20 Ways People Communicated Across Oceans Before The Internet

In 1817, Captain Frederick Marryat of the British Royal Navy published his Code of Signals for the Merchant Service. It used around 10 basic colored, numbered flags that were hoisted up a ship’s mast so that each ship could signal its name, destination, distress, and hazards to other ships or to a shore-based signal post without the need for a common language. This became the de facto standard of signaling between ships at sea internationally for many years.

Before the end of the 1830s, it took sailing ships anywhere from three weeks to two months to carry mail between Europe and America. By April 1838, steamers such as the Sirius and the Great Western proved that steam could indeed carry ships across the Atlantic. In 1839, Canadian merchant Samuel Cunard obtained a British mail contract, and Cunard Line made its first regular steamship trip with the RMS Britannia from Liverpool to Boston, carrying mail, on July 4, 1840.

It was American businessman Cyrus Field who financed the laying of the first transatlantic telegraph cable from Ireland to Newfoundland in 1858. On August 16, Queen Victoria sent a 98-word message to US President James Buchanan, which took almost 16 hours to get through. However, electrician Wildman Whitehouse overloaded the line with too much voltage, and it broke down completely within weeks. The more substantial cable laid in 1866 by the steamship Great Eastern meant that transatlantic telegraphy was here to stay.

After the permanent transatlantic cable was laid in 1866, a commercial cablegram cost £20 for 20 words or less. Corporations pushed back with cablese, a kind of compressed telegraphic shorthand, and codebooks, such as the ABC Telegraphic Code, which allowed a five-letter word such as UNIFY to mean “buy 1,000 shares at market.”

In 1869, the inventor Henry Mance built the heliograph, an adjustable mirror on a tripod that flashed beams of concentrated sunlight in Morse code. Coastal and naval forces used it to send messages along parts of the sea, such as the Strait of Gibraltar, from 30 to 50 miles out to sea with no cables or radio needed. But the heliograph only worked in clear weather. Clouds, fog, or darkness shut it down.

People have been tossing glass bottles into the sea for hundreds of years. Sometimes people did it for fun, and sometimes they wanted to pass on a message or learn more about ocean currents. From 1885 to 1888, Prince Albert I of Monaco threw 1,698 sealed glass bottles and weighted floats into the North Atlantic, each carrying a short message in 10 languages asking the finder to reply with the date and place of recovery. The purpose of the exercise was to study the Gulf Stream and chart the principal routes of the North Atlantic Drift.

Ocean liners once had pigeon lofts, called colombiers. Shipping lines such as the French Line and news agencies such as Reuters would release birds carrying tiny written or microphotographed notes, up to 100-300 miles out from the coast. The birds would then fly back to their specific lofts on land, allowing for news of a ship’s arrival, as well as the passengers on board, to hit the shore hours before the vessel itself reached port.

A series of postal treaties in 1891 resulted in the establishment of Sea Post Offices aboard ships such as the Kaiser Wilhelm II and the Olympic. The post offices allowed postal clerks from the US and Europe to sort mail while the ship was at sea into regional bags for delivery once the ship’s roughly six-day journey was complete. As soon as a ship docked in New York, Southampton, or Hamburg, the mail would be waiting to go back onto trains.

On December 12, 1901, the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi attempted to send a wireless message over the Atlantic Ocean. From his station at Poldhu in Cornwall, England, he sent electromagnetic pulses using a spark-gap transmitter. The signals were picked up at Signal Hill in Newfoundland, where his antenna was a wire suspended high above the ground on a kite. He listened to the signals through an earphone and was able to hear three faint clicks. It was Morse code for the letter “S” that had been transmitted over the 2,100-mile expanse of sea.

In August 1901, the New York Herald partnered with the Marconi Company to install a wireless station on the Nantucket Shoals Lightship, which was anchored 42 miles off the coast of Nantucket, Massachusetts. It transmitted the first ocean passenger telegram on August 16, 1901, sent from the Cunard steamer RMS Lucania and forwarded to a shore station for transmission on to Manhattan over landlines.

