Telegraph

Origins

While a professor of design at New York University in 1835, Morse demonstrated that coded signals could be transmitted by wire. He had learned of the work of British inventors William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone, whose system of telegraphy began operating there in the 1830s. Morse used pulses of electrical current to deflect an electromagnet, which moved a marker to emboss a strip of paper with dots and dashes. Working with others, he developed what became the Morse code so that in different combinations, these dots and dashes represented individual letters of the alphabet. Morse transmitted his first telegraph message in January 1838 across two miles of wire near Morristown, New Jersey. Following that, he received a $30,000 grant from Congress to construct an experimental line from Washington to Baltimore, a distance of about 40 miles. Six years later, in May 1844, Morse sent the message “What hath God wrought” (quoting the Bible, Numbers 23:23) from the old Supreme Court chamber in the U.S. Capitol building to his assistant Alfred Vail at the Mount Claire railroad depot in Baltimore. The Post office operated the line from 1844 to 1847, when they sold it to private interests.

Even before this first line had reached Baltimore, the telegraph had shown its worth in the rapid transmission of news. The previous month the Whig party had held its national convention in Baltimore and had nominated Henry Clay as its presidential candidate in the upcoming election. This information was carried by railroad to Annapolis Junction, which the telegraph wire had reached, from which Vail wired it to the Capitol. The news of Clay's nomination was published the next day in local newspapers. It was the first American news report dispatched by electric telegraph, an omen of the future of journalism. News could now be sent across great distances in a short amount of time, slowed only by the process of encoding and decoding the dots and dashes. For the first time, information could outpace land and sea transportation speeds.

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