Category: invention

Calendar: December 14

A Year: Day to Day Men: 14th of December

Crouching in Socks and Sneakers

On the fourteenth of December in 1782, the Montgolfier brothers, Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne, performed the first test-flight of an unmanned hot air balloon in France. 

The Montgolfier brothers were born into a family of paper manufacturers. Joseph-Michel was the twelfth child of Pierre Montgolfier and Anne Duret; Jacques-Étienne was the fifteenth child and was later sent to Paris to train as an architect. After the death of the eldest son who was his father’s business successor, Étienne was recalled from Paris to long the family’s paper manufacturing business. 

Both Joseph-Michel and Étienne were talented innovators and inventors. Joseph-Michel invented the self-acting hydraulic ram in 1796 and Étienne founded the first paper-making vocational school in France. For their business, the brothers together invented a process to manufacture transparent paper vellum, suitable for use in situations where tracing was required. As avid balloonists, they invented the Montgolfière-style hot air balloon, a globe aèrostatique, with which Jacques Étienne made the first piloted ascent by humans in 1783.

Interested in aeronautics, Joseph-Michel had built parachutes as early as 1775. Watching the embers rising from a fire, he wondered is the same force could be used for a military air assault. Joseph-Michel  believed that the smoke was the buoyant force which lifted the embers; from that assumption he preferred to use smoldering fuel for his experiments. He built a test structure of a very thin wood box with a light-weight taffeta cloth lid. After lighting crumbled paper in the box, the structure lifted off the stand and touched the ceiling. 

After recruiting Étienne through an urgent message, the brothers built a similar structure but three times the size with a volume twenty-seven times greater. On December 14th of 1782, they ignited the wood and hay in the fire box; the lifting force was more than expected and they lost control of the craft. The device floated nearly two kilometers but was destroyed after landing by a passing citizen.

Calendar: September 25

A Year: Day to Day Men: 25th of September

The Source of Inspiration

On September 25, 1906 Leonardo Torres Quevedo successfully demonstrated his Telekino before a crowd in Bilboa, Spain.

Torres Quevedo traveled throughout Europe, studying the scientific and technical advances of the day, especially in the initial stages of the science of electricity. He returned to Spain, set up residence in Santander where he began a regiment of study and investigation. From the work Quevedo accomplished from 1890 to 1899, the cultural institution Athenaeum of Madrid created the Laboratory of Applied Mechanics of which he was named director. The same year, he entered the Royal Academy of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences in Madrid, which he later presided over in 1910.

In early 1910, Torres Quevedo began to construct a chess automaton, that was able to automatically play a king and rook endgame against king from any position, without any human intervention. This device was demonstrated in Paris in 1914 and is considered the world’s first computer game. In the prototype, mechanical arms moved the pieces; later in 1920, electromagnets under the board was used for this task.

Torres Quevedo demonstrated twice, in 1914 and in 1920, that all of the cogwheel functions of a calculating machine, like that of inventor Charles Babbage’s design, could be implemented using electromechanical parts. Quevedo’s 1914 analytical machine used a small memory built with electromagnets; his 1920 machine used a typewriter to receive its commands and print its results.

Torres Quevedo presented the Telekino with a lecture and a demonstration at the Paris Academy of Science in 1903. He obtained a patent in that year covering the territories of France, Spain, Great Britain and the United States. The Telekino consisted of a robot that executed commands transmitted by electromagnetic waves. It constituted the world’s second publicly demonstrated apparatus for radio control and was a pioneer in the field of remote control. On September 25, 1906, In the presence of the King of Spain and a great crowd, Torres Quevedo successfully demonstrated the Telekino in the port of Balboa, Spain, guiding a boat from the shore. With his Telekino, Torres Quevedo created wireless remote-control operation principles.

In 1916 King Alfonso XIII of Spain bestowed the Echegaray Medal upon Torres Quevedo. The Sorbonne of Paris named him an Honorary Doctor in 1922; and he was named one of the twelve associated members of the Academy in 1927. In 2007, the prestigious Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers dedicated a Milestone Award in Electrical Engineering and Computing to Quevedo’s Telekino.

Calendar: June 21

A Year: Day to Day Men: 21st of June

Pastel Study in Blues and Pinks

The original Ferris wheel opened to the public on June 21, 1893 at the World’s Columbian Exposition.

