And in 1888, William Maver, who later wrote the standard book on American telegraphy, noted that those familiar with the quadruplex were “aware that there is tendency in its operation termed, not very elegantly perhaps, the ‘bug.' It was first so called by Edison.” By the mid-1880s, after the quadruplex had become a common feature of telegraphy, engineers made frequent reference to Edison’s bug trap. The term was also spread by members of the electrical community. Edison…had been up the two previous nights working on fixing ‘a bug’ in his phonograph-an expression for solving a difficulty, and implying that some imaginary insect has secreted itself inside and is causing all the trouble.” And in a 1916 article about Edison’s “insomnia squad,” a reporter noted that they worked “like fiends when they ‘fishing for a bug.’ That means that they are searching for some missing quality, quantity, or combination that will add something toward the perfect whole.” In 1889 the reporter for a British newspaper wrote, “Mr. ‘Bug’-as such little faults and difficulties are called-show themselves, and months of anxious watching, study, and labor are requisite before commercial success-or failure-is certainly reached.”Įdison’s propensity for staying up all night to perfect and debug his inventions caught the attention of numerous reporters, some of whom reported his use of the term. It was of the genus ‘callbellum.’ The insect appears to find conditions for its existence in all call apparatus of Telephones.”Īnd in November of that year he wrote to Thedore Puskas about what happens after conceiving an invention, when difficulties arise and the unexpected occurs: “This thing gives out and then that. “You were partly correct, I did find a ‘bug’ in my apparatus, but it was not in the telephone proper. In March he joked in a letter to Western Union President William Orton: Let Moses try…to rid us of them.”īy 1878, Edison was also using the term to describe technical problems to associates outside of the laboratory. One entry, referring to incandescent lighting, read: “Awful lot of bugs still. A later Edison biography made note of its frequent appearance in his notebooks. The term itself appeared in his notebooks in 1876, first occurring that July in connection with his experiments on another approach to multiplexing signals over a wire. Patent 480,567, which did not issue until 1892 due to patent-interference claims and court cases.Įdison is largely responsible for broadening the term’s application. A year later it became part of his application for U.S. In August 1873 he filed a patent caveat, a form of patent application long since discontinued, which included this solution. The problem in this approach was the false break in a message’s signal created by the changing polarity of the electromagnet in the diplex circuit when the current switched direction.Įdison worked around this by building what he later called a “bug trap” to isolate the unwanted break so that it wouldn’t interfere with the meaning of the Morse-coded signal.
![western union bug 2018 western union bug 2018](http://img.youtube.com/vi/QYJkFNWrC3A/0.jpg)
The 26-year-old engineer combined diplex and duplex circuits to send two messages in each direction using changes in current direction and strength. If he succeeded, his patron, Western Union Telegraph, would profit greatly from the increased message capacity. In 1873 Edison first confronted what he later called a bug when he began developing a quadruplex telegraph system to transmit and receive up to four separate telegrams on a single wire simultaneously. Averaging about three hours of sleep per night, Edison was known for taking power naps throughout the day. Thomas Edison and his “insomnia squad” would often stay up all night debugging his inventions. He coined the phrase 140 years ago to describe technical problems during the process of innovation. After a technician found the moth, Hopper and her staff used the word “bug” to describe the issues that complicated the input of data and the writing, loading, and processing of programs in their Mark I and II computers.īut Hopper’s bug was not a new term or simply a variant of a “fly in the ointment.” The use of “bug” to describe a flaw in the design or operation of a technical system dates back to Thomas Edison.
![western union bug 2018 western union bug 2018](https://logos.bugcrowdusercontent.com/logos/7cc0/9977/55c6405d/2bf144eae86c163d67b7d66081fcf726_Western_Union_Google_Plus_Logo.jpeg)
#Western union bug 2018 series#
THE INSTITUTE Another in a series of articles that uncover interesting historical, technical, and IEEE-related topics.Īsk someone to identify the first computer bug, and he or she might mention computer programmer Grace Hopper and the dead moth found in a relay of Harvard University’s Mark II electromechanical computer in 1947.