Friedrich Clemens Gerke

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Friedrich Clemens Gerke, 1840
lithograph A. Lill

Friedrich Clemens Gerke (born January 22, 1801 in Osnabrück , † May 21, 1888 in Hamburg ) was a German writer, journalist, musician and a pioneer of telegraphy through further development of the Morse code .

In his honor, the 230-meter-high telecommunications tower in Cuxhaven (commissioned in 1992) was named Friedrich-Clemens-Gerke-Turm .

Youth and years of apprenticeship

Gerke was born in simple circumstances. At the age of 16 he took up a position in Hamburg. At first he was the servant and scribe of the private scholar Arnold Schuback . In 1818 he switched to Senator Brunnemann as clerk and received a fixed salary for the first time. On July 10, 1820, he married the young, pretty, but equally destitute French émigré Sophie Marianne Ducalais. After trying to set up their own hatmaker's business, they found themselves penniless after a short time. They decided to emigrate and were recruited by the British Army. They traveled to Canada via Twielenfleth and Helgoland. Gerke served in the British Army from 1821 to 1823 as a musician with the Rifle Battalion, 60th Regiment. Gerke did not like the military service and managed to find a substitute who served the remaining period of service. After his return to Hamburg in 1823, he used his new language skills to translate books on telegraph technology.

In the years before he started working for the optical and later the electric telegraph, he worked as a musician in amusement bars in Altona, Denmark, on St. Pauli. During this time he began working as a publicist. As such, he wrote one of his few non-technical works on the Sais myth of an ancient Egyptian inscription, which was published in book form by Hoffmann and Campe in 1837 under the pseudonyms "Friedrich Clemens" and "Clemens von Hamburg" . The point of contact for his later research is the consideration of nature and its laws, which is expressed in an encrypted, but still readable language. You should pursue it with intuition and systematics.

Supervisor of the optical telegraph line Hamburg – Cuxhaven

From 1841 he worked for Johann Ludwig Schmidt, a merchant and vinegar manufacturer in Altona, who operated the optical telegraph line Hamburg – Cuxhaven , and solved the problems of this connection. This telegraph line served a ship reporting service on the Elbe. In 1842, during the great fire in Hamburg , he asked for help from the Hamburg area via optical telegraph. Since this telegraph was very susceptible to the weather, such as B. fog or thunderstorm, there were frequent failures. In 1846 the Cuxhaven line was extended from Stade via Hechthausen and Bremerhaven , so that the two Hanseatic cities of Bremen and Hamburg were connected by telegraph. However, the now 32 telegraph operators in 17 stations meant additional spending, so that the profit they had made since 1841 was used up.

At the instigation of Senator Carl Möring , the Americans William and Charles Robinson presented the electric Morse code telegraph in Hamburg in 1847. When Robinson presented his telegraph machine for the very first time in the great hall of the Börsenarkaden, the basic principles of the writing machine were probably known, but not those of the relay. So he kept it hidden in a covered box. When the collaboration came about, Gehrke had to promise to keep the secret to himself.

Director Schmidt made propaganda against the "dangerous" wire lines among the rural population. Recognizing the advantages of the new technology, Gerke switched to the Elektro-Magnetische Telegraphen-Compagnie . Together with Charles Robinson, Gerke installed the telegraph, which also had to cross the Elbe using tall masts, and learned a technique that was completely new to him. On October 15, 1848, a connection from Hamburg to Cuxhaven was put into operation. In 1847 Gerke became inspector of this company, which was the first in Europe to use Morse code. The management consisted of Senator C. Möring, the businessman Adolph Godeffroy and AW Hüpeden.

In 1885 he described in a very humorous way his struggle with rebellious and greedy peasants, over whose fields the telegraph lines were to be laid.

