First Telegraph Message
Samuel Morse sent 'What hath God wrought' as the first long-distance telegraph message
May 24, 1844
Communication at the Speed of Electricity
On May 24, 1844, Samuel Morse sent the first long-distance telegraph message from the chambers of the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., to a railway station in Baltimore, Maryland, roughly 40 miles away. The message, chosen by Annie Ellsworth, daughter of the U.S. Patent Commissioner, read: "What hath God wrought," a phrase taken from the Book of Numbers in the Bible. The message was transmitted using Morse code, the system of dots and dashes that Morse had developed with Alfred Vail to represent letters and numbers as electrical pulses. The transmission arrived and was correctly received within seconds.
How the Telegraph Worked
The electric telegraph used a simple principle: an electrical current sent through a wire could trigger a clicking device at the other end. By controlling the length of the pulses, operators could encode messages using Morse code. A skilled telegraph operator could send and receive dozens of words per minute. The technology required copper wire strung between poles along railway lines and roads. Congress had funded Morse's demonstration with $30,000, after years of lobbying. The Baltimore–Washington line was the first government-funded telegraph line in the United States, and its success immediately sparked interest in building a nationwide network.
The First Information Highway
The telegraph transformed business, journalism, and government within just a few years of the 1844 demonstration. News that had once taken days or weeks to travel across a country could now arrive in minutes. Stock prices, weather reports, and military orders moved at the speed of electricity. By 1861, the first transcontinental telegraph line crossed the United States, making the Pony Express immediately obsolete. The first transatlantic telegraph cable was successfully laid in 1866, linking Europe and North America. The telegraph was the world's first telecommunications network and laid the conceptual groundwork for every communications technology that followed, from the telephone to the internet.