I BUILT my own TELECOMMUNICATIONS Network!

As a long time follower and admirer of your work, I'm struck by how much nicer and more professional your final products are these days. This is an incredible project and leap in technology

As an electrical engineer I’m overjoyed that you’ve gotten to this stage. On the same vein of early communication, with the amount of copper wire you have available it’s well within the realm of you making your first crystal radio receiver and /or crude spark gap transmitter. The future is exciting and I can’t wait to see how this branch of HTME progresses!

i like how you guys jump back and forth from sawmills to chemistry and telegraph lines, really keeps the series fresh!

As a Ham radio operator, I can say that Morse Code (CW for Carrier Wave) is alive and well. It's a great deal of fun, and when you become proficient, you can "hear" words. At speed, it's musical, and you can definitely hear the rhythm of another operator and recognize their fist.

I’ve been reading about WWII Morse code operators, and how they could recognise the “fist” of a Morse code operator using the radio by the way they pressed the key. Like recognising someone’s handwriting, but they called it an operator’s fist. They even allegedly used concert pianists for “funkenspiel” or radio games, where things would happen like using specially trained concert pianists to replicate an enemy radio operator’s fist to insert counterfeit messages using broken cryptography for intelligence and counter intelligence purposes. Radio Morse code is obviously a different t beast - but people would tap communications lines to introduce a sounder and relay so they could listen to messages, or insert their own. It was an unbelievably wild time to be alive and the real dawn of the nerd.

Stone tools to digital communication in four years. That is very impressive.

11:50 Try using waxed paper or oil paper between the magnet`s core and the wire (between the layers too!). In that case, if your varnish breaks down, it will only short between the nearest turns, not between all the n turns in adjacent layers.

That you made 20awg is pretty impressive; early telegraph lines were multiple (sometimes up to a dozen) strands of 16ga, to reduce voltage drop, so you may have had more luck with a thicker wire. That's especially important with an earth return system, since half of the path is going to be even worse than the wire. A quarter mile of #20, passing 20V to power, say, a quarter amp coil, loses almost half the power to the wire alone; make half the circuit just a little bit worse and you're running out of voltage pretty quick. Keep in mind that you are running against extreme novice telegraph operators who are writing down dots and dits and decoding them after. Expert morse operators today can get up past 50wpm without writing down anything, though 25wpm is a pretty good cutoff for skilled or not as at that point you can't decode individual letters on-the-fly and instead are recognizing whole words. You'd have to be a pretty fast runner to outrun your five-word (Paris standard word) phrase...

My hometown was the site of the first transatlantic cable. There’s still a piece of the old cable sticking out of the ground.

As I understand it, the US rail lines had the batteries at the receiver end. This way, just a key to ground could send a message. The trains carried a key with them. If something went wrong between stations, with just a key, you could climb a pole and send a message. I believe they used a fairly high voltage. I also think that the system was likely a "positive ground" system. The had some method of heat treating wire to keep it soft as they went smaller and smaller. Wire was often wrapped with thread. Unlike the goo insulation you were using, cotton would hold up under pressure. On the sounder, the clearances were very small to take advantage of the fact that the force created by an electromagnet are greatest just before the armature hits the pole piece.

8:55 Were you all remembering to anneal between each draw through the die? That you can maybe add a couple of grooved wheels to keep the copper where it is pulled through the die perfectly perpendicularly or as close to it as you can manage.

Earth return you need to soak the ground at the electrodes with saline solution, quite a lot of it, to get the resistance down, plus leave time for the saline solution to soak deep down. Probably easiest if you use a pipe auger to make the hole, fill with salted ground, and put the electrode in it, though the grass on top will not recover for a long time. Plus you also need a good few electrodes in parallel each end, to get maximum surface contact between the rods and the ground, with the rods no closer than their length apart as well.

Been watching since the sandwich trailer. I'd like to say, after the unfortunate situations that occurred during your time on YouTube, you have drastically refined your skill. It's almost like not having access to the tools you used to have has increased your skills for the greater good. You have progressed immensely!!

The thumbnail I got in my notifications was so small that it looked like a mouse trap. I'm going to assume it's not a mouse trap.

man oh man a telegraph that can send a message to a cell phone then be converted to text now thats the most unique and creative way ive ever heard of to show off old tech in such way that young people will be interested in for more than a few seconds andy you deserve to recognized for what your doing your a hero young man

I think the ground-return path is area-based, from what I know, telegraph stations used to bury huge squares of metal to achieve ground return, so maybe that's it

It's so weird that you uploaded this now. I became a radio amateur in 2018 in the UK and learnt morse in 2019. This weekend I picked up the ARRL's technician license book to re-learn and get a license to operate in the US. This is awesome stuff. Thanks for the video

Further refinement of the receiver/sounder: attach a pencil lead to it and pass a strip of paper moving at constant speed under it, this way you get a printout of the message without someone having to manually write down the dots and lines

If this channel teaches me anything, it's that there is good reason why so many trades have long held traditions. Nothing came easy and each skill took generations to master,

I've seen a few of your episodes and was very impressed. Building a sawmill, making a tee shirt, forging out tools, making a battery, making corn flakes and now making a telegraph. I hope for an up coming, you make the first light bulb. That would be a nice one. Keep up the good work 👍👍👍