1874 - Communications, Media

Communications, Media

The Remington typewriter introduced by E. Remington & Sons Fire Arms Company begins a revolution in written communication. Philo Remington, now 68, took over his late father's company in 1871 (see technology, 1845), set up a new company in 1865 to make farm equipment, and has acquired sole rights to the Sholes typewriter for $12,000 (see 1873), but the $125 price of the Remington typewriter is more than a month's rent for many substantial business firms, Remington produces only eight machines, and business letters continue for the most part to be hand written (see 1876).

Remington Typewriter
Early typewriters had capital letters only, and typists could not see what was typed, but improvements came quickly. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images.)

Elisha Gray of Western Electric Company tries in April to patent a musical telegraph consisting of a two-tone transmitter that contains two single-pole elecromagnets, each with a vibrating armature (see 1872). Each armature makes and breaks contact with a platinum one that switches the current to the coil on and off; since each electromagnet exerts a different magnetic pull on its armature, each armature vibrates at a different frequency. A telegraph key controls each coil-and-armature combination, so each frequency can be sent either separately or simultaneously (see telephone, 1875).

Ohio-born New York inventor Thomas Alva Edison, 27, obtains a patent for a quadruplex telegraph system that permits the same line to be used simultaneously for sending and receiving two signals in each direction, thus doubling the capacity of a duplex system devised 3 years ago by U.S. inventor J. B. Stearns, who had refined a system devised by German inventor Wilhelm Gintl.

French engineer Jean-(Maurice)-Emile Baudot, 29, receives a patent for a binary telegraphic code that will come to replace the Morse Code of 1837. Each letter of the Roman alphabet (and each punctuation mark) is represented by a five-unit combination of current-on/current-off signals, each of equal duration, and the resulting 32 permutations permit a telegrapher to control his machine's mechanical functions far more efficiently than the system of short dots and long dashes employed in the Morse Code. The correct transmitter and receiver must be connected at the same time, and the first Baudot systems will employ manual transmission, but perforated tape will soon be used instead (see Baudot, 1894).

Yomiuri Shimbun begins publication at Osaka.

The Oakland Tribune begins publication at the California city, where George Sanford and Benet A. Dewes put out a four-page paper whose pages measure only six by 10 inches each. Dewes and a later partner will sell the sheet in 1876 to William E. Dargie, who will be publisher until his death in 1911, widening the Tribune's scope to give it international coverage.

The November 7 issue of Harper's Weekly carries a cartoon by Thomas Nast that introduces the elephant as a symbol for the Republican Party (see donkey, 1870).