how fast did the telegraph travel

The First Long-Distance Telegraph Message, Sent This Day in 1844: 'What Hath God Wrought?'

All your Internet can be traced back to this moment.

This strip of paper records the first ever message sent by telegraph, a feat that occurred on this day in 1844. Standing in the chamber of the Supreme Court, Samuel B. Morse sent a 19-letter message to his assistant Albert Vail in Baltimore, who transmitted the message back. Members of Congress watched the demonstration with fascination much like their countrymen did in future demonstrations.

The piece of paper you see above records three things: a note Morse appended to the top detailing its importance, the actual Morse code marks, and their translation into letters at the bottom.

In most accounts, like the one maintained by the Senate (which used to house the Supreme Court chamber), the words Morse sent get short thrift: "A young woman provided the first message he sent: 'What hath God wrought.'"

But the telegraph's long-distance application marks the beginning of a new era of communication, in which information can travel faster than any human by any means of conveyance. If you run the videos of the deployments of all the telephone and Internet and social networks around the world in reverse, they'd all wither and contract until there were only two points on the electric-information network: that Supreme Court chamber and the Mount Clair railway depot in Baltimore .

In light of all that, the words of Morse's friend's daughter, Annie Ellsworth, take on more meaning than she probably anticipated: What hath God wrought, indeed.

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The Invention of the Telegraph Changed Communication Forever

A communication revolution wired the world in the 19th century

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When British officials wished to communicate between London and the naval base at Portsmouth in the early 1800s, they utilized a system called a semaphore chain. A series of towers built on high points of land held contraptions with shutters, and men working the shutters could flash signals from tower to tower.

A semaphore message could be relayed the 85 miles between Portsmouth and London in about 15 minutes. Clever as the system was, it was really just an improvement on signal fires, which had been used since ancient times.

There was a need for much faster communication. And by the middle of the century, Britain’s semaphore chain was obsolete.

The Invention of the Telegraph

An American professor, Samuel F.B. Morse , began experimenting with sending communications via electromagnetic signal in the early 1830s. In 1838 he was able to demonstrate the device by sending a message across two miles of wire in Morristown, New Jersey.

Morse eventually received funds from Congress to install a line for demonstration between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore. After an abortive effort to bury wires, it was decided to hang them from poles, and wire was strung between the two cities.

On May 24, 1844, Morse, stationed in the Supreme Court chambers, which were then in the US Capitol, sent a message to his assistant Alfred Vail in Baltimore. The famous first message: “What hath God wrought.”

News Traveled Quickly After the Invention of the Telegraph

The practical importance of the telegraph was obvious, and in 1846 a new business, the Associated Press, began using the rapidly spreading telegraph lines to send dispatches to newspaper offices. Election results were gathered via telegraph by the AP for the first time for the 1848 presidential election, won by Zachary Taylor .

In the following year AP workers stationed in Halifax, Nova Scotia, begin intercepting news arriving on boats from Europe and telegraphing it to New York, where it could appear in print days before the boats reached New York harbor.

Abraham Lincoln Was a Technological President

By the time Abraham Lincoln became president the telegraph had become an accepted part of American life. Lincoln's first State of the Union message was transmitted over the telegraph wires, as the New York Times reported on December 4, 1861:

The message of President Lincoln was telegraphed yesterday to all parts of the loyal states. The message contained 7, 578 words, and was all received in this city in one hour and 32 minutes, a feat of telegraphing unparalleled in the Old or New World.

Lincoln's own fascination with the technology led him to spend many hours during the Civil War in the telegraph room of the War Department building near the White House. The young men who manned the telegraph equipment later recalled him sometimes staying overnight, awaiting messages from his military commanders .

The president would generally write his messages in longhand, and telegraph operators would relay them, in military cipher, to the front. Some of Lincoln's messages are examples of emphatic brevity, such as when he advised General Ulysses S. Grant, at City Point, Virginia in August 1864: “Hold on with a bulldog grip, and chew and choke as much as possible. A. Lincoln.”

A Telegraph Cable Reached Under the Atlantic Ocean

During the Civil War construction of telegraph lines to the west proceeded, and news from the distant territories could be sent to the eastern cities almost instantly. But the biggest challenge, which seemed utterly impossible, would be to lay a telegraph cable under the ocean from North America to Europe.

In 1851 a functional telegraph cable had been laid across the English Channel. Not only could news travel between Paris and London, but the technological feat seemed to symbolize the peace between Britain and France just a few decades after the Napoleonic Wars. Soon telegraph companies began surveying the coast of Nova Scotia to prepare for laying cable.

An American businessman, Cyrus Field, became involved in the plan to put a cable across the Atlantic in 1854. Field raised money from his wealthy neighbors in New York City’s Gramercy Park neighborhood, and a new company was formed, the New York, Newfoundland, and London Telegraph Company.

