Diffusions of Innovations of the Telegraph Blog #8

 So what is the Diffusions of Innovations theory? The short and very simplified version of it is "how popular was it over time?" The actual answer to that is "How many people used or had access to this technology from the creation or introduction of it to when it became obsolete? And how did it change over time?" Typically paired with a graph, it helps to show exactly how popular a technology or good was and how used to this technology people became, along with how many people held this item in their house/pocket. iPhone, for example, has many more people using them, and in their graph, they would still be in their popular phase and not quite dying off, unlike a Nokia or Blackberry, which has reached the end of its life when the smartphone came to be, and therefor has become obsolete.

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    So what was the Diffusions of Innovations theory like for the Telegraph?  Sadly, with the theory coming out in 1962 and the Telegraph being made in 1844 and becoming obsolete sometime in the mid 20th century, its hard to find a graph to accurately show its use. However, it became widely used sometime from 1845-1850s to send messages from place to place due to the transatlantic telegraph, but due to the price to install one into either one's home or from location to location, it never was as wide spread as the mobile phone became, so its early and late majority use was likely quite small and primarily came from News station and printers, along with military use in both world wars. There was not much use besides that, as even just sending a message was cents to the letter, and most families could not afford to send much more than a simple message.

    The early users of this tech were mainly the military and News publishers and journalists, and those who wanted to spread information from one plate to anther quickly, be it from city to city or from one country to another, so they would likely take the innovators and early adopters portion of the graph. The early majority would likely be the rich, who could afford the tax of using the telegraph with its pay per letter price. Late majority is the middle class families, who can now afford the now lowered price of sending a message from across the country, dropping from price per letter to price per word, and lastly are the laggards, the ones who used the telegraph after it has become, for the most part, obsolete. This could range anywhere from poor folk to older people who don't know how to use any of the newer tech.