Telegenic
able boost of publicity to telegraphy: in 1845
a suspected murderer was spotted boarding a
London-bound train at Slough; the news was
telegraphed to Paddington and the man was
arrested on arrival and later found guilty and
hanged.
In the US, Samuel Morse’s first working
telegraph of 1837 depended on the making and
breaking of an electric current: an electromag-
netically operated stylus recorded the long and
short dashes of Morse Code on a moving strip of
paper. After much persuasion, the US Congress,
in 1843, voted to pay Morse (1791–1872) to build
the fi rst telegraph line in America, from Balti-
more to Washington. It was in the following year,
using the Morse Code on this line, that Morse
transmitted his famous message: ‘What hath
God wrought!’
Development of telegraphy was swift. By
1862 the world’s telegraph system covered some
150,000 miles, including 15,000 in the UK. A
method of printing the coded telegraph messages
had been invented in 1845 and was developed in
the US as ‘House’s Printing Telegraph’. In 1850 a
telegraph cable had been laid across the English
Channel. In 1858 the Atlantic was spanned
by telegraph cable. The duplex telegraphy of
Th omas Alva Edison (1847–1931) made it possi-
ble to transmit two messages simultaneously
over the same line; soon, four- and fi ve-message
systems followed, and ultimately the teleprinter.
Picture transmission by telegraphy resulted from
the development work of English physicist Shel-
ford Bidwell, the fi rst such transmissions taking
place in 1881. See telex.
‘Th e signifi cance of telegraphy,’ writes James
W. Carey in Communication as Culture (Rout-
ledge, 1992) ‘is that it led to the selective control
and transmission of information. Th e telegraph
operator was able to monopolize knowledge, if
only for a few moments, along a route; and this
brought a selective advantage in trading and
speculation.’ It also ushered-in a new language
of journalism, what Ernest Hemingway
called ‘the lingo of the cable’ – terse, precise;
as Carey puts it, ‘a form of language stripped
of the local, the regional, and colloquial ...
something closer to a “scientific” language,
a language of strict denotation in which the
connotative featurers of utterance were under
rigid control’.
Telegraphy continues to be widely used by
news services, the Stock Exchange telex service,
public message services, certain police and fi re
alarm systems and private-line companies for
data transmission. See telephone; wirelessthey ‘did not prevent popular protest movements
being crushed in Belarus and Iran’. Th ey have a
catalytic eff ect but ‘they do not determine the
outcome ... we must remind ourselves that these
moments are always transient. Th e hard grind of
consolidating liberty is all ahead’.
As for the specifi c impact of online ‘people
power’, a similar warning was issued by Ron
Deibert in ‘Blogging dangerously’ (Index on
Censorship, Vol. 39. No. 4, 2010). He writes, ‘In
no other time during the internet’s history has
it been as dangerous to publish on the web as
it is now ...Whereas once governments were
either incapable of, or chose not to, regulate the
internet, today they are reasserting themselves
dramatically and forcefully’ by ‘the implementa-
tion of new and more rigid laws around slander,
libel and copyright’.
Diebert believes it is important to remember
that ‘cyberspace is owned and operated by the
private sector. Decisions taken for market
reasons can end up having major consequences,
though often without public accountability or
transparency’.
Social networking has ‘led to a proliferation
of voices’ but has ‘also produced a much deeper
exposure of personally incriminating informa-
tion’. See blogosphere; censorship; democ-
racy and the media; digital optimism;
effects of the mass media; facebook;
internet: denial of service; mobiliza-
tion; networking: social networking;
twitter. See also topic guide under media:
politics & economics.
Telegenic Looking good on TV – a factor that has
had particular signifi cance in the domain of poli-
tics, but also applies in many other walks of life,
including working on TV, where the telegenic
is associated with youth and ageing, especially
among women broadcasters. See lookism.
Telegraphy Only after the discovery of the
magnetic effect of electric current was teleg-
raphy possible. The first telegraph consisted
of a compass needle that was defl ected by the
magnetic field produced by electric currents
which fl owed through the circuit whenever the
transmitting key was depressed and contact
established. Th e fi rst patent for an electric tele-
graph was taken out by William Fothergill Cooke
and Charles Wheatstone in June 1837, and later
in the same year they demonstrated a fi ve-needle
telegraph to the directors of the London and
Birmingham railway.
A year later the Great Western Railway
connected Paddington and West Drayton by
telegraph line, which soon gave a consider-