The American Morse code is being adapted

Gerke recognized the shortcomings of the American Morse code of the American Alfred Vail . It was mainly due to the different signaling of 'shorter' and 'longer' long characters and different pauses between characters, even within the individual characters. In the Gerke system there are only short and long characters. A long character is three times the length of a short character. He changed around half of the characters by rearranging 11 letters and introducing German umlauts (6 letters were only later brought into their current form), and initially kept the coding of the numbers. A special position was taken by the number zero, which is represented by an overlong line. Gerkes system (also called Hamburger Alphabet), was established by the German-Austrian Telegraph Association in 1865 through the first international telegraph contract as a generally applicable telegraphy standard. His significantly changed Morse Code is, apart from minor changes, the International Telegraph Alphabet which is still used today in Morse code .

In 1848 Gerke translated the work The Electro Magnetic Telegraph , published by Alfred Vail in 1845, into German under the title Thorough presentation of the electromagnetic telegraphs based on the Morse system . In 1851 he published The Practical Telegraphist or Electro-Magnetic Telegraphy according to Morse's system, initially also as a manual for aspiring telegraphists, presented completely and comprehensively from his own practical experience by Friedrich Clemens Gerke , at Hoffmann and Campe. In this 144-page book, Gerke describes all aspects of telegraphy from the power source, the transmission, the devices and the signaling with the adapted Morse code.

FC Gerke, 1870

In the meantime, during a competition in Potsdam , the Morse telegraph had proven to be superior to the pointer telegraph developed by Lieutenant Siemens , which was installed on the Prussian railroad between Berlin and Hamburg. Gerke was a tireless proponent of the American system. The Prussian Telegraph Administration did not like the design of the US Morse Code. The first company that built Morse Code machines for them was a C. Lewert company in Berlin, whose machine became the standard machine for the German-Austrian Telegraph Association in 1851. In 1853 the Gurlt company appeared in Berlin and also built the standard Morse code machine. Gurlt first constructed a Morse code device with an exchangeable spring housing in 1856, a long-cherished wish, since up until now the whole device had to be dismantled if the spring broke.

In 1850 his wife Marianne, nee. Ducalais. Their marriage had remained childless. A short time later Gerke married a much younger woman, with whom he had five children.

From 1868 Gerke worked for the newly founded telegraph office in Hamburg and took over the management in 1869. He later worked for the Deutsche Reichspost and was retired on November 1, 1876.

Gerke died on May 21, 1888 and was buried in the Hamburg cemetery in Ohlsdorf . The grave was abandoned by relatives in the 1930s.

Much of his literary life's work has been preserved.

Morse Code in Gerke coding

Publications

literature

  • Hans Brecht: Friedrich Clemens Gerke, an almost forgotten Hamburg writer and inventor . In: Journal of the Association for Hamburg History, Volume 86, 2000 , PDF
  • Detlev Kasten: 100 years of the Hamburg Telegraph Office . In: Postgeschichtliche Blätter Hamburg 1968 edition .
  • 1205. Gerke (Friedrich Clemens). In: Hans Schröder : Lexicon of Hamburg writers up to the present , vol. 2 (1854), Dassovius - Günther, p. 470 ff. (List of his works)
  • The electro-magnetic telegraph between Hamburg and Cuxhaven. In: Hamburg address book from 1855, page 585

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Hans Schröder : Lexicon of Hamburg writers up to the present , Vol. 1 (1851), Abatz - Dassovius, p. 543
  2. * 1. March 1791 in Wildeshausen, † March 29, 1854 in Oldenburg, see Wolfgang Haubold: Der Landkreis Oldenburg. People, history, landscape, Holzberg, Oldenburg 1992, p. 275
  3. ^ Gerke: The practical telegraphist ... Hoffmann & Campe, Hamburg 1851
  4. CF Lewert, Schreibelegraph & Morseapparat mit Taste, 1880 ( Memento of the original from May 29, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. - at auction @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / auctionata.de
  5. ^ Information and history from Gurlt, W., Telephon- und Telegraphenwerke GmbH; Berlin

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