million, according to AT&T’s own history.

On the West Coast the Bell business ran through its own regional company. San Francisco’s Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company was reorganized as Pacific States Telephone and Telegraph in 1900 and went by Pacific Telephone and Telegraph again from 1907, running the Bell System’s West Coast operations. Pacific Bell traces its incorporation in California to 1906, the year the earthquake and fire destroyed its downtown San Francisco telephone buildings. By 1915, AT&T’s Pacific Telephone subsidiary had built the western network the first coast-to-coast line would join.

Neat fact Pacific Bell’s 1998 annual report still listed 1906 as its year of incorporation in California, with its offices at 140 New Montgomery Street in San Francisco.

Voices fade over long wires, so a phone line all the way to the Pacific needed help along the way: loading coils, and from 1913 the first practical electronic amplifiers, vacuum-tube repeaters developed at AT&T. The line was tested in 1914, and the official opening came on January 25, 1915, in time for San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific Exposition. Bell, in New York, spoke to Watson, in San Francisco. President Woodrow Wilson and AT&T’s president, Theodore Vail, joined the call from elsewhere.

Neat fact Bell repeated his request from 1876, asking Watson to come to him. Watson answered that this time it would take him a week. (Accounts of the exact words differ a little.)

By 1924 the engineering staff of AT&T and Western Electric had grown to more than 3,600 people. The two companies made it a separate research company, owned jointly: Bell Telephone Laboratories began work on January 1, 1925, in New York City. Bell Labs grew into one of the largest industrial research labs in the world, and several stops on this page came out of it.

Neat fact In 1947 an AT&T researcher, Douglas Ring, sketched the idea of a cellular network: a city split into small “cells,” with calls handed from one to the next. The electronics to build it did not exist yet. Commercial service took 36 more years.

At Bell Labs in New Jersey, between November 17 and December 23, 1947, Walter Brattain and John Bardeen, working under William Shockley, discovered the transistor effect and built the first working transistor, a point-contact device made with germanium. Like a vacuum tube, it could amplify a signal, but it was a small solid part. IEEE’s milestone plaque says it led directly to the solid-state devices that changed the electronics industry, and it is the ancestor of the chips in every phone and network switch.

Neat fact Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for the work.

On Sixth Avenue in New York, Motorola’s Martin Cooper made the first public call from a handheld cellular phone, a prototype of what became the DynaTAC. He called Joel Engel, who led AT&T’s rival cellular program, to tell him he was calling from a real handheld portable phone.

Neat fact Phones you could take in a car had existed for years, but by the 1960s they still weighed 30 to 40 pounds and were mounted in the trunk.

Commercial cellular service in the U.S. began in Chicago on October 13, 1983. It used AMPS (Advanced Mobile Phone Service), the analog cellular system developed at Bell Labs and tested in Chicago from 1978. The area was divided into cells, each with its own low-power radio site, and calls were handed from cell to cell as people drove. AT&T’s history credits AT&T together with Ameritech, the Midwest Bell group about to be spun off; news reports at the time named Ameritech Mobile Communications. This was the first generation, or “1G,” of cell service.

Neat fact The launch was marked with a news conference at Soldier Field, according to a UPI report the next day.

In 1974 the U.S. Justice Department sued AT&T under antitrust law. On January 8, 1982, the two sides settled: AT&T would give up its local phone companies and keep long distance, Western Electric manufacturing and Bell Labs. Judge Harold Greene approved the settlement on August 24, 1982. On January 1, 1984, the 22 local Bell companies went to seven new regional companies, nicknamed the “Baby Bells”: Ameritech, Bell Atlantic, BellSouth, NYNEX, Pacific Telesis, Southwestern Bell and U S West. The Bell System, as one company, was gone.

Neat fact Each Baby Bell held several of the old phone companies. NYNEX, for example, held New York Telephone and New England Telephone; U S West held Mountain Bell, Northwestern Bell and Pacific Northwest Bell.

In the breakup, California’s phone company went to Pacific Telesis Group, which held Pacific Bell, California’s Bell company, and Nevada Bell. It was spun off from AT&T to shareholders on January 1, 1984, as an independent company. On April 1, 1997, SBC Communications, the former Southwestern Bell, bought it. Pacific Bell is now part of AT&T Inc.

Neat fact Pacific Telesis was the first of the seven Baby Bells to be bought: SBC closed the deal in April 1997, a few months before Bell Atlantic and NYNEX combined.

Within about twenty years, the seven Baby Bells had folded into three companies. Southwestern Bell’s parent became SBC Communications in 1995 and bought Pacific Telesis (1997), Southern New England Telecommunications (1998) and Ameritech (1999). On November 18, 2005, SBC bought AT&T Corp., the long-distance company left after the breakup, and took the name AT&T Inc.; it added BellSouth on December 29, 2006. In the East, Bell Atlantic combined with NYNEX in 1997 and with GTE, a large non-Bell phone company, on June 30, 2000, forming Verizon. In the West, Qwest took over U S West in 2000; CenturyLink bought Qwest in 2011 and renamed itself Lumen in 2020.

