Online and Offline

(A person typing a message on a cell phone.)

(Abby Brown, host of FIND Iowa, is standing in front of a train depot with a red Rock Island locomotive sitting on the tracks in front.)

[Abby Brown] Lots of us these days receive messages from our friends and families on our phones. But long before there were cell phones, or internet, or computers, people would send and receive messages in the mail, on trains, at depots like this, or via telegraph, which used wires that ran along the railroad tracks.

As important as the railroad was to moving people and goods across our state and country, it also laid the groundwork for communicating electronically.

There was a lot of work that went into laying down railroad tracks and figuring out how to use the land to get that work done. So, stringing a wire for communication along that same railroad track path made sense.

(A person using a telegraph machine. The machine is square and has two knobs at the end with an arm attached at the back of the telegraph and supported above the square with a bracket. The arm has a handle on it that the person pushes down in a specific pattern to make sounds that travel along a wire to a receiver.)

Telegraph operators used those wires to transmit electrical signals in certain patterns that represented the letters of the alphabet. Those letters were put together to make words, and that's how messages were sent.

(A sign that reads “American Morse Code” with the alphabet translated into morse code. For example, “A” with a short dot and a long dash under the “A”. “B” a long dash with three short dots under the “B”, “C” with a long dash a short dot a long dash a short dot under the “C.”)

(A black and white photograph of a woman sitting at a table. There is a handwritten poster attached under the window with American Morse Code written on the poster. The woman has an ear piece up to her ear that is attached to wires leading out of the window. There is a telegraph machine on the table in front of her with wires attached leading out of the window.)

Every town in Iowa was within five miles of a train depot, which allowed people to get their mail that had been delivered on a train. But the depot was also a place to send and receive telegraph messages.

(Inside the depot office is a typewriter sitting on a filing cabinet in front of a large wooden desk with a telegraph machine atop it. Beyond the desk is a service counter with an opening to the passenger waiting area.)

Online and offline are now part of our everyday language. But those words actually have roots in the old railroad telegraph days. When operators were sending electric current down a telegraph line, which means they were sending messages, they would refer to that as online. If they weren't there to send or receive the messages, they were offline.

Or a message could be sent down the telegraph line that said train online. That meant there's a train on the tracks.

The next time you're using your phone or computer to send a message, remember how railroads have shaped the history of how we communicate.

(A person typing a message on their phone. The message reads “Railroads shaped our history.”)

Funding for FIND Iowa has been provided by The Coons Foundation, Pella and the Gilchrist Foundation.