Campfire Chat - General DiscussionsThis is a forum for posting discussion topics, questions, current events, and anything else you'd like to chat about. Please post serious Civil War History threads in appropriate History Forums.
Armies, both North and South, were constantly marching off to some god-forgotten place that nobody ever heard of, and when they arrived at where they wanted to be, one of the first things they did was get their telegraph service set up, strung up, connected....whatever it required.
How on earth did they manage that. I've seen a picture of a magnetic telegraph and I haven't a clue how it worked. I don't know much about telegraph systems...not even those of today...but surely there had to be wires of some sort, but it seems highly unlikely there was a complete system of telegraph wires in the 1860s, especially in remote locations.
Can anyone explain that? (in terms a person can understand who still is boggled by television and even radio)
Jules
__________________ "In leaving this unpretentious record, therefore, I seek to do simply what I would have had my fathers do for me.
KINSMEN OF THE COMING CENTURIES, I BID YOU HAIL AND GODSPEED!"
[From his Introduction to "Memoirs of a Volunteer," by John Beatty - published in 1879
Armies, both North and South, were constantly marching off to some god-forgotten place that nobody ever heard of, and when they arrived at where they wanted to be, one of the first things they did was get their telegraph service set up, strung up, connected....whatever it required.
How on earth did they manage that. I've seen a picture of a magnetic telegraph and I haven't a clue how it worked. I don't know much about telegraph systems...not even those of today...but surely there had to be wires of some sort, but it seems highly unlikely there was a complete system of telegraph wires in the 1860s, especially in remote locations.
Can anyone explain that? (in terms a person can understand who still is boggled by television and even radio)
Your welcome, another thing you might like is to read what cav commanders got upto when they went on a raid, Stuart had a telgraph reader ( anyone who could read morse code could do it but Sturat had a pet fav )with him and is recounted in D S Freemn lees liets, in which after reading the wire trascripts, and so knowing what orders were passing from a to b, he tapped in before destroying the line for a mile or so, and sent a memo to Gen Meigs from himslelf (Stuart) complaing about the quality of horse and mules being bought by the US QM department, as when they were harnsed to captured wagons they were barely strong enough to run them back to CS lines.
My point being any messages transmitted in the clear could be read and would provide usfull intel, if you also had the current code being used, so much the better.
__________________ "Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.
Liberty is a well armed lamb contesting the vote."
Benjamin Franklin, 1759
Being clever at reading one another's telegraphed messages, some were in code. This lesson did not fall away to the side; as it was evident in World War II; Native American Indian's language was a code that was never cracked by the enemy. A big bonus in winning the war as a whole.
Just some thoughts.
Respectfully submitted for consideration,
M. E. Wolf
The lines were strung on trees and fences and were quite vulnerable. For some reason, Halleck's Department early in the war encoded messages by translating them into and out of Hungarian. Have no idea when and how this decision was made, but it was.
Guess maybe the codes subsequently got a bit easier to implement.
The signal itself was an electrical impulse sent in the form of Morse Code to be received and clicked out on the other end. Have heard tales of scouts who learned the code and could take the sending end of the wire (after cutting it) and read the message (if it wasn't in Hungarian) by placing the wire on his tongue and reading the mild shocks!
ole
__________________ I never knew a man who wished to be himself a slave. Consider if you know any good thing that no man desires for himself. A. Lincoln
The lines were strung on trees and fences and were quite vulnerable. For some reason, Halleck's Department early in the war encoded messages by translating them into and out of Hungarian. Have no idea when and how this decision was made, but it was.
Guess maybe the codes subsequently got a bit easier to implement.
The signal itself was an electrical impulse sent in the form of Morse Code to be received and clicked out on the other end. Have heard tales of scouts who learned the code and could take the sending end of the wire (after cutting it) and read the message (if it wasn't in Hungarian) by placing the wire on his tongue and reading the mild shocks!
ole
Wouldn't they know that the message had been interceipted if they received no reply?
I'm guessing that considerable time would pass between sending a message and expecting a response. The other operator has to write the message and someone has to deliver it to the addressee. Then a response is composed, it's delivered to the telegrapher, who sends it off.
In that set of hours, interception of a message would likely not be noticed. (And I didn't count the time for translation or decoding.) A lot can happen in a few hours.
ole
__________________ I never knew a man who wished to be himself a slave. Consider if you know any good thing that no man desires for himself. A. Lincoln
Birth of the signal Corps, well worth a read, heres an extract from the early WBTS
Although technically under the Quartermaster Department, the Military Telegraph was actually controlled by Secretary Stanton. As a former director of and attorney for the Atlantic and Ohio Telegraph Company, Stanton, like Myer, possessed considerable knowledge about telegraph operations. He placed the telegraph office next to his own in the War Department, and one of his biographers described the operators as Stanton's "little army ... part of his own personal and confidential staff."50 Myer saw this organization as a rival and believed that Stanton and the telegraph companies conspired against the Signal Corps. Whether collusion existed or not, Myer took on a formidable adversary when he challenged Stanton, a man whom one historian has described as a "stubby, whiskered, ill-tempered conniver."51
The fact that the Military Telegraph functioned independently of the army commanders it was supposed to serve created potential problems of command and control. Only the operators themselves knew the cipher codes used to transmit messages, and even President Lincoln, a frequent visitor to the War Department telegraph office, was denied access to them.52 The placement of electric telegraphy under the Signal Corps could have alleviated this situation and provided a more closely coordinated communication system. Failing that, a reasonable compromise would have been to place tactical communications under the Signal Corps and leave strategic lines with the Military Telegraph.
The US adopted a cipher cylinder system early war, but was not universaly used, and no message sent under it was ever cracked.
__________________ "Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.
Liberty is a well armed lamb contesting the vote."
Benjamin Franklin, 1759
Wouldn't they know that the message had been interceipted if they received no reply?
A message would not have to be "interecepted" to be read by the enemy. Think of it more as a wire tap. The message still goes through, but you can "hear" what they are saying.
__________________ "There must be more historians of the Civil War than there were generals figthing in it... Of the two groups, the historians are the more belligerent." David Donald, Lincoln Reconsidered (1961)
CivilWarTalk.com -
A free and friendly Civil War community. 
Another Question 
Linear Mode