In 1857, two ships chartered by Field's company began laying the 2,500 miles of cable, setting off from Ireland's Dingle Peninsula. The initial effort soon failed, and another attempt was put off until the following year.

Telegraph Messages Crossed the Ocean By Undersea Cable

The effort to lay the cable in 1858 met with problems, but they were overcome and on August 5, 1858, Cyrus Field was able to send a message from Newfoundland to Ireland via the cable. On August 16 Queen Victoria sent a congratulatory message to President James Buchanan.

Cyrus Field was treated as a hero upon arrival in New York City, but soon the cable went dead. Field resolved to perfect the cable, and by the end of the Civil War he was able to arrange more financing. An attempt to lay cable in 1865 failed when the cable snapped just 600 miles from Newfoundland.

An improved cable was finally put in place in 1866. Messages were soon flowing between the United States and Europe. And the cable which snapped the previous year was located and repaired, so two functional cables were operating.

The Telegraph Was Depicted In the Capitol Dome

Constantino Brumidi, the Italian-born artist who was painting inside the newly expanded US Capitol, incorporated the transatlantic cable into two beautiful paintings. The artist was an optimist, as his lofty depictions were completed a few years before the cable was finally proven successful.

In the oil painting Telegraph , Europe is portrayed as clasping hands with America while a cherub offers a telegraph wire. The spectacular fresco inside the top of the Capitol's dome, Apotheosis of Washington has a panel titled Marine showing Venus helping to lay the transatlantic cable .

In the Late 1800s Telegraph Wires Covered the World

In the years following Field's success, underwater cables connected the Middle East with India, and Singapore with Australia. By the end of the 19th century, much of the globe was wired for communication.

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The History of Microphones
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A Brief History of Washing Machines
The Inventions of Galileo Galilei

The Telegraph: How Samuel Morse’s Invention Revolutionized Communication

For all of human history, news and information traveled no faster than a man or horse could walk or a ship could sail. That changed on May 24, 1844 when inventor Samuel F.B. Morse tapped out a single sentence over a wire strung between Washington DC and nearby Baltimore: “What hath God wrought?” Seconds later, his associate in Baltimore tapped the same message back, ushering in the telegraphic age.

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Morse was a painter, not an inventor. He had become interested in the idea of using electromagnetism to transmit information while chatting with a scientist on the way home from a trip to Europe in 1832. He partnered with others to develop his system, using the underlying science and technological advances already pioneered in Europe to develop a system of relaying messages over wire.

Within a few years, they worked out the basic system, and Morse even developed his own simple code that eventually became known as Morse Code . In 1844, he was given $30,000 by Congress to refine his work, which he demonstrated at the Capitol in May 1845.

Introduction of the Telegraph

Morse initially wanted the government to buy his rights and patents, in the belief that his innovation should be a government service like the Post Office. His offering price was $100,000 (equivalent to roughly $3.4 million in 2020). To his disappointment, the government declined, and he turned to private investors. He and his partners founded the Magnetic Telegraph Company in May 1845, with the goal of building a line from Washington to New York. Other entrepreneurs soon followed suit.

Within five years of Morse’s first big public transmission, dozens of new companies had laid over 21,000 miles of telegraph lines. All major cities were connected as early as 1851. The first transatlantic cables were completed in 1858; the first transcontinental line was operational by 1861.

By the mid-1850s, the industry began to run up against the limits of an overly-crowded market. New York City alone was served by ten competing companies. Across the country, different areas used different standards, and often different systems: many used the Morse system, but others adopted a system developed by Scottish inventor Alexander Bain in 1848. This lack of consistent standards led to poor service, as transmissions often became garbled or lost in the tangle of overlapping lines.

Starting in 1852, when the Bain system was declared patent infringement by the US Supreme Court, major telegraph companies began a period of cooperation and standardization. Six regional monopolies agreed to what was called the “ Treaty of the Six Nations ,” establishing a shared network of main lines and acquiring many of the smaller firms in their regions.

Economic Impact of the Telegraph

The ability to rapidly transmit information across long distances revolutionized American commerce. Some economic historians believe that it was one of the key technologies that accelerated domestic and international trade and contributed to the industrialization of the United States.

In a study of 20,400 messages sent by the New York and New England Telegraph Company in November 1856, only around 2,000 were purely social, mostly related to illness and deaths. The remaining 18,500 focused on business. This was very different than in Europe, where the majority of the traffic consisted of personal messages throughout the 19th Century.

Businessmen used telegrams to send buy and sell orders, to give instructions for payment, to set appointments, to share commodity prices, give freight and shipping news, and share revenue reports. Later, it became a key instrument to wire money orders between accounts. It also made the business world less regional in nature, allowing the smaller cities, especially those in the West and Midwest, to become more competitive with the mature East Coast trading centers.