George Washington Gate Ferris Jr. was a graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a Pittsburgh bridge-builder. He began his career in the railroad industry and then pursued an interest in bridge building. Ferris understood the growing need for structural steel and founded G.W.G. Ferris & Co. in Pittsburgh, a firm that tested and inspected metals for railroads and bridge builders.

The buttressed steel wheel that Ferris designed was truly original—so much so that the structure’s design had to be derived from basic assumptions because no one actually had experience constructing a machine of this size. By the winter of 1892, Ferris had the acquired the $600,000 in funding he needed but had just four months of the coldest winter in living memory to complete construction before the expo opened. To meet the deadline, Ferris split the wheel’s construction among several local machine shops and constructed individual component sets congruently and assembled everything on-site.

Construction crews first struggled with laying the wheel’s foundation. The site’s soil was frozen solid three feet deep overlaying another 20 feet of sand that exhibited liquefaction whenever crews attempted to drive piles. To counter the effects of the sand, engineers continually pumped steam into the ground to thaw it, then drove piles 32 feet deep into the bedrock to lay steel beams and poured eight concrete and masonry piers measuring 20 x 20 x 35 feet.

These pylons would support the twin 140-foot towers upon which the wheel’s central 45-ton, 45-foot-long, 33-inch-wide axle would rest. The wheel section measured 250 feet across, 825 feet around, and supported thirty-six enclosed wooden cars that each held up to sixty riders. Ten-inch steam pipes fed a pair of one thousand horsepower engines—a primary and a reserve—that powered the wheel’s movement. Three thousand of Edison’s new-fangled light bulbs lit up the wheel’s supports.

The Ferris Wheel opened on June 21, 1893 on the first day of the Exposition and ran until November 6th of that year. A fifty cent fare entitled the rider to an initial six-stop revolution as the passengers filled the cars and then a nine-minute continuous revolution with views across Lake Michigan and parts of four states. The attraction was a success, earning $726,805 during the Exposition. By 1906, after operating for thirteen years in three locations, the original Ferris Wheel had fallen into disrepair and was slated for demolition. It required three hundred pounds of dynamite to completely level the wheel and shatter its foundations.

Calendar: June 4

A Year: Day to Day Men: 4th of June

Modern Man in the Ancient Wood

On June 4, 1783, a hot-air balloon was demonstrated by Joseph and Jacques Montgolfier.

The Montgolfier brothers Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne were born into a family of paper manufacturers founded in 1534 in Annonay, France. Of the two brothers, it was Joseph who was first interested in aeronautics: as early as 1775 he was building and experimenting with parachutes. He first contemplated building machines when he observed laundry drying over a fire incidentally form pockets that billowed upwards.

While living in Avignon in November of 1782 he made his first definitive experiments. Joseph Montgolfier built a box-like chamber out of very thin wood, and covering the sides and top with lightweight taffeta cloth. He crumpled and lit some paper under the bottom of the box. The contraption quickly lifted off its stand and collided with the ceiling.

Joseph recruited his brother Jacques to balloon building. They built a similar device, however scaled up to three times the dimensions of the original, making it 27 times greater in volume. They did their first test flight on December 14, 1782, lighting wool and hay underneath. The lifting power was so great, that they lost control of the craft. The device floated nearly two kilometers and was destroyed, after landing, by a passerby.

To make a public demonstration and to claim its invention the brothers constructed a globe-shaped balloon of sackcloth tightened with three thin layers of paper inside. The envelope could contain nearly 28,000 cubic feet of air and weighed 500 pounds. It was constructed of four pieces (the dome and three lateral bands) and held together by 1,800 buttons. A reinforcing fish net of cord covered the outside of the envelope.

The Montgolfier brothers flew the balloon at Annonay on June 4, 1783 in front of a group of dignitaries. The flight covered 2 km (1.2 mi), lasted 10 minutes, and had an estimated altitude of 5,200-6,600 feet. Word of their success quickly reached Paris. Étienne went to the capital to make further demonstrations and to solidify the brothers’ claim to the invention of flight.

On September 19, 1783, the Montgolfiers’ new balloon Aerostat Revelillon was flown with the first living beings in a basket attached to the balloon: a sheep called Montauciel, a duck and a rooster. The flight covered two miles at an altitude of 1500 feet and lasted eight minutes: it landed safely with all aboard surviving. Since the animals survived, King Louis XVI, who had witnessed the flight, allowed flights to proceed with human passengers.

Calendar: May 20

 

A Year: Day to Day Men: 20th of May

Within the Hedge

The Kinetoscope, an early motion picture exhibition device, was first publicly displayed on May 20, 1891.

