The principle of telegraphy is relatively simple. A transmitting device in which a needle is moved by an electromagnetic field, making intermittent contacts, produces signals that are transmitted through a copper wire to a distant receiver, which reproduces the signals in some decodable form, usually as sounds.

The possibility had been pointed out by Pierre-Simon Laplace and further popularized by Andre-Marie Ampere before numerous inventors began to produce actual models; Pavel Schilling's was not the first, but it was by far the most widely publicized. William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone were not the only Englishmen working on the problem in 1837-1838, but the Devonshire surgeon Edward Davy did not follow through with his model, leaving them a clear field in Great Britain, although their slowness in developing a single-needle system using a binary code disadvantaged them relative to Samuel F. B. Morse in the United States. Cooke and Wheatstone first developed a five-needle telegraph system to indicate the alphabet, but the device was not economically viable compared to Morse's simpler single-needle system, which used a system of dots (short signals) and dashes (long signals) to represent letters. Cooke and Wheatstone finally produced and patented a single-needle apparatus in 1845.

The patterns of the technology's development differed markedly between the United States and Europe because geography imposed different priorities. Railway systems were developed more rapidly in the compact countries of Western Europe, and it was entirely natural for Cooke and Wheatstone to give initial priority to railway signaling, while the vast open spaces of America meant that the primary emphasis had to be more narrowly devoted to the long-distance transmission of information. Within a relatively short space of time, however, transatlantic cables were laid and telegraphy became a key mode of communication between as well as within continents. The technology swiftly revolutionized communications in news, business, and warfare, and everyone who had a significant hand in its development had good claims to have played an important role in the development of modern civilization.

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