It was more difficult to lay cable under the Pacific Ocean, where the water was deeper and the distance greater than on the Atlantic route. In October of 1902, the British Empire finished laying its All Red Line cable across the Pacific Ocean, and in July of 1903, the Commercial Pacific Cable Company laid a 7,800-mile-long cable from San Francisco to Manila. On July 4, 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt sent a message around the world via telegraph, and he got his reply back in 12 minutes.

The choice of SOS as a distress signal at the 1906 Berlin International Radiotelegraphic Convention, for implementation in 1908, had nothing to do with its meaning as Save Our Souls. It was chosen for its distinct signal pattern in Morse code, and was standard long before the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. In 1909, the RMS Republic collided with the SS Florida in a dense fog near Nantucket. Operator Jack Binns was able to transmit CQD, the older distress call still in common use, to rescue vessels more than 60 miles away and received help that ultimately saved over 1,500 passengers and crew members.

The Aldis lamp was invented by Arthur Cyril Webb Aldis in the early 1900s. It used a tilting mirror or shutter to flash directional beams of light. In the 1910s, military personnel used the lamps to send Morse code at up to 12 words per minute, 5 to 10 miles out to sea during the night or in heavy fog. Unlike a lighthouse that transmits in all directions, or a radio transmission that anyone can listen in on, the Aldis lamp beamed its message in one direction to one receiver.

On November 29, 1924, RCA engineer Richard H. Ranger gave a demonstration of his “photoradiogram”, a kind of wireless radio-facsimile. Instead of a telephoto machine running along a telegraph wire, a transmitter at a location in London scanned a photograph and converted the pattern of light and dark into variations in a radio signal. This signal was transmitted 3,000 miles to New York, where it could be reconstructed by an ink-based facsimile receiver in roughly 20 or 25 minutes. The first photo Ranger sent over the air was a portrait of US President Calvin Coolidge.

AT&T and the British General Post Office launched a commercial transatlantic telephone service on January 7, 1927, employing the wireless radio technology that Marconi had proved possible in 1901. The call was made from New York, sent over a transmitter on Long Island, carried for approximately 3,000 miles by radio to Scotland, then transferred to a landline into London. The rate was $75 for three minutes, which is more than $1,200 in current dollars, putting it well out of reach for ordinary callers.

The first commercial airship to make an Atlantic crossing was the German Graf Zeppelin, which took over 50,000 postcards and letters from Friedrichshafen, Germany, to Lakehurst, New Jersey, in October 1928. In the 1930s, it carried regular airmail and passengers between Europe and North and South America, taking about 60 hours for a South Atlantic crossing, roughly half the time of the fastest liners. Commercial service ended after a sister airship, the Hindenburg, caught fire and crashed in 1937.

On July 22, 1929, a Heinkel seaplane loaded with mail was fired from the deck of the German liner SS Bremen by compressed air, some 300-500 miles offshore, and flown ahead to either New York or Plymouth. This expedited mail delivery by 12 to 36 hours compared to waiting for the liner to dock at its destination.

In the 1920s, engineers found that short waves of high frequencies were reflected by the ionosphere, a layer of the upper atmosphere. Radio signals could bounce off the ionosphere, skip over oceans and continents, and travel beyond the horizon in ways that regular radio couldn’t. On December 19, 1932, the BBC began sending news reports every day over the Atlantic and Indian Oceans with its Empire Service from Daventry, England. That same year, King George V of Britain made the first live transoceanic Christmas broadcast.

The Boeing 314 flying boat Yankee Clipper of Pan American Airways made the first scheduled transatlantic airmail flight, departing from Port Washington, New York, on May 20, 1939, with 112,574 letters. It traveled via the Azores to Lisbon and Marseille. Some sources have cited 180,000 letters. It was not an experimental aviator like Charles Lindbergh doing a solo effort, but rather a scheduled commercial air service. And since these were flying boats, landing on the water, they didn’t need a long concrete runway.

In 1942, the increase in mail volume began to outpace the military cargo space available for overseas shipping. The U.S. Post Office Department and U.S. military formed a partnership that created Victory Mail (V-Mail). The letters were censored, then photographed onto 16mm microfilm using British Airgraph technology, and shipped via cargo plane. One roll of microfilm could contain 1,700 letters and weighed only 7 ounces, a 98 percent reduction in weight and volume. Over one billion V-Mail letters were sent by 1945.

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