First described in conceptual terms by Thomas Edison in 1888, the Kinetoscope was largely developed by Edison Labs employee William Kennedy Laurie Dickson between 1889 and 1892, leading most modern scholars to assign Dickson with the major credit for turning the concept into a practical reality.

Only sporadic work was done on the Kinetoscope for much of 1890 as Dickson concentrated on Edison’s unsuccessful venture into ore milling. By early 1891, however, Dickson, his new chief assistant, William Heise, and another lab employee, Charles Kayser, had succeeded in devising a functional strip-based film viewing system. In the new design, whose mechanics were housed in a wooden cabinet, a loop of horizontally configured 19 mm film ran around a series of spindles.

The film, with a single row of perforations engaged by an electrically powered sprocket wheel, was drawn continuously beneath a magnifying lens. An electric lamp shone up from beneath the film, casting its circular-format images onto the lens and thence through a peephole atop the cabinet. A rapidly spinning shutter permitted a flash of light so brief that each frame appeared to be frozen. This rapid series of apparently still frames appeared, thanks to the persistence of vision phenomenon, as a moving image.

Dickson, himself, starred in the first public demonstration, which was given on a prototype Kinetoscope at the laboratory for approximately 150 members of the National Federation of Women’s Clubs on May 20, 1891. When the women looked through the peephole, they saw a man who bowed his head, smiled, and waved his hands holding his hat. Dickson was the man in the 3-second-long movie, which is often referred to as “Dickson Greeting”.

The premiere of the completed Kinetoscope did not come until May 9, 1893, at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences. Instrumental to the birth of American movie culture, the Kinetoscope also had a major impact in Europe; its influence abroad was magnified by Edison’s decision not to seek international patents on the device, facilitating numerous imitations of and improvements on the technology.

Calendar: April 27

A Year: Day to Day Men: 27th of April

Natural Extension into Space

April 27 1791 was the birthdate of Samuel Finley Breese Morse, the American painter and inventor.

In England, Morse perfected his painting techniques under the watchful eye of notable artist Washington Allston; by the end of 1811, he gained admittance to the Royal Academy. At the Academy, he was moved by the art of the Renaissance and paid close attention to the works of Michelangelo and Raphael. After observing and practicing life drawing and absorbing its anatomical demands, the young artist produced his masterpiece, “The Dying Hercules” after first making a sculpture as a study for the painting.

In 1825, Samuel Morse decided to explore a means of rapid long distance communication. While returning by ship from Europe in 1832, he encountered Charles Thomas Jackson, a man from Boston well schooled in electromagnetism. Witnessing various experiments with Jackson’s electromagnet, Morse developed the concept of a single-wire telegraph. In time the Morse code, which he developed became the primary language of telegraphy in the world. It is still the standard for rhythmic transmission of data.

Morse encountered the problem of getting a telegraphic signal to carry over more than a few hundred yards of wire. His breakthrough came from the insights of Professor Leonard Gale, who taught chemistry at New York University. With Gale’s help, Morse introduced extra circuits or relays at frequent intervals and was soon able to send a message through ten miles (16 km) of wire. This was the great breakthrough he had been seeking. Morse and Gale were soon joined by Alfred Vail, an enthusiastic young man with excellent skills, insights, and money.

At the Speedwell Ironworks in Morristown, New York,  on January 11, 1838, Morse and Vail made the first public demonstration of the electric telegraph. Although Morse and Alfred Vail had done most of the research and development in the ironworks facilities, they chose a nearby factory house as the demonstration site. The first public transmission, with the message, “A patient waiter is no loser”, was witnessed by a mostly local crowd.

On May 24, 1844, a 38 mile line financed by Congress and stretching between Washington D.C. and Baltimore,  was officially opened.  Samuel Morse sent the now-famous words, “What hath God wrought” from the Supreme Court chamber in the basement of the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C., to the B&O’s Mount Clare Station in Baltimore.

The Zoetrope: Jumping Frogs

The Zoetrope: Jumping Frogs

“Jumping Frogs”  is a three dimensional carousel from the 2018 Kickstarter company in England called 4-Mation. This is one of four models available. It’s powered by 24 3Watt RGB LED strobes, precision timed by a microcontroller linked to an encoder motor. RPM(Strobe-rate), brightness, colour are all controlled from a phone app. The Android app (4-Mation) is already in the play store, iPhone app is in progress.

