A major change in the forest world

Chapter 15 The Profound Significance of Morse's Invention of the Telegraph

On the first day of his closed-door discussion on scientific inventions at the company, Big Turtle Brother kept a low profile and stayed away from past troubles. He felt great and decided to continue the discussion the next day.

On the long table in the conference hall lay chilled whiskey, rum, soda water, and several plates of nuts and salmon. Sunlight streamed through the stained-glass windows, casting dappled patterns of color onto the carpet.

The giant tortoise came over from the office once everyone had arrived. He sat down in the head seat and tapped the table with his short, thick claws: "Everyone's here, huh? We won't talk about anything else today, just the telegram that kid Morse came up with. All you can drink, drink as much as you want."

The eagle shook its wings first, took a sip of its whiskey, and spoke with an intriguing British accent: "Morse, I vaguely remember you. You were a painter, a portrait painter, you even painted a portrait of your former president. What brings you to electricity all of a sudden?"

The giant tortoise chuckled, its shell swaying slightly. "It's all because of a painful memory. In 1825, he was painting in Washington when his wife fell critically ill at home. The messenger took several days to deliver the letter, and by the time he got home, his wife had already been buried. Because the news traveled so slowly, he didn't even get to see her one last time. From that moment on, he vowed to build a machine that could deliver messages instantly."

The eagle, cigar in mouth, blew a smoke ring: "An artist, switching to electrical engineering halfway through life? Can he really pull it off?"

Berlin Bear, holding a beer mug, said in a deep voice, "It wasn't easy. He didn't start learning electromagnetism until he was 41. He was dirt poor and often went hungry. He made a living by selling paintings while hiding in his hut to do experiments for more than a decade."

The goat swayed its horns, a hint of curiosity in its voice: "My goodness, over ten years! That's quite a feat. How did he even come up with the idea for a telegram?"

The giant tortoise took a sip of its drink, extended a claw, and tapped it on the table: "The key is 1832, when he was traveling by ship from the Bird Tribe back to the Giant Tortoise. On board was a doctor named Jackson who publicly demonstrated an electromagnetism experiment—electric current attracts iron, and when the current is cut off, the iron disengages. Morse was stunned, then suddenly slapped his forehead: Electric current is so fast; if we use its on/off state to transmit signals, wouldn't we be able to send messages instantly?"

"He wrote it down in his notebook: 'If the current is cut off for even a moment, a spark will appear; a spark is one symbol, no spark is another, and a longer period without a spark is yet another. These three symbols can be combined to represent letters and numbers, and text can be transmitted through wires!'"

The eagle's eyes lit up: "That's interesting. How did he turn this idea into a machine?"

"It was difficult at first," the big turtle sighed. "He didn't understand electromagnetism and took many detours. Later, he found our physicist Henry, the one who discovered electromagnetic induction. Henry taught him the principles and gave him relays and copper wire. In 1835, he built the first telegraph machine; in 1837, together with his assistant Will, he developed a code composed of dots, dashes, and spaces—which later became Morse code."

Berlin Bear nodded: "So you use short signals as 'dots' and long signals as 'dashes,' with different combinations corresponding to different letters?"

"That's right," said the giant tortoise. "E is the simplest, just a dot; T is a dash; common letters use short codes, and rare letters use long codes. It's a very clever design."

The eagle frowned: "What about the machine? How far can it transmit? It probably won't work at first, right?"

“It really didn’t work,” the Great Tortoise said. “In the early days, it could only transmit a few meters. He had no money and went everywhere begging for investment, but no one paid any attention to him. Later, he had to apply to Congress for 3 Great Tortoise dollars to build a line from the Great Tortoise capital to Baltimore. Congress argued about this for two years and finally barely passed it in 1843.”

The goat listened intently: "And then? How did you succeed?"

The giant tortoise's voice grew heavy: "May 24, 1844, a historic day. Morse, with trembling hands, pressed the telegraph key in the Washington Capitol and sent the first long-distance telegram in human history to Baltimore, 64 kilometers away."

"What's the content?" the eagle asked anxiously.

"God, what a miracle you have created!" said the giant tortoise.

A few seconds of silence fell over the room. Berlin Bear put down his glass: "Just that one sentence?"

"Just this one sentence," the giant tortoise nodded, "but this sentence heralded the beginning of the instant messaging era."

