Sir Charles Wheatstone Uses Paper Tape to Store Data

In 1837, the American inventor Samuel Morse developed the first American electric telegraph, which was based on simple patterns of "dots" and "dashes" called Morse Code being transmitted over a single wire.

The telegraph quickly proliferated thanks to the relative simplicity of Morse's system. However, a problem soon arose in that operators could only transmit around ten words a minute, which meant that they couldn't keep up with the public's seemingly insatiable desire to send messages to each other. This was a classic example of a communications bottleneck.

Thus, in 1857, only twenty years after the invention of the telegraph, Sir Charles Wheatstone introduced the first application of paper tapes as a medium for the preparation, storage, and transmission of data.

Sir Charles' paper tape used two rows of holes to represent Morse's dots and dashes. Outgoing messages could be prepared off-line on paper tape and transmitted later. By 1858, a Morse paper tape transmitter could operate at 100 words a minute. Unsuspectingly, Sir Charles had also provided the American public with a way to honor their heroes and generally have a jolly good time, because used paper tapes were to eventually become a key feature of so-called ticker-tape parades.

In a similar manner to Sir Charles' telegraph tape, the designers of the early computers realized that they could record their data on a paper tape by punching rows of holes across the width of the tape. The pattern of the holes in each data row represented a single data value or character. The individual hole positions forming the data rows were referred to as "channels" or "tracks," and the number of different characters that could be represented by each row depended on the number of channels forming the rows.