Telegraph Invented

In 1837, the American painter and inventor Samuel F. B. Morse filed for a patent on an electromagnetic telegraph, a device that sent coded electrical signals along a wire. The telegraph was not the work of one person, and Morse was not the first to build one. But his system became the most widely used in North America, and it marked the start of a world in which news could travel faster than any messenger, ship, or train.

The idea of electrical communication had been circulating for decades. Experiments with electricity and magnetism by scientists such as Hans Christian Ørsted, André-Marie Ampère, and Joseph Henry had shown that current could produce magnetic effects at a distance. Henry, working in the United States, demonstrated that electromagnets could be made strong enough to operate over long circuits. In Britain, William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone developed their own telegraph at almost the same time as Morse, and it was patented there in 1837. Earlier optical telegraphs, such as the semaphore towers used in France, had already shown how much value rapid messages held for governments and armies, but they depended on daylight and clear weather.

Morse, who had trained as an artist, became interested in the problem in the early 1830s. He worked with Leonard Gale, a chemistry professor, and with Alfred Vail, a skilled mechanic who joined the project in 1837. The exact division of credit among them has long been debated. The system they refined used a key to open and close a circuit, with a receiver that recorded the pulses. Messages were sent in a code of short and long signals, later known as Morse code. The version used widely today is a somewhat later revision, and historians generally credit Vail with significant contributions to the early code.

A public demonstration and years of lobbying followed the patent filing. In 1843, the US Congress funded an experimental line between Washington and Baltimore. It opened in 1844 with the famous message "What hath God wrought," a phrase from the Bible. After that, private companies built lines rapidly, and by the 1850s wires connected most major American cities.

The consequences were far-reaching. Railways used the telegraph to coordinate schedules, newspapers and news agencies used it to gather reports quickly, and merchants used it to follow distant markets. Governments and militaries came to rely on it, notably during the American Civil War. Submarine cables, including a lasting transatlantic link completed in 1866, extended the network across oceans. The telegraph set the pattern for later communication technologies, from the telephone to the internet, by separating the speed of a message from the speed of travel.