Telegraphy

Colligan and Linley 2011 -- Ivan Raykoff chapter on piano interface in early telegraphs, typewriters, and player pianos

Kieve 1973 -- British history of the telegraph

see Arthur C. Clarke, How the World was One (1992) https://archive.org/details/howworldwasonebe0000clar_l7b2

see Gabler, The American Telegrapher (1988)

see Prescott, History Theory and Practice of the Electric Telegraph (1860)

Renata Vinci, "A telegraph for China: The attempted application of Caselli’s pantelegraph to transmit Chinese characters, 1856−87"

The possibility to import telegraphy in China encountered the opposition of the imperial government from its very early stages. In 1865, when, for the first time, a foreigner attempted to build a telegraphic line between Shanghai and Wusong, this innovative communication system faced a proscription by the local officials and the rebellion of the residents who literally pulled out most of the telegraph line poles…

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In the same period, the Italian inventor Giovanni Caselli’s revolutionary telegraph was repeatedly met with Chinese interest, both by direct witnesses and by the local press.

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From the early stage of his e ments he focused on improving existing telegraphic systems to transcend the transcription process through conventional signs employed at that time by the more popular Morse and Wheatstone telegraphs (Larousse 1897: 490) so that alphabetic script and autograph documents could be transmitted inte- grally without codificat…

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A few days after the release of its first issue, the paper mentioned Caselli’s inven- tion as the first telegraph permitting the transmission of Chinese characters.

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Many nineteenth century sources, as well as more recent ones, concern- ing Caselli’s work have reported news of a Chinese legation who witnessed Caselli’s experiments. In an article appearing in L’illustrazione italiana, Savorgnan de Brazzà had even published the overambitious statement that it was a mission appointed by the Emperor of China to find a system to overcome the problem of the telegraphic transmission in eastern languages, avoiding the transcription into a western alphabet which was the only one compatible with the telegraphic devices of th…

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Caselli had clear in his mind the potential of his pantelegraph and the close relation between such an innovative medium and non-European languages, as proved by one of his handwritten caselligrammi signed by himself, stating that Eastern languages, above all Chinese and Arabic, can use no other tele- graph than the autographic o…

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…different kinds of styluses could produce different coloured prints, mainly red when using a copper stylus and blue (not black!) when using an iron one, leading to the formulation of some hypotheses regarding the use of a stylus made of different metals to obtain multicolour drawings.

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Although we do not know whether or not Caselli’s i tion remained a main topic of this investigation, and of the later Chinese public discussion on the necessity of the development of telegraphy in China, the Shenbao article testifies that it had not completely disappeared from the public debate in the period from the 1866 mission until a second contact in the 1880s.

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Many studies about Caselli mention the application of the pantelegraph in China in 1885 as proof of the validity of the Casellian system and of its diffusion abroad (Ferri 1978: 331; Crispolti and Pierini 1997: 23). However, thanks to the unpublished sources discovered during the course of this research, it is possible to affirm that, although Caselli had established some successful contacts not only with Chinese but also with Japanese represent- atives (Coopersmith 2012: 4, 2015: 24), he eventually failed in the a…

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commercialize his pantelegraph in Asia.

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…the Chinese have invented a much easier system using the ordinary telegraph as follows: in Chinese, 4,000 or 5,000 characters are enough to approximately convey any expressible idea. Nevertheless, they printed some manuals or dictionaries containing 8,000 characters in which every character is marked by a European number. Such manu- als are provided to all the telegraphic offi…

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All things considered, a regular telegraphic transmission arrived quite late in China, since the first Chinese telegraph land line was built only in 1881 to connect Shanghai and Tianjin (Baark 1997: 159). The first line came after some minor attempts both by foreigners and Chinese, which, as it has been discussed, were often obstructed by the opposition of the Qing central government and local officials.

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A special transcription system was thus elaborated in 1870 by the Danish astronomer Hans Schjellerup and perfected by the French harbour master, Septimo Auguste Viguier in Shanghai. The constant work of the two foreigners resulted in a codebook first published in 1872, containing 6,899 characters, which was later enlarged by others. Their system consisted of a series of four digit number that identified every Chinese character, arranged by Chinese radicals: through a process of codification and de-codification, Chinese characters could finally be suitable for telegraphic transmission…

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Caselli’s pantelegraph may somehow be considered an ephemeral meteor in the history of western telegraphy, but this ancestor of the fax represents a moment in the history of the scientific and technological exchange between China and the West, as well as a symbolic occasion to explore a variety of Chinese sources, and introduces numerous Chinese personalities of the late-Qing period involved in different ways in the contact with the West, all connected by the common pantelegraphic experience.

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With the failure of Caselli’s attempt, China would wait until the early years of the twentieth century to finally get enthusiastic about an image transmission system when Belin’s visit to China, and the public trials of his telephotograph, led to the definitive first application of such technology on Chinese soil…

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