THE WORLD ATLAS

Technology · 1844

The electric telegraph: "What hath God wrought"

US Capitol, Washington, D.C. (USA)

With $30,000 from the US Congress, the painter-turned-inventor Samuel Morse strung two copper wires on about 700 chestnut poles beside the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad between Washington and Baltimore. On 24 May 1844, from the Supreme Court chamber in the Capitol, he tapped out the Bible phrase "What hath God wrought" in his dot-and-dash code to his partner Alfred Vail at the railway's Mount Clare station in Baltimore.

It was the first long-distance overland electric telegraph in the United States.

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Why it mattered

For the first time a message could travel faster than a horse, a ship or a train. Within two decades telegraph wires crossed the United States (October 1861, ending the Pony Express), a cable under the Atlantic linked Europe and North America in 1866, Britain was wired to India in 1870 and Australia to the world in 1872, and a Pacific cable in 1902 encircled the globe; newspapers, markets, railways and governments began to work in near real time, and once a cable reached the Crimea in 1855, war news arrived in London within hours.

Elsewhere

Morse was not alone: in Britain William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone patented a needle telegraph in 1837 that became the first commercial telegraph system, while Morse's code, in a modified form, became the international standard in 1865.

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