Diao flicked his cigarette ash: "How useful was this thing back then? How much faster was it than a messenger?"

"It's incomparably faster." The giant tortoise emphasized, "In the past, transatlantic communication required ships and could take anywhere from a few weeks to several months. Now, a telegram can travel across continents and oceans in seconds."

"Think about it: the outbreak of war, the signing of peace treaties, storm warnings, the price of gold, train accidents, etc., which used to take dozens of days to arrive, could be known on the same day with telegrams. The entire forest, all at once, saw its pace quicken!"

The eagle wholeheartedly agreed: "That's right. Back then, our Eagle Clan had colonies all over the forest. Giving an order to the goats, crows, and owls would take six months to get back. With telegraphs, we could do it in a day."

Berlin Bear nodded: "The telegraph is incredibly important. Railway scheduling, financial transactions, news dissemination, disaster relief—it all depends on it. Some say: the telegraph turned the forest into a person, and the wires were its nervous system. That's no exaggeration."

The goat shook its horns: "What about us ordinary people?"

"It's the same for ordinary people," Big Turtle said. "Families are thousands of miles away. In the past, we would exchange several letters a year; now, if there's an emergency, we can send a telegram and receive a reply on the same day. Life and death separations, weddings and funerals, business dealings—we no longer have to regret it for the rest of our lives because of delayed news, like Morse did."

The eagle suddenly spoke up: "Has any famous person said anything insightful or classic about telegrams?"

The giant tortoise thought for a moment, then slowly said, "Yes, as the writer and historian Henry David Thoreau once said: 'We hastily built the electromagnetic telegraph line from Maine to Texas, but the first important message it delivered may have been just 'a hen laid an egg.''"

"What do you mean by that?" the goat asked.

"The meaning is clear: the telegraph made information spread incredibly fast, so that even the most trivial matters could be transmitted across the entire land in an instant. It increased the information density of the entire forest by hundreds or thousands of times."

The giant tortoise picked up his glass, looked around, and asked, "What do you think the future of the telegraph will look like? How promising is its future?"

Berlin Bear spoke first: "I see that from the beginning, the lines were laid longer and longer, eventually becoming wireless. Look at the forest now, every city and every town has instant communication."

The eagle added, "Now forests aren't just on land. The same goes for the seabed, spanning the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and connecting to all continents. The entire universe, the entire forest, will be covered by wireless networks."

The eagle chuckled: "Technology will advance. Right now, there's a mix of wired and wireless coverage; in the future, we'll be able to transmit wireless telegrams through the air. And further down the line, the hardware will become smaller, cheaper, and faster."

The goat was a little excited: "Does that mean that in the future, whether you're in the forest or out of space, as long as there's hardware and a sensor signal between you, you can talk and communicate instantly? There will be no more distance barriers?"

"That's right, it would be the same if we could successfully install the hardware on the sun!" the giant turtle said with great certainty.

"The telegraph was just the beginning. It was the ancestor of digital communication—dots and dashes, the earliest '0s and 1s.' Then came the telephone, radio, television, and later the internet, mobile phones, and wireless satellite communication."

"But the root of the problem lies in Morse's telegram."

It proved for the first time that humans could use electromagnetic signals to overcome the limitations of time, space, and distance, allowing information to travel wirelessly at the speed of light. This was the greatest revolution in the history of communications.

As dusk fell, the office remained brightly lit.

The giant tortoise stood up, its shell gleaming faintly under the light: "We've pretty much covered everything for today. To summarize: Morse, a painter who came to the profession later in life, spent over a decade in hardship and poverty inventing the great telegraph and Morse code."

With a simple series of dots and strokes, he broke the shackles of distance and compressed the barriers of time, truly connecting forests for the first time and laying the foundation for all subsequent communication technologies.

As we often say in the forest: In the past, mountains were high and rivers were far, and communication was difficult; but since the telegraph was invented, the ends of the earth are now close, and the world is one family.

It continues to influence the future; the entire forest, the entire world, will be completely transformed by this string of dots and lines.

Having said that, the giant tortoise raised his glass: "To Morse! To the telegraph! To this new world redefined by wireless network signals!"

Eagles, condors, Berlin bears, and goats all raised their glasses.

The crystal glasses clinked gently, their clear sound echoing in the quiet office.

Outside the window, the sun is slowly setting, and a new era of wireless communication at the speed of light may just be beginning.