Telegraphs. An Account of Their Hundred Year Journey
The telegraph service, which in its day was seen as a sign of society’s progress, was eventually superseded by the growing number of telecommunications services, and is now becoming just a memory.
There are few accounts of what the telegraph service was like, and many of them tell the story in a rather circumstantial way when talking about the history of the telephone service or the different types of radio communication.
The author of this book, the recently late Sebastián Olivé, has tried to provide an outline of the history of the telegraph service rendered by the Telegraph Corps in Spain, telling it from the insider’s view of a telegraphist, the “creator” of a number of the events being narrated, while remaining fully aware that it might turn out to be a story which is rather less than objective.
The author tackles the way the organisation of the telegraph personnel evolved, the constant modernisation of the communication equipment and the systems being used (here perhaps with a special emphasis, since this is the field in which the author worked) and also the administrative and political events which have affected the telegraph service during the nearly 150 years of its existence.