Calendar: February 26

Year: Day to Day Men: February 26

Moment of Rest

The twenty-sixth of February in 1870 marks the opening day of New York City’s Beach Pneumatic Transit, the first attempt to build an underground public transit system in the city. This system was a prototype developed by Alfred Ely Beach in 1869 to demonstrate a subway line running on air pressure.

At New York’s 1867 American Institute Exhibition, inventor and patent lawyer Alfred Ely Beach demonstrated a basic subway model in which air pressure pushed cars through a tubular tunnel. After a successful demonstration, Beach founded the Beach Pneumatic Transit Company in 1869 for the construction of a pneumatically powered subway line beneath Broadway, one of the main commercial arteries in New York City. He financed the full-scale test project himself in the amount of three hundred-fifty thousand dollars.

Alfred Beach, however had no political support for the project as William Magear Tweed, the political boss of Tammany Hall and third largest land owner in New York City, refused to give his approval. In order to start the project, Beach claimed he was building a postal tube system. This was a pneumatic system, already established in London and Paris, that quickly transported tubular cylinders containing small packages, mail, paperwork, and currency. Beach was granted an initial permit to install a pair of postal tubes beneath Broadway; it was later amended by Tweed to allow a single large tunnel in which a system of tubes would reside.

Construction on the Beach tunnel was completed in fifty-eight days. It extended for approximately three-hundred feet from the intersection of Warren Street and Broadway, directly across from City Hall,  and ended at Murray Street and Broadway. Built through the use of a tunneling shield, a temporary structure that shields workers from falling materials or cave-ins, the subway opened to the public on the twenty-sixth of February in 1870 and operated as a demonstration until 1873. 

The Beach Pneumatic Transit ran only a single car on its track from the Warren Street to Murray Street, the distance of one city block. Riders paid a fare of twenty-five cents for the experience, with proceeds given to the Union Home and School for Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Orphans. The Warren Street station was elaborately designed with frescoes on the walls lit by zirconia lamps; the interior held statues and a goldfish pond to view while passengers waited for the car.  The ride was controlled by a forty-four short-ton (39,915 kilogram) generator built by Roots Patent Force Rotary Blowers. The air pressure would propel the car forward and, by reversing the baffles on the blower system, the car would return to the original station. The public approved of the system with over four-hundred thousand rides in its operation.

Alfred Beach had problems in getting official permission to expand the system. In 1873, he succeeded in getting permission to expand the system to Central Park, a distance of five miles. However; both public and financial support had waned, mainly from a stock market crash that became known as the Panic of 1873. With the project shut down, the tunnel entrance was sealed and the station reclaimed for other uses. Although the Beach Pneumatic Transit only existed for three years, the project inspired the New York pneumatic tube postal system that Beach had previously, albeit falsely, suggested to William Tweed. Opening in October of 1897, the pneumatic postal system operated continuously in New York City until 1953, except for a suspension of service during World War I to conserve funding for the war effort.

Calendar: January 30

Year: Day to Day Men: January 30

Ginger on White

January 30th of 1910 marks the death of African-American inventor Granville Tailer Woods who registered nearly sixty patents in his lifetime and made vital contributions to the railroad industry. He also made improvements to technological devices such as the telephone, telegraph and phonograph.

Born in Columbus, Ohio in April of 1856, Granville Woods received little education as a young man. As a teenager, he was employed in a variety of work including as  a steel mill worker and an engineer in both a railroad machine shop and onboard the British steamer, Ironsides. Between 1876 and 1878, Woods resided in New York City and took courses in engineering and electricity, subjects he knew were necessary for industry’s future. 

Returning to Ohio in 1878, Woods was employed by the Springfield, Jackson and Pomeroy Railroad Company for eight months and later by the Dayton and Southeastern Railroad Company as an locomotive engineer for thirteen months. It was during this time that he began to form ideas for his later invention, the inductor telegraph. In the spring of 1880, Woods moved to Cincinnati where he founded the Woods Electric Company to develop, manufacture and sell electrical apparatus. In 1884, he filed his first patent for an improved steam boiler furnace; his later patents were predominantly for electrical devises. 

Granville Wood’s 1885 patent for an improved telephone transmitter, which allowed a station to send voice as well as Morse code over a single wire, was purchased by the American Bell Telephone Company owned by Alexander Graham Bell. In 1887, he secured his patent for the creation of a magnetic coiled-wire field, that placed under a train, enabled communication between stations and moving trains by using the ambient static electricity of the existing telegraph lines. Challenged twice in court by Thomas Edison over the rights to this patent, Woods defeated Edison by proving there were no existing devices by which he could have relied on to make his device. 

