Let’s do another ‘Jewish Invention’ myth with the claim made by Pam Karp (1) as well as other such as Nicolas Slonimsky in ‘Commentary’ magazine (2) that a jew invented the electrical telegraph which revolutionized communication in the nineteenth century and laid the foundations for modern electronic communications.
Karp and Slonimsky both list Hayyim Slonimski – more accurately Chaim Selig Slonimski - as the inventor of the electrical telegraph a claim which was ironically (and falsely) trumpeted by Joseph Stalin as a ‘Russian achievement’ in a speech in 1952. (3)
But what is the truth?
The concept of telegraphy is an old one with one of the first known systems of telegraphy having been developed by the Greek writer Aeneas Tacticus – not to be confused with the famous later Roman writer Publius Cornelius Tacitus – of the fourth century B.C. (4) and mentioned by Polybius (5) then continued via various different incarnations till the mid-eighteenth century when in 1753 an anonymous writer in the ‘Scots Magazine’ suggested and explained how to create an electrical telegraph. (6)
Next after some false starts in both France and Germany we have the origin of the electrical telegraph as summarized well and in detail by the website ‘Edubilla’:
‘The first working electrostatic telegraph was built by the English inventor Francis Ronalds. He laid down eight miles of wire in insulated glass tubing in his garden and connected both ends to two clocks marked with the letters of the alphabet. Electrical impulses sent along the wire were used to transmit messages. He offered his invention to the Admiralty, describing it as "a mode of conveying telegraphic intelligence with great rapidity, accuracy, and certainty, in all states of the atmosphere, either at night or in the day, and at small expense." However, there was little official enthusiasm for his device in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. He published an account of his apparatus in the 1823 Descriptions of an Electrical Telegraph, and of some other Electrical Apparatus.
The telegraph invented by Baron Schilling von Canstatt in 1832 had a transmitting device which consisted of a keyboard with 16 black-and-white keys. These served for switching the electric current. The receiving instrument consisted of six galvanometers with magnetic needles, suspended from the silk threads. Both stations of Shilling's telegraph were connected by eight wires; six were connected with the galvanometers, one served for the return current and one - for a signal bell. When at the starting station the operator pressed a key, the corresponding pointer was deflected at the receiving station. Different positions of black and white flags on different disks gave combinations which corresponded to the letters or numbers. Pavel Shilling subsequently improved its apparatus. He reduced the number of connecting wires from eight to two.
On 21 October 1832, Schilling managed a short-distance transmission of signals between two telegraphs in different rooms of his apartment. In 1836 the British government attempted to buy the design but Schilling instead accepted overtures from Nicholas I of Russia. Schilling's telegraph was tested on a 5-kilometre-long (3.1 mi) experimental underground and underwater cable, laid around the building of the main Admiralty in Saint Petersburg and was approved for a telegraph between the imperial palace at Peterhof and the naval base at Kronstadt. However, the project was cancelled following Schilling's death in 1837.Schilling was also one of the first to put into practice the idea of the binary system of signal transmission.
In 1833, Carl Friedrich Gauss, together with the physics professor Wilhelm Weber in Göttingen installed a 1,200-metre-long (3,900 ft) wire above the town's roofs. Gauss combined the Poggendorff-Schweigger multiplicator with his magnetometer to build a more sensitive device, the galvanometer. To change the direction of the electric current, he constructed a commutator of his own. As a result, he was able to make the distant needle move in the direction set by the commutator on the other end of the line.
At first, they used the telegraph to coordinate time, but soon they developed other signals; finally, their own alphabet. The alphabet was encoded in a binary code which was transmitted by positive or negative voltage pulses which were generated by means of moving an induction coil up and down over a permanent magnet and connecting the coil with the transmission wires by means of the commutator. The page of Gauss' laboratory notebook containing both his code and the first message transmitted, as well as a replica of the telegraph made in the 1850s under the instructions of Weber are kept in the faculty of physics of Göttingen University.
Gauss was convinced that this communication would be a help to his kingdom's towns. Later in the same year, instead of a Voltaic pile, Gauss used an induction pulse, enabling him to transmit seven letters a minute instead of two. The inventors and university were too poor to develop the telegraph on their own, but they received funding from Alexander von Humboldt. Carl August Steinheil in Munich was able to build a telegraph network within the city in 1835-6. He installed a telegraph line along the first German railroad in 1835.
Across the Atlantic, in 1836 an American scientist, Dr. David Alter, invented the first known American electric telegraph, in Elderton, Pennsylvania, one year before the Morse telegraph. Alter demonstrated it to witnesses but never developed the idea into a practical system.He was interviewed later for the book Biographical and Historical Cyclopedia of Indiana and Armstrong Counties, in which he said: "I may say that there is no connection at all between the telegraph of Morse and others and that of myself.... Professor Morse most probably never heard of me or my Elderton telegraph.’ (7)
Put another way: English inventor Francis Ronalds first invented the electrical telegraph in 1823 then Baron Pavel Lvovitch Schilling independently demonstrated his own electrical telegraph in October 1832 – in fact he’d similarly demonstrated a different working prototype of an electrical telegraph in 1828 as well – (8) which was then independently invented in a different form by the Germans Carl Friedrich Gauss and Wilhelm Weber in 1833.
It is worth noting that Schilling was not in fact Russian but rather a Baltic aristocrat of distinctly German origin which is why Stalin’s 1952 claim is simply ridiculous.
Now what of Chaim Selig Slonimski?
Well, his electrical telegraph machine was first invented in 1856 – thirty-three years after Ronalds had invented the electrical telegraph in England in 1823 – and was actually an alleged improvement of the existing telegraph to send more messages at one time. (9)
So – as with the claim that jews invented the mechanical calculator/adding machine which Slonimski also features in because he invented an adding machine in 1842 – (10) no jews did not invent the electrical telegraph: Englishmen and Germans did!
References
(1) https://www.geni.com/projects/Jewish-Inventors/12388
(2) http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/my-grandfather-invented-the-telegraph/
(3) https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/2015-05-15/ty-article/.premium/1904-rabbi-astronomer-honored-by-russia-dies/0000017f-e5d3-da9b-a1ff-edff9f510000
(4) David Newton, 1997, ‘Encyclopedia of Cryptology’, 1st Edition, ABC-Clio: Santa Barbara, p. 7
(5) Polybius, Hist., 10:44-45
(6) E. A. Marland, 1964, ‘Early Electrical Communication’, 1st Edition, Abelard-Schuman: London, pp. 17-19
(7) https://edubilla.com/invention/electrical-telegraph/
(8) Anatoly Vasilevich Yarotsky, 1963, ‘Pavel Lvovich Schilling 1786-1837’, 2nd Edition, Publishing House of the USSR Academy of Sciences: Moscow, p. 84
(9) https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/13804-slonimski-hayyim-selig
(10) Ibid.; for a debunking of the myth that jews invented the mechanical calculator/adding machine see my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/jewish-invention-myths-the-mechanical