Telegraph’s Impact on Warfare

The telegraph’s impact on warfare was also significant. During the Crimean War (1853-1856), the telegraph was used for the first time to provide rapid communication between the front lines and the command centers. This allowed for more efficient troop movements and supply distribution. Similarly, during the American Civil War (1861-1865), the telegraph played a crucial role in transmitting orders, coordinating troop movements, and relaying battlefield intelligence. President Abraham Lincoln even had a telegraph office installed in the War Department next to the White House, allowing him to monitor battlefield developments in real-time.

Telegraph’s Impact on Diplomacy

The telegraph also had a profound impact on diplomacy and international relations. For the first time, diplomatic messages could be transmitted rapidly across great distances, allowing for more timely negotiations and crisis management. The telegraph played a key role in the resolution of the Trent Affair in 1861, a diplomatic crisis between the United States and Great Britain that threatened to draw the British into the American Civil War. Rapid telegraph communication allowed for a peaceful resolution to the crisis, averting a potential war between the two nations.

Growth of Newspapers

The telegraph also had a significant impact on the news industry. Newspapers were already a booming industry, with more than 1,600 in circulation by 1840. But the speed with which news spread across the country, like all information, moved no faster than the mail. With the telegraph, news could spread across the country in hours and days, not weeks and months, and this helped feed the country’s voracious appetite for news and debate. According to the American Antiquarian Society, by 1850, the number of American newspapers had climbed to 2,500 with an annual circulation of half a billion issues — at a time when the US population was barely 23 million. Most of these were four-page weeklies, but the number of daily papers shot up from 138 in 1840 to 254 in 1850.

To reduce the costs of sending large blocks of information over the wires, the industry began to pool resources. The Associated Press began in 1848; in Europe, the Reuters news service was established in 1849. Both still play a major role in global news.

The Decline of the Telegraph

The Treaty of the Six Nations was nullified by the Civil War, and the postwar period brought a new era of competition. By 1885, there were more than 200 small telegraph companies across the country, some of them only running a few miles between communities. Over time, many of these companies failed, and many others were absorbed into the behemoth of the Western Union Telegraph Company .

Western Union got its start in 1851, running a line between Buffalo, New York and St. Louis, Missouri. By the late 1860s, it was quickly becoming the dominant player in the telegraph industry. Its great innovation was to partner with the railroads, especially the transcontinental Union Pacific line completed in 1869. The deal was simple: Western Union would run its lines in the right-of-way along the tracks and set up offices in the major train stations. In return, the railroad companies could send all their messages for free, saving them millions in communications costs.

Over time, the company acquired over 500 smaller companies and gained the monopoly in the telegraph industry in the United States. By 1902, they controlled almost a million miles of telegraph lines and two undersea cable lines. While the company continues on today as a financial and communication company, they sent their last telegrams in 2006, after falling to a low of just 20,000 telegrams per year.

The popularity of the telegram began to decline as new technologies took its place: first telephones, then faxes, and later computers. By the early 21st Century, it would seem that the industry was dead. In fact, there were a flurry of reports in the media in 2013 that the last-ever telegram had been sent by a telegraph company in India.

This, however, appears to be an urban legend. According to International Telegram, at least 17 million telegrams are still sent each year. It remains a preferred means of communication for people in parts of Asia, as well as remaining the traditional communication methods of royal families and some governments.

Despite the telegraph’s eventual decline, its legacy lives on in the communication technologies we use today. The principles of electrical communication pioneered by the telegraph paved the way for the development of the telephone, radio, and eventually the internet. In many ways, the telegraph was the first step in the creation of the globalized, interconnected world we live in today. As we continue to develop new and more advanced communication technologies, it is important to remember the groundbreaking role the telegraph played in shaping the modern world.

Coe, Lewis. The Telegraph: A History of Morse’s Invention and Its Predecessors in the United States . United States, McFarland, Incorporated, Publishers, 2003.

Hochfelder, David. The Telegraph in America, 1832–1920 . United States, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012.

Lubrano, Annteresa. The Telegraph: How Technology Innovation Caused Social Change . United States, Taylor & Francis, 2013.

Reid, James D. The Telegraph in America: Its Founders, Promoters, and Noted Men . United States, Arno Press, 1974.

Updated: March 14, 2024

Related posts, the great inflation of the 1970s, the steam engine: driving force of the industrial revolution, the british industrial revolution: innovations, labor, and societal transformation.

Fairly certain this is AI generated. Very surface level look, and the Treaty of the Six Nations hyperlink links to the wrong Treaty of the Six Nations, which is a mistake I feel a human would not make.

He is my ancestor a very smart man

there is no info i can use here. this website stinks.

nah. this isn’t enough info.