Neat fact Today’s AT&T Inc. is not the same company that was broken up in 1984. It is the former Southwestern Bell, one of the Baby Bells, which bought its old parent and took its name.

Early phone lines picked up interference from nearby wires. On July 19, 1881, Bell was granted patent 244,426 for a telephone circuit with two insulated wires for each line. The wires could lie side by side or be twisted, and his patent says the twisted ones were preferred because they gave the best freedom from “inductive disturbance.” Twisting puts any outside noise on both wires almost equally, so it largely cancels out at the far end. Network cable today, such as Cat 6, is still built from twisted pairs.

Neat fact Bell’s patent also admits the twisted wires were “more liable to become injured by handling.” Installers still treat network cable gently for the same reason.

At Bell Labs in 1929, Lloyd Espenschied and Herman Affel invented coaxial cable: one conductor in the center of a tube-shaped outer conductor, kept apart by insulation (air, in their design). The outer conductor holds the signal in and keeps outside interference out, and coax can carry a much wider range of frequencies than a simple pair. That let one cable carry thousands of phone calls at once, and later, with microwave relays, television signals across the country. Their patent was filed in 1929 and granted in 1931.

Neat fact The first Ethernet, built at Xerox PARC in 1973, ran over a single shared coaxial cable.

Light can carry far more information than electric current, but in the 1960s even good glass lost almost all of its light within a short distance: around 1,000 dB per kilometer. Researchers set a goal of 20 dB per kilometer as the point where fiber would be practical for phone lines. At Corning Glass Works, Robert Maurer, Donald Keck and Peter Schultz worked with very pure fused silica, and in August 1970 Keck measured a new fiber at about 16 to 17 dB per kilometer, beating the goal.

Neat fact Keck’s notebook entry that day ended with one word: “Whoopee!” Eighteen years later, glass fiber carried calls across the Atlantic on TAT-8.

At Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in California, Bob Metcalfe and David Boggs built the first Ethernet in 1973 to connect the lab’s Alto computers and laser printers. It was inspired by ALOHAnet, a packet radio network at the University of Hawaii, and by the ARPANET. In 1980 Xerox, DEC and Intel published a 10-megabit Ethernet specification over coax, which became the IEEE 802.3 standard in 1985. Later versions moved to twisted pair and fiber.

Neat fact Metcalfe’s idea was to capture ALOHAnet’s wireless “ether” inside a coaxial cable, with no central control. The “ether” in the name echoes that idea.

Work on a common standard for wiring commercial buildings began in 1985, and in 1991 the industry published ANSI/EIA/TIA-568, the Commercial Building Telecommunications Wiring Standard. It set out “structured cabling”: standard cable types and distances, how cables end at jacks and panels, and how they are tested, no matter whose equipment is plugged in. Bulletins in 1991 and 1992 soon added specifications for unshielded twisted-pair cable and connectors.

Neat fact An industry magazine looking back said the first edition took six years of meetings, debates and ballots. The standard has been revised many times since.

In June 1997 the IEEE approved 802.11, the first standard for wireless local networks, at 1 or 2 megabits per second. Faster versions followed, but buyers needed a simple name and proof that products from different makers would work together. In 1999 a group of companies formed the Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance to test and certify them, and the Wi-Fi name dates from about then. In 2000 the group adopted “Wi-Fi” as the name for its work and became the Wi-Fi Alliance.

Neat fact Despite a popular belief, “Wi-Fi” is not short for “wireless fidelity.” People involved say it was chosen as a brand name with no particular meaning.

On June 12, 2003, the IEEE approved 802.3af, the first standard for Power over Ethernet (PoE). It lets a network switch send low-voltage DC power down the same twisted-pair cable that carries data, up to 15.4 watts at the switch port. A phone, camera or wireless access point could now run on one cable, with no outlet nearby.

Neat fact The project was approved in January 2000, so the standard took about three and a half years to finish.

Each “G” is a new generation of cellular technology. 1G was analog voice, like AMPS in Chicago in 1983. 2G went digital: the first official GSM call was made in Finland on July 1, 1991. 3G brought faster mobile data; NTT DOCOMO in Japan launched its 3G service in October 2001. 4G LTE service opened in Stockholm and Oslo on December 14, 2009. 5G began on April 3, 2019, when carriers in South Korea and Verizon in the U.S. both switched it on and both claimed to be first.

Neat fact At the 1991 GSM launch, Nokia later admitted, one of the official calls actually went over the backup analog network.