The Telegraph: The Digital Revolution Begins.

Did you know that the inventor of the telegraph was not even an inventor at first? He was just a painter. In 1825, Samuel Morse was a painter working in Washington, D.C., who had just received a letter that his wife was sick back home in New Haven, Connecticut. Before he was able to make it back to visit her, she had already passed away and been buried. This tragedy was the main motivating factor that led Morse to invent the telegraph.

Before the invention of the telegraph, information was transported through a much slower process involving letter mail, which was distributed mostly via horseback and known as the Pony Express. On horseback, a letter would take ten whole days to travel across the United States.

The invention of the telegraph relied on previous advancements in technology that supported its function. In 1825, William Sturgeon invented the electromagnet, proving that running an electrical current through a coil of wire could create a magnetic field around it. This invention led to the technology required to create the single-wire electric telegraph. The first famous telegraph message was sent on May 24, 1844, and read, “What hath God wrought?”

The invention of the telegraph greatly affected the political environment because it changed the speed at which messages traveled. Before the telegraph, messages would take days to cross the United States, significantly impacting how news and political messages were received. To build the wire system across the country, the telegraph system had to gain the trust of both the public and the government. Economically, the telegraph required infrastructure to be built, which included posts, wires, and telegraph stations. Before the Civil War, there were only 300 miles of telegraph wire, but by the end of the Civil War, there were over 15,000 miles. In 1858, the first Transatlantic telegraph cable was laid, allowing for faster communication between the United States and Europe, which had previously relied on messages carried by ship. The telegraph system also affected the economy, as messages could now travel faster, connecting new markets and trade opportunities. Other telegraph communication systems relied on complex codes and letter wheels, which took longer to send messages.

Samuel Morse created a telegraph system known as Morse Code, which relied on human knowledge instead of machine complexity to read messages sent via the telegraph. Morse Code used a series of dots and dashes to represent each letter of the alphabet. The telegraph key was a switch that created an electrical signal when pressed. Dots were a quick press of the switch, while dashes involved a longer hold. The length of the dot determined the unit of time, and each dash lasted the length of three dots. A silence lasting the length of one dot indicated a space. Initially, Morse Code was read using a machine that punched holes for each dash and dot, but it was discovered that humans could decode the message more quickly just by listening to the sounds of the dots and dashes and writing the corresponding letters.

By 1861, there were telegraph wires across the United States and telegraph relay stations at most train stations that would replay the message sent from the previous station, passing it along to the next station at full strength. While the telegraph lasted through most of the 1800s, technologies are constantly being replaced by newer innovations, and the telegraph was no exception. The end of the telegraph era came with the fall of the Western Union Telegraph Company, when Alexander Graham Bell founded the Bell Telephone Company.