Telegraphic History

Costa Rica

Since the first days of the experiments with electricity at XVII Century, was created complicated systems to send messages through wire.

At England, Charles Wheatstone invented a telegraph that functioned very well, but was Samuel Morse, a north american painter, that developed a practical telegraph and the first line travel from Washington to Baltimore in the United States, and sent the first message the may 24th 1844. Morse lived to see that his telegraph was know as net of communications for America, Europe and Asia.

Morse develop his key using two sounds, one short called point and the other large ( equal to three points) called line. In this way, combining points and lines develop all the alphabet, with numbers, sylabes and puntuation signs, that permits the comunication to distance. Once consolidated the system as an effective communication media at Costa Rica began the conversations to establish the system signing a contract with Mr. Lyman Reynolds on march 23rd 1868, establishing the conecction between San José, Cartago, Heredia, Alajuela and Puntarenas. At the end of 1868, was finished the first wired line and transmited the first telegrams between Cartago and San José. Later was conected to Heredia and Alajuela and Puntarenas the latest.

The contratist said that the income was very low and was impossible to mantain the service, and the Governement during the administration of Don Jesús Jiménez, the 27th april 1869, took the telegraphic service, because it was a public utility service.

Telephone, Radio and Telex

The experiments with electricity continued, and we have another inventions like telephone, developed by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876 and the Radio, patented by the italian Gulllermo Marconi in 1896.

The Radio and the short wave radio were used by Costa Rica as auxiliary services to the telegraph. The telephone in low transit offices, where the messages were transmitted by voice from another bigger office, and the radio exchange the messages in Morse key with distant offices, but the lines of wired and the maintenance was very expensive. Also was very difficult to communicate with the foreign countries.

The telegraph dissapear from Costa Rica at the end of the decade of 1970, when the Morse appliances were replaced by the Telex, and latter for computer nets, but the telegraphist occupation dissapeared, that employee specialist in the Morse key because the computer can receive the message in a common language code, transmit to another machine and this decode and print the message in common a language, ready for delivery.