An early brass telegraph instrument from the 1830s or 1840s
Telegraph Instrument, ca. 1837–44
Marked Porthcurno

SubjectIn outline · lessons being written

Telegraph, telephone and radio

Electric telegraphs carried messages along wires from the 1830s, and cables crossed the Atlantic from 1858 and 1866. The telephone followed in 1876 and radio in the 1890s, and by the 1930s the BBC was broadcasting television.

Place
Porthcurno · Valentia Island · Poldhu · Alexandra PalaceThe whole world
Laid out as
An inventionA new way of doing something, link by link: what came before, the breakthrough, and what it changed.
Lessons
6 planned, none written yet

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

  1. ICooke, Wheatstone and Morse
  2. IIThe Atlantic cable
  3. IIIThe telephone
  4. IVMarconi at Poldhu
  5. VBroadcasting
  6. VIThe first television service

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

  • Samuel Morse
  • Charles Wheatstone
  • Alexander Graham Bell
  • Guglielmo Marconi
  • Hedy Lamarr
  • John Logie Baird

Objects

  • Morse keys
  • Telegraph cable samples
  • Baird’s televisor

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestryOur species and the Old Stone AgeFarming and the New Stone AgeFirst cities and the Bronze AgeThe Iron Age and growing statesThe classical worldAfter the empiresMedieval networks and empiresOceans crossedRevolutions and the first factoriesIndustry, empire and world warThe world since 1945

1837 to 1936. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?