TELEGRAPH

The telegraph was the first communicational instrument that could send messages through wires via electricity. Though the invention was the result of several decades of research by many people, American inventor Samuel F.B. Morse (1791–1872) is credited with making the first practical telegraph in 1837. Morse was a portrait painter in New York City when he became interested in magnetic telegraphy in around 1832. With technical assistance from chemistry professor Leonard Gale (1800–1883) and the financial support of Alfred Vail (1807–1859), Morse conducted further experiments and finally developed a battery-powered instrument that provided the necessary steady source of electricity. He also developed Morse code, a system of variously arranged dots and dashes for transmitting messages. (For example, the most frequently used letter of the alphabet is e, which is rendered in Morse code by using one dot; the less frequently used z is rendered by two dashes followed by two dots.) By 1837 Morse had demonstrated the telegraph to the public in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington. He received a patent for his invention in the United States in 1840. In 1843 his telegraph was further promoted when the U.S. Congress approved construction of an experimental line between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, Maryland. The following year, on May 24, 1844, Morse sent his first message across that line: "What hath God wrought!" Alfred Vail was on the receiving end of the wire.

By 1861 most major U.S. cities were linked by telegraph wires. The first successful trans-Atlantic cables were laid in 1866. Morse Code transmissions— called telegrams when transmitted via above-ground wires and cablegrams (or cables) when transmitted via underwater cables—were translated by operators or mechanical printers on both the sending and receiving ends of the message. The introduction of the telegraph marked the beginning of modern communications. When the first transcontinental telegraph line in the United States was completed on October 24, 1861, it eliminated overnight the need for the Pony Express, which had briefly enjoyed the status of the fastest way to transmit a message—about eight days from St. Louis, Missouri, to Sacramento, California, a distance that could be bridged by telegraph lines within minutes. The telegraph became the chief means of long distance communication. The telephone (invented 1875), which allows voice transmission over electrical wires, gradually replaced the telegraph. But for many decades the two technologies were in use together.