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In 1968 Shirley Chisholm became the first Black woman elected to the United States Congress. In 1972 she launched a campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, breaking another political barrier.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
Alfred Vail | |
|---|---|
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| Born | September 25, 1807 |
| Died | January 18, 1859 (aged 51) Morristown, New Jersey, US |
| Children | Stephen Vail |
| Engineering career | |
| Discipline | Mechanical and electrical engineering |
| Institutions | Magnetic Telegraph Company |
| Projects | Telegraph, Morse code |
| Significant design | Telegraph key, recording telegraph, "dot-and-dash" telegraph alphabet |
Alfred Lewis Vail (September 25, 1807 – January 18, 1859) was an American machinist and inventor. Along with Samuel Morse, Vail was central in developing and commercializing American electrical telegraphy between 1837 and 1844.[1][a]
 | This section needs more citations. (January 2018) |
Vail's parents were Bethiah Youngs (1778–1847) and Stephen Vail (1780–1864). Vail was born in Morristown, New Jersey, where his father was an entrepreneur and industrialist who built the Speedwell Ironworks into one of the most innovative iron works of its time.[2] Their other son George Vail, Alfred's brother, was a noted politician.
Alfred attended public schools before taking a job as a machinist at the iron works. He enrolled in New York University to study theology in 1832, where he was an active and successful student and a member of the Eucleian Society, graduating in 1836.[1]
Visiting his alma mater on September 2, 1837, Vail happened to witness one of Samuel Morse's early telegraph experiments. He became fascinated by the technology and negotiated an arrangement with Morse to develop the technology at Speedwell Ironworks, at his own expense, in return for 25% of the proceeds. Alfred split his share with his brother George Vail. After having secured his father's financial backing, and being a skilled machinist, Vail refined Morse's crude prototype telegraph to make it suitable for public demonstration and commercial operation.
The first successful completion of a transmission with this system was at the Speedwell Iron Works on January 6, 1838, across two miles (3 km) of wire. The message read "A patient waiter is no loser." Over the next few months Morse and Vail demonstrated the telegraph to Philadelphia's Franklin Institute, members of Congress, and President Martin Van Buren and his cabinet. Demonstrations such as these were crucial to Morse's obtaining a Congressional appropriation of $30,000 to build his first line in 1844 from Washington to Baltimore.
Vail and Morse were the first two telegraph operators on Morse's first experimental line between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, and Vail took charge of building and managing several early telegraph lines between 1845 and 1848. He was also responsible for several technical innovations of Morse's system, particularly the first sending key, which Vail invented,[3] and improved recording registers and relay magnets. Vail left the telegraph industry in 1848 because he believed that the managers of Morse's lines did not fully value his contributions.
His last assignment, superintendent of the Washington and New Orleans Telegraph Company, paid him only $900 a year ($26,324 in 2024 US dollars), leading Vail to write to Morse,
I have made up my mind to leave the Telegraph to take care of itself, since it cannot take care of me. I shall, in a few months, leave Washington for New Jersey, ... and bid adieu to the subject of the Telegraph for some more profitable business.[4]
When Morse took on an influential congressman as a partner,[b] Morse cut the Vail brothers' share to one-eighth, although the other partners' shares were not reduced. Morse retained patent rights to all the apparatus and the alphabetic code-system that Vail had developed.
Vail retired from the telegraph operations in 1848 and moved back to Morristown, where he spent his last ten years researching genealogy. Since Alfred and his brother George shared a one-eighth interest in Morse's telegraph patents, Vail realized far less financial gain from his work on the telegraph than Morse and others.
His papers and equipment were subsequently donated by his son Stephen to the Smithsonian Institution and New Jersey Historical Society.
Alfred Vail's cousin, Theodore N. Vail, became the first president of American Telephone & Telegraph.
Alfred Vail and Samuel Morse collaborated in the invention of Morse code.
The "Morse code" that went into operational use after Vail had become involved was very different from Morse's original plan.[c] A controversy exists over the role of each in the invention. The argument for Vail being the original inventor is laid out by several scholars.[6][7][8][d][9][e]
The argument offered by supporters of Morse claims that Morse originally devised a cipher code similar to that used in existing semaphore line telegraphs, by which words were assigned three- or four-digit numbers and entered into a code book. The sending operator converted words to these number groups and the receiving operator converted them back to words through the same code book.
Morse spent several months compiling this code dictionary. It is said by Morse supporters that Vail, in public and private writings, never claimed the code for himself. According to one researcher, in a February 1838 letter to his father, Judge Stephen Vail, Alfred wrote,[5]
Professor Morse has invented a new plan of an alphabet, and has thrown aside the Dictionaries.
In an 1845 book Vail wrote describing Morse's telegraph, he also attributed the code to Morse.[10] He died in 1859 at the age of 51.[11]
A U.S. Army base was named in Vail's honor: Camp Vail in Eatontown, New Jersey, later temporarily renamed Fort Monmouth, was an Army housing complex.
After World War II the families of servicemen and civilian Army employees negotiated with the Army to purchase the development, which they incorporated as the "Alfred Vail Mutual Association". Due to the diligent efforts of the town clerk, the rights of the charter of the original Shrewsbury Township (est. 1693) were transferred to the residents. The housing development exists under that name to this day.