Woods manufactured a system of overhead electric conducting lines for railroads, an idea he modeled after a system developed by Charles van Depoele. Wood’s 1888 patent relied on wire brushes to make connections with metallic terminal heads, without exposing wires, through electrical contact rails. Once the train car had passed, the wires were no longer live and risk of injury was diminished. The invention was successfully tested in 1892 on the Figure Eight Roller Coaster in Coney Island. Patented in 1893, Woods sold the patent to General Electric in 1901.

In 1896, Granville Woods patented a system for controlling electrical lights in theaters, which became known as the safety dimmer. This device was safe and efficient and saved theaters forty per cent of electricity use. Between 1902 and 1907, Woods patented twelve devices that made improvements on the country’s railway system. Among these were devices that improved motor and vehicle control, automatic air brakes, and safety apparatus.

The first African American mechanical and electrical engineer after the Civil War, Granville Tailer Woods died of a cerebral hemorrhage at New York City’s Harlem Hospital on the 30th of January in 1910. His burial at St. Michael’s Cemetery in East Elmhurst, New York was without headstone or ceremony. In 1975 with donations from cooperations that used Woods’s patents, a headstone was erected at his grave site. In 2006, Granville T. Woods was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Alexandria, Virginia.

Calendar: January 9

Year: Day to Day Men: January 9

Betty Boop Coffee

On the ninth of January in 1839, French painter and physicist Louis Daguerre presented a full description of his daguerreotype process to a meeting of the Academy of Sciences held by the eminent astronomer and physicist François Arago, the man who proved the wave theory of light. 

The first permanent photograph from nature was made by French inventor Nicéphore Niépee in 1826 through his heliographic process; however, the quality of the image was poor and the process required an exposure time of eight hours. Daguerre’s daguerreotype process, the first practical process of photography, improved the quality of the image and reduced to exposure time to thirty minutes.

Born in Cormeilles-en-Parisis, in November of 1787, Louis Daguerre apprenticed in theater design, architecture and panoramic painting under Pierre Prévost. He was originally a revenue officer and later a scene painter for opera sets. In 1822, Daguerre opened the Diorama, an exhibition venue in Paris which presented three-dimensional pictorial views that changed with various lighting effects. He later opened a second establishment in London’s Regent Park.

Born in Chalon-sur-Saône in March of 1765, Nicéphore Niépee initially began experimenting in 1813 in the recently developed printing technique, lithography. Unskilled in drawing and unable to obtain a proper lithographic stone, he sought a way to make images automatically. Niépee made experiments and developed the heliographic process of using light and light-sensitive supports to produce images. He initially used a substrate of light-sensitive bitumen of Judea, which hardened on exposure to light, to obtain an image on glass. With the use of a camera in 1826, he was able to fix an image on a metal plate made of pewter. However, Niépee was unable to reduce the exposure time by either optical or chemical means.

In 1829, Nicéphore Niépee agreed to the repeated requests by Louis Daguerre for a partnership to perfect and exploit his heliography process. After four years of working without any advancement, Niépee died in July of 1833. Deguerre, building upon Niépee’s discoveries, eventually succeeded in greatly reducing the exposure time. He also discovered that exposing an iodized silver plate in a camera would result in a lasting image if the latent image on the plate was developed by exposure to fumes of mercury and then made permanent by a solution of common salt. 

For this discovery, Louis Daguerre was appointed an officer of the Legion of Honor. In 1839, he and the heir of Nicéphore Niépee were assigned annuities of six-thousand and four-thousand Francs, respectively, in return for their photographic process. 

Notes: Lithography was invented circa 1796 in Germany by the Bavarian playwright Alois Senefelder. By chance, he discovered the ability to duplicate his scripts by writing then in greasy crayon on slabs of limestone and them printing them with rolled-on ink. As the local limestone retained the crayon marks on its surface, multiple images, called lithographs meaning in Latin stone marks, could be printed in large quantities. It was not until 1820 that lithography became commercially popular.

Calendar: January 7

Year: Day to Day Men: January 7

Sending a Message

The seventh of January in 1927 marks the placement of the first official transatlantic telephone call. The call, transmitted by radio waves, was held between Walter S. Gifford, the President of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T), and Sir Evelyn P. Murray, the head of the British General Post Office. 