Pingback: Breaking News: The Telegraph Communication Revolution and Samuel Morse - Great Inventions

Samuel Morse unveils the telegraph, revolutionizing communication

On January 6, 1838, Samuel Morse’s telegraph system is demonstrated for the first time at the Speedwell Iron Works in Morristown, New Jersey . The telegraph, a device which used electric impulses to transmit encoded messages over a wire, would eventually revolutionize long-distance communication, reaching the height of its popularity in the 1920s and 1930s.

Samuel Finley Breese Morse was born April 27, 1791, in Charlestown, Massachusetts . He attended Yale University, where he was interested in art, as well as electricity, still in its infancy at the time. After college, Morse became a painter. In 1832, while sailing home from Europe, he heard about the newly discovered electromagnet and came up with an idea for an electric telegraph. He had no idea that other inventors were already at work on the concept.

Morse spent the next several years developing a prototype and took on two partners, Leonard Gale and Alfred Vail, to help him. In 1838, he demonstrated his invention using Morse code, in which dots and dashes represented letters and numbers. In 1843, Morse finally convinced a skeptical Congress to fund the construction of the first telegraph line in the United States, from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore. In May 1844, Morse sent the first official telegram over the line, with the message: “What hath God wrought!”

Over the next few years, private companies, using Morse’s patent, set up telegraph lines around the Northeast. In 1851, the New York and Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Company was founded; it would later change its name to Western Union. In 1861, Western Union finished the first transcontinental line across the United States. Five years later, the first successful permanent line across the Atlantic Ocean was constructed and by the end of the century telegraph systems were in place in Africa, Asia and Australia.

Because telegraph companies typically charged by the word, telegrams became known for their succinct prose–whether they contained happy or sad news. The word “stop,” which was free, was used in place of a period, for which there was a charge. In 1933, Western Union introduced singing telegrams. During World War II , Americans came to dread the sight of Western Union couriers because the military used telegrams to inform families about soldiers’ deaths.

Over the course of the 20th century, telegraph messages were largely replaced by cheap long-distance phone service, faxes and email. Western Union delivered its final telegram in January 2006.

Samuel Morse died wealthy and famous in New York City on April 2, 1872, at age 80.

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In 1858, People Said the Telegraph Was 'Too Fast for the Truth'
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COMMENTS

Morse Code & Telegraph: Invention & Samuel Morse - HISTORY
In 1844, Morse sent his first telegraph message, from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore, Maryland; by 1866, a telegraph line had been laid across the Atlantic Ocean from the United States to...
Telegraph | Invention, History, & Facts | Britannica
Chains of these towers were built to permit transmission over long distances. The towers were spaced at intervals of 5 to 10 km (3 to 6 miles), and a signaling rate of three symbols per minute could be achieved. Another widely used visual telegraph was developed in 1795 by George Murray in England.
The First Long-Distance Telegraph Message, Sent This Day in ...
But the telegraph's long-distance application marks the beginning of a new era of communication, in which information can travel faster than any human by any means of conveyance.
How Far Did A Telegraph Signal Carry? - True West Magazine
Sam Morse used electromagnets to develop his code in 1837 to communicate with the telegraph. His code of dots and dashes corresponded to letters of the alphabet. The advent of the telephone in 1877 eventually brought about the decline of the telegraph.
How the Early Cable Was Used | American Experience | PBS
The wiring of America proceeded at an explosive pace, swelling from Morse's initial forty-mile line from Washington to Baltimore in 1846 to 12,000 miles of telegraph wire in 1850.
The History of the Invention of the Telegraph - ThoughtCo
The message of President Lincoln was telegraphed yesterday to all parts of the loyal states. The message contained 7, 578 words, and was all received in this city in one hour and 32 minutes, a feat of telegraphing unparalleled in the Old or New World.
Telegraph - Encyclopedia.com
Before the telegraph, the only way people could communicate with others in distant places was to send them letters or to travel to meet them. The telegraph allowed a person to transmit a message over hundreds and, eventually, thousands of miles in the space of perhaps an hour.
The Telegraph: How Samuel Morse’s Invention Revolutionized ...
By Heather Michon May 23, 2024. For all of human history, news and information traveled no faster than a man or horse could walk or a ship could sail. That changed on May 24, 1844 when inventor Samuel F.B. Morse tapped out a single sentence over a wire strung between Washington DC and nearby Baltimore: “What hath God wrought?”
Samuel Morse unveils the telegraph, revolutionizing ... - HISTORY
On January 6, 1838, Samuel Morse’s telegraph system is demonstrated for the first time at the Speedwell Iron Works in Morristown, New Jersey.
Invention of the Telegraph | Articles and Essays | Samuel F ...
Invention of the Telegraph. Long before Samuel F. B. Morse electrically transmitted his famous message "What hath God wrought?" from Washington to Baltimore on May 24, 1844, there were signaling systems that enabled people to communicate over distances. Earlier Signal Systems