An elementary school in Morristown, New Jersey, near the site of the Speedwell Iron Works, is named Alfred Vail Elementary School in his honor.
Alfred Vail was born on September 25, 1807, in Morristown, New Jersey, where his father, Stephen, operated the Speedwell Iron Works.
subtitle: With the reports of Congress, and a description of all telegraphs known, employing electricity or galvanism
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Source: Wikipedia. Article content is retrieved live through the MediaWiki API.
Alfred Lewis Vail (September 25, 1807 – January 18, 1859) was an American machinist and inventor. Along with Samuel Morse, Vail was central in developing and commercializing American electrical telegraphy between 1837 and 1844.
George Vail (July 21, 1809 – May 23, 1875) was an American Democratic Party politician who represented New Jersey's 4th congressional district in the United States House of Representatives from 1853 to 1857. His father Stephen Vail, and his brother Alfred Vail were the driving force behind the success of the Speedwell Iron Works. Father and sons assisted in the technical expertise and financial development of this family business. The Vail family contributions to mechanical inventions, early communication, transportation industry, and mass production placed Speedwell at the cutting edge of the Industrial Revolution in the United States.
Morse code is a telecommunications method which encodes text characters as standardized sequences of two different signal durations, called dots and dashes, or dits and dahs. It is named after Samuel Morse, one of several developers of the system. Morse's preliminary proposal for a telegraph code was replaced by an alphabet-based code developed by Alfred Vail, the engineer working with Morse. Vail's version was used for commercial telegraphy in North America. Friedrich Gerke simplified Vail's code to produce the code adopted in Europe, and most of the alphabetic part of the (ITU) "Morse" is copied from Gerke's revision. The ITU International Morse code encodes the 26 basic Latin letters A to Z, one accented Latin letter É, the Indo-Arabic numerals 0 to 9, and some punctuation and messaging procedural signals (prosigns). There is no distinction between upper and lower case letters. Each code symbol is formed by a sequence of dits and dahs. The dit duration can vary for signal clarity and operator skill, but for any one message, once the rhythm is established, a half-beat is the basic unit of time measurement. The duration of a dah is three times the duration of a dit. Each dit or dah within an encoded character is followed by a period of signal absence, called a space, equal to the dit duration. The letters of a word are separated by a space of duration equal to three dits, and words are separated by a space equal to seven dits. Morse code can be memorized and sent in a form perceptible to the human senses, e.g. via sound waves or visible light, such that it can be directly interpreted by persons trained in it. Morse code is usually transmitted by on-off keying of an information-carrying medium such as electric current, radio waves, visible light, or sound waves. The current or wave is present during the time period of the dit or dah and absent during the time between dits and dahs. Since many natural languages use more than the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet, Morse alphabets have been developed for those, largely by transliteration of existing codes. To increase transmission efficiency, Vail designed the original alphabetic code so the duration of each symbol was approximately inverse to the frequency that the character it represents occurs in English text. After revisions that led to ITU Morse code, the assignment of codes to characters in a few cases became non-optimal, although many encodings are. For instance, the most common letter in English, E, has the shortest code – a single dit. Because code elements are specified relatively, by proportion, rather than fixed duration, the code is usually sent at the highest rate the receiver is capable of decoding.
A telegraph sounder is an antique electromechanical device used as a receiver on electrical telegraph lines during the 19th century. It was invented by Alfred Vail after 1850 to replace the previous receiving device, the cumbersome Morse register and was the first practical application of the electromagnet. When a telegraph message comes in it produces an audible "clicking" sound representing the short and long keypresses – "dots" and "dashes" – which are used to represent text characters in Morse code. A telegraph operator would translate the sounds into characters representing the telegraph message. The terms "dot" and "dash" originated because the original equipment used the electromagnets to move a pencil that actually marked dots and dashes on a moving strip of paper. This was abandonded because the mechanism was more complicated and failure prone than listening to the sounds. Telegraph networks, used from the 1850s to the 1970s to transmit text messages long distances, transmitted information by pulses of current of two different lengths, called "dots" and "dashes" which spelled out text messages in Morse code. A telegraph operator at the sending end of the line would create the message by tapping on a switch called a telegraph key, which rapidly connects and breaks the circuit to a battery, sending pulses of current down the line. The telegraph sounder was used at the receiving end of the line to make the Morse code message audible. Its simple mechanism was similar to a relay. It consisted of an electromagnet attached to the telegraph line, with an iron armature near the magnet's pole balanced on a pivot, held up by a counterweight. When current flowed through the electromagnet's winding, it created a magnetic field which attracted the armature, pulling it down to the electromagnet, resulting in a "click" sound. When the current ended, the counterweight pulled the armature back up to its resting position, resulting in a "clack" sound. Thus, as the telegraph key at the sending end makes and breaks the contact, the sounder echoes the up and down state of the key. It was important that a sounder make a sound both when the circuit was broken and when it was restored. This was necessary for the operator clearly to distinguish the long and short keypresses – the "dashes" and "dots" – that make up the characters in morse code.
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
MORE →Shirley Chisholm, elected in 1968.
