Harrison Gray Dyar - Notability

Notability

Alfred Munroe in Concord and the Telegraph records that Dyar and his brother Joseph were interested in the newly developed technology of electricity. They came up with the idea of transmitting a message over electrical wire. Dyar experimented and finally concluded that he had discovered how a message could be transmitted over a single wire. In 1826 he and his brother laid a wire line along the "Causeway", later called Lowell Road and the Red Bridge Road, that proved the technique viable. According to Colonel Whiting of Concord, the telegraph wire was strung from the trees along the Red Bridge Road over the Concord River at Hunt’s Bridge and went all the way to Curtis’s residence. Dyar used apothecary vial jars as glass insulators for the bare iron wire.

Dyar erected the first telegraph line and dispatched over it the first telegraph message ever sent in America — as determined by Levi Woodbury of the Supreme Court of the United States. Dyar had used over half a mile of bare electrical wire to transmit the message. He employed mechanical and electrical means that Samuel Morse used many years later for the telegraph system he patented in 1847. The author Munroe explains that Dyar made his telegraph line at least eighteen years before the actual materialization of the first practical Morse telegraph line that was made between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, Maryland.

According to Munroe it was Dyar, not Morse, who erected the first real telegraph line at the race track in Long Island in 1826 and dispatched the first message ever sent. This was years prior to the joint patent of electric telegraphy by William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone taken out in 1837 in England. Alfred Munroe writes in his book "Concord and the Telegraph", This may seem strange to most of our readers. The credit of this great discovery has been generally conceded to Professor Morse, but the latter deserves credit only for combining and applying the discoveries of others. Dyar had erected his telegraph line some six years before Morse even began his investigation on telegraphy and some ten years before he began to talk about the subject. Because of threats with prosecution for "Conspiracy to send Secret Communications in advance of the Mail" Dyar abandoned his work.