#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.

Virtual Tour

Informatization

The process of continuous enrichment of the museum collections has led to the need for an automated system of registration of material cultural values.

Thus, in 1994 specialists of the Department of Informatics and Programming of the State University of Moldova, in accordance with the program of the museum administration and in collaboration with the Institute for Cultural Memory of the Ministry of Culture of Romania, has created the Automated System for Registration of Museum Collections (ASRMC).

ASRMC is a unified system of documentary databases, which includes documents and images on all the collections of the National Museum of History of Moldova, registered through scientific cataloging as a result of identification of the objects, their typology, classification, and grouping on specific criteria.

In 1996 the process of creation of the databases for museum collections has started. Since then, the museum staff is working on filling the special analytical cards for the scientific description of the exhibits. These cards arrive in the Department of Informatics of the museum, where operators enter the obtained data in the databases.

At present the databases on the collections of the National Museum of History of Moldova contain about 109,349 records on storage units for the following fields: archeology, coins, medals, documents, photographs, books, decorative arts, fine arts, history, and ethnography.

Using the Automated System for Registration of Museum Collections provides rapid retrieval of information on the various thematic criteria, cataloging of collections and exhibitions.