#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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Research Research Projects

"Research, Collection, Preservation, and Promotion of the Cultural and Historical Heritage of the Country" (2006-2008)

In 2006 - 2008, in the framework of the project "Research, Collection, Preservation, and Promotion of the Cultural and Historical Heritage of the Country", the museum specialists, in accordance with individual research subjects, conducted archaeological research, undertook investigations of documents in public and museum archives, museum collections of the republic and abroad. Realization of the project objectives was of a considerable cultural and scientific benefit through ongoing development of the museum collections and diverse forms of publishing of the scientific research results: reports on the results of archaeological excavations, collection catalogues, collected articles, monographs, scientific articles published in various editions in the country and abroad.

The project brought more results, such as:

elaboration of ideological subject-matter for a permanent exhibition "History and Civilization";
analysis of social, ethno-demographic, economic, and politic processes in the communities of the 10th - 13th centuries in the east of the Eastern Carpathians;
determination of a typology of adornments and medieval clothes found in the territory of Moldova;
specification of a social, politic, and ecclesiastical impact upon the books published in Bessarabia in the modern time;
elucidation of the questions concerning the influence of commercial bourgeoisie on the development of trade in Bessarabia and the importance of Russian trade-custom laws in this matter;
elaboration of the criteria of development and organization of historical architectural complexes in the Republic of Moldova;
identification of concepts of the museum studies in the field of history in the historical context in which they appeared, were developed and introduced into practice during the 19th - 20th centuries in the country;
determination of the legislative framework and its role in the process of protecting of the archaeological heritage in the Moldavian SSR in the post-war period.