A telegraph in every home

[Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy]

Inspired by The Difference Engine: Is there any way to have telegraphs become home devices, like telephones later? Not necessarily as wide-spread as the title and the analogy suggest, but something every upper-class Victorian family must have. There would certainly be some sort of demand, and even though there won't be anyone else with a home telegraph to communicate with at first you can still use your connection with the telegraph office.

Of course, some typewriter-looking device that transforms characters into Morse code would be a must.

It's strange that nothing like this happened in OTL. They could certainly wire a whole city. Is the operator system the problem?

 

[Leo Caesius]

I wonder if it would be possible to go straight from a telegraph to digital communication without that messy analog stage in between. It seems like the former two forms of communication are much more closely related than the telephone.

 

[carlton_bach]

Technologically, it wouldn't be a big problem. The main issue would be connections - you'd need switchboards, and without a voice connec tion to guide customers through the motions I don't see this as a smooth business (phone numbers took a long time to refine). So it's likely to remain something that larger households, businesses, and politicians get, and that is then adopted by people who consider themselves "important". The technology existed, but it never had the chance to spread because the telephone is so much more user friendly. If you can delay the invention of the telephone, you could have an established 'graph network and the phone companies are stuck, unable to compete with the cheaper rates of established services on existing networks. I don't know if that would be enough, but maybe voice over telegraph protocol in this ATL becomes an extra the 'graph company offers on top of its standard service? IN the end, with electronic storage media and printer technology, you could have forms of proto-e-mail becoming the dominant teenage girl obsession...

 

[wkwillis]

Better switching technology would let the telegraph dominate because they wouldn't need operators and you could record messages much more easily when the user was out.
Reed relay switches, ok.
Input and output is a teletype? Dot matrix?

 

[Scarecrow]

I wonder if it would be possible to go straight from a telegraph to digital communication without that messy analog stage in between. It seems like the former two forms of communication are much more closely related than the telephone.

i had the thought that a 19th century time traveler would think that txt messiging would be the direct decendent of the telegraph. that gives me an idea for a TL...

 

[Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy]

Allow me to quote myself:

Of course, some typewriter-looking device that transforms characters into Morse code would be a must.

Ta-daaa!

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