Earliest telegraph

[SunilTanna]

What is the earliest that that first morse-type telegraph could be produced (without the users necessarily understanding why it works)?

 

[Max Sinister]

When's your POD?

In my Chaos TL, the Chinese discover electricity in the 13th/14th century (but only use it for galvanization), and the Russians copy this knowledge, and invent the telegraph in the 18th century.

 

[Fellatio Nelson]

What is the earliest that that first morse-type telegraph could be produced (without the users necessarily understanding why it works)?

As soon as someone spins a tight coil of copper wire within a strong magnetic field and realises a practical application, I suppose.

 

[carlton_bach]

Batteries would work earlier. Over short distances, you could make one with bronze-age tech. Over longer distances I don't think it would be practical before the high middle ages.

The challenge is, of course, for anyone to come up with the application.

 

[1940LaSalle]

You're missing one key point: mass production on a proto-industrial scale sufficient to build something approaching a network. The technology isn't much more than a curiosity unless it can be deployed widely. Given all of that-especially the need to provide insulated copper wire of consistent quality, and the need to provide standard insulators for the wires, you're probably looking at perhaps the 1820s at the earliest. Before that...it would be limited to spotty, isolated installations: say, a localized network among financial institutions in New York or Boston, or perhaps among government bureaucracies in Washington. And don't forget that it was the rise of the railroad and the need for accurate, timely orders (in the days before block signals, when order boards and timetables ruled) that spurred the development of the telegraph in the first place.