Features or advantages and disadvantages of telegrams

Telegraph has greatly accelerated the circulation of news and is one of the important inventions in industrial society. Early telegrams could only communicate on land, and later submarine cables were used to carry out overseas business.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, radio began to be used to send telegrams, and the telegraph business basically reached most parts of the earth. Telegrams are mainly used to transmit text messages, and those that use telegraph technology to transmit pictures are called faxes.

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First, the way of communication

Before the invention of telegraph, the main ways of long-distance communication were: postal delivery, carrier pigeons, carrier dogs and beacon smoke. Postal service is the delivery of letters to their destinations by specially responsible personnel on horseback or by other means of transportation. It is very expensive to establish a reliable and fast delivery system. First of all, a good road network should be established, and then appropriate postal facilities should be equipped.

It is not feasible in areas with inconvenient transportation. The reliability of communication using homing pigeons is very low, and it is limited by weather and path. Another way of communication is to use signals visible to the naked eye, such as navigation lights, semaphores, lights, etc. to transmit information.

This method is also very expensive, and it is easily affected by weather and terrain. Before the invention of the telegraph, only the most important information was transmitted, which was unbearably slow from today's point of view.

Second, military use.

The civil war that broke out from 1, 18 1 to 1865 was the first time in the world that telegrams were used for military purposes. The warring parties not only used Morse code to communicate between troops, but also cooperated with the newspaper industry to spread battlefield news.

2. 1884 During the Sino-French War, the French army invaded Taiwan Province Province, and Liu Mingchuan, governor of Taiwan Province Province and commander of the Qing army, also made good use of the telegram built during the Ding Richang period to report the war in Taiwan Province Province to the Qing court.

3. 1894 to 1895 During the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895, the Japanese side intercepted the telegram sent back to Beijing by Li Hongzhang, and learned the feelings of the Qing court for reparations and peace.

4. 1905 During the Russo-Japanese War, Japan set up a telegraph monitoring station in Taiwan Province Province, and learned that the Russian Baltic Fleet sailed through the Taiwan Province Strait to rescue the war zones in Lushun and Tsushima Island, which made Japan annihilate the Russian fleet at one stroke.

5. During World War II, the Germans developed the Enigma cipher transmitter, which once made the Allies helpless, but it was finally deciphered by the more advanced cipher machine of the Allies, and the German U-boat fleet commanded by telegraph communication was completely annihilated in the Atlantic naval battle.

6. During the civil war, both sides also used the telegraph encoder/decoder, but the PLA not only intercepted the country's military information by telegraph, but also cooperated with the infiltration personnel behind the enemy lines and the people's hearts to gain an advantage; See also the movie The Listener.

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