Your message is received wmietg When may I expect the goods? wyegfef Will you exchange gold for eastern funds? - Todd Hoff

From a really interesting book: The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick - Todd Hoff

Mark Twain has fun observations of his time as Telegrapher - WarLord

"Morse had a great insight from which all the rest flowed. Knowing nothing about pith balls, bubbles, or litmus paper, he saw that a sign could be made from something simpler, more fundamental, and less tangible—the most minimal event, the closing and opening of a circuit. Never mind needles. The electric current flowed and was interrupted, and the interruptions could be organized to create meaning. The idea was simple, but Morse’s first devices were convoluted, involving clockwork, wooden pendulums, pencils, ribbons of paper, rollers, and cranks." - Todd Hoff

"That was in 1852; the impossible was accomplished by 1858, at which point Queen Victoria and President Buchanan exchanged pleasantries and The New York Times announced “a result so practical, yet so inconceivable … so full of hopeful prognostics for the future of mankind … one of the grand way-marks in the onward and upward march of the human intellect.”" - Todd Hoff

"The very idea of a “weather report” was new. It required some approximation of instant knowledge of a distant place. The telegraph enabled people to think of weather as a widespread and interconnected affair, rather than an assortment of local surprises." - Todd Hoff

"ransmission of intelligence, but it has originated in the mind an entirely new class of ideas, a new species of consciousness. Never before was any one conscious that he knew with certainty what events were at that moment passing in a distant city—40, 100, or 500 miles off." - Todd Hoff

"To save on the tariff, clever middlemen devised a practice called “packing.” A packer would collect, say, four messages of five words each and bundle them into a fixed-price telegram of twenty words." - Todd Hoff

"Those who used the telegraph codes slowly discovered an unanticipated side effect of their efficiency and brevity. They were perilously vulnerable to the smallest errors." - Todd Hoff

"Three great waves of electrical communication crested in sequence: telegraphy, telephony, and radio. People began to feel that it was natural to possess machines dedicated to the sending and receiving of messages. These devices changed the topology—ripped the social fabric and reconnected it, added gateways and junctions where there had only been blank distance." - Todd Hoff

"A freer spirit prevailed at the farmer cooperatives, which avoided paying the telephone companies well into the 1920s." - Todd Hoff

Any pointers WarLord? - Todd Hoff