alt Hacker NewsWhen visiting Ayers Rock in Australia I stayed in Alice Springs. While I was there I learnt that Alice Springs exists because it was a repeater station for a telegraph line that stretched from Southern Australia all the way to London. There would be people listening to morse code, and tapping it out again to the next repeater station. Blew my mind that there was a wire that went all the way to London from Australia!
Replies
Peteragain • yesterday at 8:09 AM
My great, great grand dad carted telegraph poles for the construction of the southern half of that! Family oral history.
dboreham • last Tuesday at 2:46 PM
Similar history for Denver.
> Blew my mind that there was a wire that went all the way to London from Australia!
Before the telegraph they used to do things wirelessly: https://www.brunningandprice.co.uk/_downloads/telegraph/tele...
(Not quite London to Australia though...)
In the late-1700s/early-1800s the Admiralty Telegraph was used to relay messages between London and Portsmouth (70 odd miles apart) using a semaphore type system with repeater stations every 10 miles or so.