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The First Car Phone Was The Civil War Telegraph Wagon
 

This Information appeared in our Sept., 2023 Anagram

A TELEGRAPH BATTERY-WAGON
NEAR PETERSBURG, JUNE 1864
The operator in this photo is receiving a telegraphic message, writing at his little table in the wagon as the machine clicks off. Each battery-wagon was equipped with such an operator's table and attached instruments. A portable battery of one hundred cells furnished the electric current. No feature of the Army of the Potomac contributed more to its success than the field telegraph. Guided by its young chief A.H. Caldwell, its lines bound the corps together like a perfect nervous system, and kept the great controlling head in touch with all its parts. Not until Grant cut loose from Washington and started from Brandy Station for Richmond was its full power tested. Two operators and a few orderlies accompanied each wagon, and the army crossed the Rapidan with the telegraph line going up at the rate of two miles an hour. At no time after that did any corps lose direct communication with the commanding general. At Spotsylvania the Second Corps, at sundown, swung round from the extreme right in the rear of the main body to the left. Ewell saw the movement, and advanced toward the exposed position; but the telegraph signaled the danger, and troops on the double-quick covered the gap before the alert Confederate general could assault the Union lines.  THE MILITARY~TELEGRAPH SERVICE, By A. W. GREELY

Major-General, United States Army

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The actual vehicles that are the ancestors of all our on-line cars were called Telegraph Battery Wagons. Just like the cell phone of today, most of the internal volume was consumed by battery needs. Open your cell phone and you'll find that most of the interior is packed with a form-fitting rechargeable battery. Open one of these telegraph wagons, and you'll find the same thing is true, essentially. Almost all of the wagon was packed with batteries.

Now, keep in mind these aren't the nice, clean, not-scar-you-with-acids batteries we enjoy today. These were likely something closer to a crapload of acid-filled jars. Common telegraph batteries of the era were Daniell Cells, which were, too keep things exciting in a moving wagon, open-topped jars. Closed-jar lead-acid Leclanché batteries, one of the first rechargable battery cells, didn't come around until after the war in 1866.

These Daniell Cell batteries made about 1.1 V each, and the number of batteries needed to send a signal a given distance varied on the type of wire it was sending over. Some estimates give 2V per 20 miles, some much more. Even if we estimate 1V per 10 miles, that's a lot of bulky, leaky batteries to get a useful distance. An average load of batteries for a telegraph battery wagon seems to have been about 100 cells.

In addition to being packed with battery cells, these wagons also had a small area with a telegraph key and a place for a person, very often a civilian contractor, to operate it. This is the key part that makes these clunky wagons so significant. Telegraphs were the first commercial/mainstream use of anything electrical at all, and the placement of a telegraph set in a wagon makes this combination the first electric component in any vehicle, ever. Unless someone finds evidence of a mobile electroplating setup in an ancient Persian chariot, at least.

Since I'm already pretty wildly diverging from our usual motor-driven fare, I may as well keep going, because there's some interesting stuff here. These mobile telegraph wagons would link one another with miles and miles of wire, and then at other points link into the larger established telegraph network. This would allow both inter-camp instant communication and also communication with Washington (or a bit less commonly, Richmond).

Since telegraphs use just one wire with simple coded pulses sent over them, it was very easy to connect these lines — when you have only one wire to connect, it's tricky to get it wrong. That also means the Civil was was the birth of the first cyberwarfare, cyberespionage, and hacking. I'm taking some liberties on the use of "cyber" but you can argue that a virtual electrical, Morse-coded world was made by the telegraph network, and that's roughly analogous to the internet.

Hacking/eavesdropping lines was pretty easy. You'd send some soldier/telegrapher out to a quiet section of telegraph line, and they'd splice in their own wire linking to their own telegraph sounder. That's it. To help combat this, the Union and Confederate armies used two tactics: shoot anyone they saw doing this, and codes.

These codes are especially interesting. According to the Civil War Signals site, an effective Union cipher was to use nonsense words mixed in the real message, and key words would signal a matrix layout for the words, and the order the words were to be read and/or ignored. The resulting encoded messages sound like hilarious dada-poetry:

Washington, D.C.,July 15,1863

A.H. Caldwell, Cipher-operator, General Mead's Headquarters:

Blonde bless of who no optic to get an impression I madison-square Brown cammer Toby ax the have turnip me Harry bitch rustle silk adrian counsel locust you another only of children serenade flea Knox country for wood that awl ties get hound who was war him suicide on for was please village large bat Bunyan give sigh incubus heavy Norris on trammeled cat knit striven without Madrid quail upright martyr Stewart man much bear since ass skeleton tell the oppressing Tyler monkey.

Bates.

Except from Jason Torchinsky, 18 Jan 2013

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