#Exhibit of the Month

One of the great technical achievements that revolutionized the idea of time and space, opening a new era in the history of communication, is telegraphy. It is based on the transmission of electrical signals through a cable over long distances, allowing people to communicate instantly. The telegraph spread very quickly and a network of wires stretched around the world.

In 1837, the American painter and physicist Samuel Morse invented the first electromagnetic device for telegraphy, patented in 1840. To send messages by wire, Morse developed in 1838 a simple code of dots and dashes, which represented the letters of the alphabet, known as "Morse code ".

Both Morse code and the telegraph machine were improved over time, with the telegraph becoming the most widespread system of communication and information transmission for more than a century, until the advent of the Internet. The telegraph system consisted of a series of stations repeaters along the transmission line route. Each station had an operator who received and transmitted messages by telegraph. The Morse machine transmitted about 25 words per minute, which were recorded in code on a paper tape. The operator in charge of transmitting the message would decode it and write it on paper using a special typewriter.

In Bessarabia, the telegraph entered in 1860: on April 8, the Bender telegraph station began its activity, and on April 24, the one in Chisinau, following the construction of the first Odesa-Chisinau-Leova telegraph line. Currently, telegraph services have been discontinued. The only ones who still use coded communication are radio amateurs.

The Morse telegraph machine shown comes from the Osinoostrovsky electrotechnical plant, Soviet Union, and dates back to 1934. The exhibit was restored by Mihail Culașco.

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Events Archive

Symposium "The Union of 1918 in museum collections"

April 12, 2018

On April 12, 2018, at the National Museum of History of Moldova was held the Symposium "The Union from 1918 in museum collections". The event was attended by historians and museographers from various Romanian and Moldovan institutions, representatives of the Museum of History of Romania (Bucharest), the Museum of the Union (Alba Iulia), the National Museum of Ethnography and Natural History (Chişinău), the National Museum of Literature "M. Kogâlniceanu" (Chişinău), the Museum of Cahul Region, the Institute of History (Chişinău) and the State Archival Service of the Republic of Moldova.

The works of the Symposium began with a presentation by Ion Negrei, researcher at the Institute of History of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Research of the Republic of Moldova, which reviewed the chronology of the events from Bessarabia in 1917-1918, especially the works of the historical meeting of Sfatul Ţării (the Parliament) on March 27th, 1918. All 13 papers presented were focused on the thematic of the symposium evoking moments, places, personalities that marked the history of the event.

The symposium was an attempt to approach with reverence the content of the museum heritage focusing on the theme of the Union, tangled testimonies coming from various categories of pieces: documents, photographs, postcards, medals, original personal objects, presented in a form of recovery and re-evaluation. Testimonies about Bessarabian personalities in the collections of the National Museum of History of Romania, Documents of the Union from the collection of the Museum of the Union from Alba Iulia, From the KGB archive - to the museum heritage. The history of a collection, The Mărăşeşti Book of poet Alexei Mateevici, The evocation of the Union for half a century, Photographic, documentary and numismatic testimonies with memorial value from the collection of the NMHM - are just a few of the subjects that have marked the contribution of the museographers to the process of collective memory formation in connection with the events of March 27, 1918 - December 1, 1918, these testimonies being a contribution from the perspective of writing history.

The event was part of the series of events, dedicated to the Centenary of the Great Union, organized by the National Museum of History of Moldova.