The need to communicate rapidly over long distances reached critical proportions once the Western world became heavily industrialized and urbanized. Visual telegraphy systems such as the semaphore had insuperable physical and speed limitations. Advances in the science of electricity permitted the crucial breakthrough, finally making it possible to send messages via electrical impulses over long distances through wires.

Experimenters began investigating the possibility of sending messages alphabetically by electric current during the early 1700s. As early as 1727 an experimenter in London managed to send an electrical impulse one sixth of a mile along thread. A writer identified only as C.M. in a Scots Magazine of 1753 described a static electricity telegraph that would spell out messages over 26 wires, one for each letter of the alphabet. Claude Chappe (1763-1805), developer of the semaphore, experimented with a synchronized clockwork electric telegraph in 1790, and a system using this principle...