The telegraph was the first form of instant messaging. In the 1780's, Frenchman Claude Chappe, a churchman and amateur physicist was credited with the establishment of the telegraph even though the idea had been proposed over a century before his telegraph. Chappe's telegraph system consisted of towers with a long horizontal beam on top with a long a short vertical beam on each end. Depending on how this beam was positioned, it could be read as a number, letter, word, or common phrase. There were a possible two-hundred and fifty-six different positions, which would be read by workers in other towers with telescopes and relayed on. This method was used for over half a century in France, connecting Paris to many adjacent cities. In 1852, there were 556 stations that stretched over three thousand miles. Next, the electrical telegraph had many problems in the early stages. In the 1830's, two Englishmen William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone created an electrical line that could transfer a twenty letter code over a thirteen mile stretch. They used five of these wires and set them up along railways, allowing for as many as one-100 letters to be sent at one time. Also in the 1830's, Samuel Morse in the United States created the famous system known as Morse Code. This system consisted of dots and dashes that could be heard on the receiving end by a trained listener, being able to transmit up to 30 letters per minute initially. This was very successful and was granted the funds to have lines built from New York to Philadelphia, Boston, and Buffalo. Once Morse's business became a national phenomenon, he had to hire firms to build lines for him across the country to keep up with the demand. This lead to competition in this industry because of some of Morse's licensees breaking out and stealing Morse's invention, but creating different variations of it. These other variations were not as successful though because they did not have the same funding