The telephone call between Walter S. Gifford in New York City and Sir Evelyn P. Murray in London was a shared communication of prepared statements on the significance of the new technology with regards to facilitating business and fostering better understanding. The line was then opened for personal and business-related calls. By the day’s end, a news dispatch had been sent from Europe to  America and over six million dollars worth of business had been transacted. The Gifford-Murray call was recorded for its historical significance and resides in the collection of the Library of Congress, Washington DC.

Before the telephone, long distance communication was conducted through letters, early models of fax machines, and telegraphs. Over a period of several years, the telephone was developed by inventors and businessmen; however, the definitive inventor of the telephone is still a matter of controversy. In 1840, American electrical experimenter and professor Charles Grafton Page discovered a way to use electricity passing through a wire to make sound. During the 1850s, Italian inventor Antonio Santi Giuseppe Meucci developed a voice-communication apparatus that connected his Staten Island, New York, laboratory to his second-floor bedroom.

In 1871, Antonio Meucci submitted a patent caveat, the required legal document, for his telephonic device to the United States Patent Office; however, there was no mention of electromagnetic transmission of voice sound in his granted patent request. In 1876,  Scottish-born Canadian-American inventor Alexander Graham Bell was granted a patent for the electromagnetic transmission by vocal sound through undulatory electric current.  Elisha Gray, an American electrical engineer who co-founded the Western Electric Manufacturing Company, also played an important part in the development of the telephone with his creation of the liquid transmitter, an important component of Alexander Graham Bell’s patent. 

On the morning 14th of February in 1876, Elisha Gray’s lawyer submitted to the U.S. Patent Office a signed and notarized patent caveat that described a telephone using a liquid transmitter. In the same morning, a lawyer for Alexander Graham Bell submitted Bell’s application. The question of whose patent application had precedence became controversial. When proof of Bell’s invention of the liquid transmitter idea was required, Bell pointed to an earlier application which used mercury as a circuit breaker. This argument was accepted as proof even though mercury would not have worked in a telephone transmitter. Bell’s amendment to his claim enabled him to acquire U. S. patent 174, 465 on the 7th of March in 1876 for the invention of the telephone.

 

Calendar: January 5

A Year: Day to Day Men: 5th of January

A Cyclist in Blue

On January 5, 1903, the general public could use the Pacific cable for the very first time.

The Commercial Pacific Cable Company was founded in 1901, and ceased operations in October 1951. It provided the first direct telegraph route from America to the Philippines, China, and Japan.

The company was established as a joint venture of three companies: the Commercial Cable Company (25%), the Great Northern Telegraph Company (25%), and the Eastern Telegraph Company (50%). Though the Eastern (a British firm) was the majority shareholder, the CPCC was registered in the United States.

The company used cable ships to lay its undersea cable across the Pacific Ocean from America’s west coast. The cables extended a length of 6,912 miles (11,124 km) and the project cost about $12 million. Before this, messages had to travel across the Atlantic to the Far East via Cape Town, South Africa, and the Indian Ocean, or by way of London to Russia, then across the Russian landline to Vladivostok, then by submarine cable to Japan and the Philippines.

The first section of cable was laid in 1902 by the cable ship CS Silvertown from Ocean Beach, adjacent to the famous Cliff House in San Francisco to Honolulu. It began operating on January 1, 1903. Later that year, cables were laid from Honolulu to Midway Atoll, thence to Guam, thence to Manila. The cables carried the first message to ever travel around the globe from US President Theodore Roosevelt on July 4, 1903. He wished “a happy Independence Day to the US, its territories and properties…” It took only nine minutes for the message to travel worldwide, an incredibly short time compared to past history.

French Encryption Machine

French Encryption Machine, !6th Century, Court of Henry the Second

This is in collection of the Musée National de la Renaissance in Paris.

Essentially all ciphers remained vulnerable to cryptanalysis using the frequency analysis technique until the development of the polyalphabetic cipher, most clearly by Leon Battista Alberti around the year 1467, though there is some indication that it was already known to Al-Kindi.

Alberti’s innovation was to use different ciphers (i.e., substitution alphabets) for various parts of a message (perhaps for each successive plaintext letter at the limit). He also invented what was probably the first automatic cipher device, a wheel which implemented a partial realization of his invention.

In the polyalphabetic Vigenère cipher, encryption uses a key word, which controls letter substitution depending on which letter of the key word is used. In the mid-19th century Charles Babbage showed that the Vigenère cipher was vulnerable to Kasiski examination, but this was first published about ten years later by Friedrich Kasiski.