On May 24, 1844, the United States took a major step forward in modernizing its system of communication. That day, the first electric telegraph was sent from Washington D.C. to Baltimore. It read, “What Hath God Wrought?” Within 15 years, telegraph cables not only traversed the entire United States but also crossed oceans.
In the 1830s, Samuel Morse was a professor of painting and sculpture at the University of the City of New York. He heard about the recent invention of the electromagnet, and the idea of using a cable to send a message intrigued him. Through his academic contacts in New York, Morse teamed up with Leonard Gale, professor of chemistry and Alfred Vail, a mechanic. The three studied recent advances in electromagnetic induction and refined the idea, figuring out how to pass the messages through wires across long distances. It was in this time that Morse developed Morse code, a series of dots and dashes to represent letters. Messages passed through the telegraph system were embossed in this code and interpreted by the receiver.
In 1837, Morse finally had a working model with which he conducted demonstrations. He applied for a government grant worth $30,000 (approximately $1.2 million today) in order to build a telegraph line between Washington D.C. and Baltimore. Unfortunately, due to an economic downturn in the U.S., it was not until 1843 that Morse received the funding for his project. Morse immediately hired engineer Ezra Cornell to lay the telegraph wire over the 40 miles between the two cities. On May 24, 1844, Morse sent the first electric telegraph from the Capitol Building to a railroad station in Baltimore where Alfred Vail was waiting to receive it. The telegraph was the main means of communication in the U.S. for almost 100 years until Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone replaced it.
Learn more here:
- https://www.britannica.com/technology/telegraph
- https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/what-hath-god-wrought
- https://www.loc.gov/collections/samuel-morse-papers/articles-and-essays/invention-of-the-telegraph/
