Chapter 8
I Part 1: Communications
i Before the Telegraph
ii Electrical Communication Before Federation
iii Federation to the End of the Second World War
iv Post-war and on to 1975
v 1975 ONWARDS
II Epilogue
III Part 2: Early Australian Computers And Computing
IV Acknowledgements
References
Index
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Before the Telegraph (continued)
While in this period the people of Australia were experiencing all the problems of a small population widely dispersed over a large and remote country without any means of rapid communication, either internally or externally, a solution to these problems was being developed elsewhere. In Europe and USA scientists, technologists and inventors were undertaking work, both theoretical and practical, on electricity and magnetism, with the first outcome in the terms of a commercial service available to the public when Morse demonstrated his system of electrical communications in Boston, USA, in 1844, using relatively simple technical equipment -a Morse key, a battery as a source of voltage, a line and some form of receiver at the distant end. The information to be transmitted was coded in the form of dots and dashes and sent to line as a series of electrical impulses of either short or long duration. When the key was depressed, voltage was applied to the line and a current caused to flow through the receiving equipment at the distant end, with spaces between the elements of the code represented by no voltage on the line. Although not described in such terms at the time, the code was an interesting application of information theory, with the shorter elements of the code used for the frequently recurring letters.
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Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering |  |
© 1988 Print Edition page 534, Online Edition 2000
Published by Australian Science and Technology Heritage Centre, using the Web Academic Resource Publisher
http://www.austehc.unimelb.edu.au/tia/528.html