Such installations are in the Western Dedicated Freight Corridor in India where the wire height is at 7.45 m (24.4 ft) to accommodate double-stack container trains without the need of well-wagons. Australian forces used the heliograph as late as 1942 in the Western Desert Campaign of World War II. The term heliostat is sometimes used as a synonym for heliograph because of this origin. Another type of heliograph was the heliostat or heliotrope fitted with a Colomb shutter. The heliostat was essentially a surveying instrument with a fixed mirror and so could not transmit a code by itself. The idea for a telegraph of this type was first proposed as a modification of surveying equipment (Gauss, 1821). Various uses of mirrors were made for communication in the following years, mostly for military purposes, but the first device to become widely used was a heliograph with a moveable mirror (Mance, 1869). The system was used by the French during the 1870-71 siege of Paris, with night-time signalling using kerosene lamps as the source of light.

In 1843, Scottish inventor Alexander Bain invented a device that could be considered the first facsimile machine. The first machine to use punched tape was Bain's teleprinter (Bain, 1843), but the system saw only limited use. A teleprinter is a telegraph machine that can send messages from a typewriter-like keyboard and print incoming messages in readable text with no need for the operators to be trained in the telegraph code used on the line. This was a telegraph code developed for use on the French telegraph using a five-key keyboard (Baudot, 1874). Teleprinters generated the same code from a full alphanumeric keyboard. Miles' enemies used smoke signals and flashes of sunlight from metal, but lacked a sophisticated telegraph code. As of 1980, the longest cost-effective distance for DC transmission was 7,000 kilometres (4,300 miles). The heliograph was heavily used by Nelson A. Miles in Arizona and New Mexico after he took over command (1886) of the fight against Geronimo and other Apache bands in the Apache Wars. The heliograph was ideal for use in the American Southwest due to its clear air and mountainous terrain on which stations could be located. Twenty-six stations covered an area 320 by 480 km (200 by 300 mi).

During World War I, Britain's telegraph communications were almost completely uninterrupted while it was able to quickly cut Germany's cables worldwide. Several telegraph companies were combined to form the Eastern Telegraph Company in 1872. Australia was first linked to the rest of the world in October 1872 by a submarine telegraph cable at Darwin. The Baudot code was used on the earliest ticker tape machines (Calahan, 1867), what is electric cable a system for mass distributing information on current price of publicly listed companies. The first widely used system (Wheatstone, 1858) was first put into service with the British General Post Office in 1867. A novel feature of the Wheatstone system was the use of bipolar encoding. A feature of the Baudot code, and subsequent telegraph codes, was that, unlike Morse code, every character has a code of the same length making it more machine friendly. The advantage of doing this is that messages can be sent at a steady, fast rate making maximum use of the available telegraph lines.

A chemical telegraph making blue marks improved the speed of recording (Bain, 1846), but was delayed by a patent challenge from Morse. He called his invention a "recording telegraph". Caselli called his invention "Pantelegraph". Despite British acquisition of German colonies and expansion into the Middle East, debt from the war led to Britain's control over telegraph cables to weaken while US control grew. Also such devices are tested to survive harder use while limiting electrical leakage, compared to wiring devices intended for residential or commercial purposes. South Dakota, Kansas, Wisconsin, Oklahoma and Idaho are the cheapest for cable and internet. The idea was proved viable when the South Eastern Railway company successfully tested a three-kilometre (two-mile) gutta-percha insulated cable with telegraph messages to a ship off the coast of Folkestone. The Atlantic Telegraph Company, formed in London in 1856, had several failed attempts. Getting a cable across the Atlantic Ocean proved much more difficult. An electrical cable is an assembly of one or more wires running side by side or bundled, which is used as an electrical conductor to carry electric current.