Communicate!

The world's first undersea cable, linking Britain and France across the English Channel, was laid in 1851. Europe and the United States were finally linked after three failed attempts. The first cable, in 1857, was lost. The second, in 1858 lasted four weeks. A third snapped while being laid in 1865.

Success came in 1866 when Isambard Kingdom Brunel's ship the 'Great Eastern' was used to lay a new cable across the Atlantic and to find and repair the 1865 cable. From then on, Europe and the United States were linked by telegraph, which sent messages at seven words per minute.

Samuel Morse was born in Boston in the United States. He began his working life in New York as a portrait painter. He founded the National College of Design and stood, unsuccessfully, for election as Mayor.

Morse was interested in electricity and in 1835 began to develop an electric telegraph, unaware that others were working on the same idea. Morse patented his telegraph in 1837 and in 1838 produced the famous code of dots and dashes named after him.

The first telegraph line in America was completed between Baltimore and Washington in May 1843. Morse's first message was "What God hath wrought".

The telegraph provided a new respectable employment for unmarried middle class women. They were seen as "admirable manipulators of instruments", and were less likely to change jobs having little alternative employment.

The operators were supervised by a matron. They worked a ten hour day, six days a week. The night shift operators were men.

In the 1850s a fast operator typing Morse at 27 words a minute could earn a high salary of 30 shillings a week (£1.50). A governess might earn 10 shillings (50p). Operators on later automatic telegraph machines counted as unskilled and were paid a quarter of the money.

Alexander Bain was born in 1811 near Wick in the far north of Scotland. He was inspired to become a clockmaker, after hearing a science lecture. He learnt his new trade in Wick, then moved to Edinburgh and later to London where he developed several new communications devices.

In 1841 he invented an electric clock. In 1843 he patented an early fax machine, 30 years before the telephone. Then he patented a chemical telegraph, in which electrical pulses made marks on chemical-soaked paper. It could receive almost 300 words per minute, so he then invented a sending telegraph to match this record speed.

The telephone was invented by Alexander Graham Bell. Whilst teaching in Boston he found through experiments that sound waves could be converted into electrical currents. He made his first telephone in 1875, but it was not until 10 March 1876 that his assistant Thomas Watson heard the first telephone message, "Come here, Mr Watson, I want to see you".

Bell demonstrated his telephone to excited audiences in the Boston area. The telephones were connected to existing telegraph wires, and people were able to hear Thomas Watson, reading and singing from several miles away.

Bell may not have been the first or only person to invent a telephone.

Antonio Meucci, an Italian living in New York, claimed to have invented a telephone in 1849. He applied for the right to patent his invention but never did so. Like Bell, Meucci produced many inventions relating to explosives, plastics and foodstuffs.

German Johann Philipp Reis developed a telephone in 1860 which relied on vibrations induced by intermittent electrical contact. He died without developing the idea.

Elisha Gray submitted his idea only hours after Bell had filed his patent. Meucci and Gray challenged Bell's patents but a long-running court case upheld Bell's claims.

Sailors have used flag codes for hundreds of years, to communicate from ship to ship, or back to shore. At night, ships used coloured light signals instead.

Ships' flags were used in patterns to spell out messages. There were also single flags with specific meanings. The flag codes are recorded in a signal book.

By 1800, signalling between ships was vital as battle tactics became more complicated. In 1803 the captain of a captured British ship forgot to throw his signal book overboard. Nelson ordered the codes to be changed. In 1813 British ship flag codes were standardised. They are still used internationally today.

In 1971 Ray Tomlinson sent the first e-mail message using @. He was using 'SNDMSG' an electronic message system that allowed users of the same computer to leave messages for each other. He wanted to use the ARPANET to send messages to different computers. Tomlinson chose the @ symbol to tell the system that the receiver was 'at' a separate computer.

What was the first e-mail ever sent? Well no-one actually knows! Tomlinson says 'most likely the first message was QWERTYUIOP or something similar'. When he showed this first e-mail to a colleague he said 'don't tell anyone, this isn't what we're supposed to be working on'!

In 2002 Ahmed Samy, a Lincolnshire surgeon operated on a patient to repair an artery in her arm. Some time later the patient began bleeding for a second time. Mr. Samy was the only person who could diagnose which part of her artery was bleeding, but he was on a train between Edinburgh and Grimsby at the time.

Ahmed Samy had his laptop computer and mobile phone with him. His colleagues in Lincolnshire e-mailed scans of the patient to him. Mr. Samy worked out what was wrong, and suggested appropriate treatment from the train. His colleagues operated and saved the patient's life.