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"What hath God wrought!"
—Samuel Morse
In the 1830s and 1840s, Samuel Morse in America and the British duo of Cooke and Wheatstone invented the telegraph, which sent electrical pulses through wires to transmit messages across vast distances in minutes rather than days or weeks.
This invention replaced physical message delivery systems like smoke signals and pigeons, connected continents through underwater cables, and laid the foundation for modern communications.
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In 1794, Claude Chappe built France's first optical telegraph: a chain of hilltop towers with movable wooden arms that operators adjusted to send coded messages.
The system relayed information across 200 kilometers in under an hour and was used extensively by the French military and government.
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In 1837, Cooke and Wheatstone's electric telegraph replaced visual signal systems by sending messages via wires as electrical pulses.
This invention sparked rapid growth in global communication networks.
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In 1838, Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail patented their electric telegraph system, which used a distinctive pattern of dots and dashes to transmit messages.
Known as Morse code, it transformed communication during the 19th century, proving especially vital during the Civil War where women stepped in as telegraph operators due to male labor shortages.
In 1840, Britain's Great Western Railway adopted a time zone, Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) as its standard, using the telegraph to synchronize clocks.
Samuel Morse's first Morse Code message in 1844 transmitted "What hath God wrought!" between Washington D.C. and Baltimore.
In 1845, the Magnetic Telegraph Company launched America's first commercial telegraph line between New York and Washington.
This development sparked rapid construction of telegraph networks across the nation, revolutionizing business communication and rendering services like the Pony Express obsolete.
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In 1851, Western Union was founded as the New York and Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Company in Rochester and New York by Samuel L. Selden, Hiram Sibley, and Ezra Cornell.
Across the Atlantic, entrepreneurs launched an ambitious plan to lay the first undersea cable between Europe and America.
Despite multiple failed attempts in the 1850s to stretch copper wire across 2,000 miles of ocean floor, engineers persisted to make it an eventual reality.
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In 1852, Boston inventor William Channing linked telegraph wires to the first fire alarm, creating a direct signal path from fire locations to nearby stations.
That same year, Wells Fargo began sending telegrams via the Pony Express.
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The Western Union Telegraph Expedition, an ambitious project to connect the United States and Europe via a telegraph line spanning North America and the Russian Empire from 1865 to 1867.
It influenced the purchase of Alaska by the United States.
The first transatlantic telegraph cable, laid in 1858 between Ireland and Newfoundland.
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Thomas Edison invented the ticker tape.
The telegraph is now able to send financial information to investors in real time.
In 1870, the British government nationalized the telegraph industry to protect national interests.
This move brought standardized rates and improved reliability across the British Isles, while telegraph lines expanded across America, reaching from San Francisco to remote mining towns like Butte, Montana.
Thomas Edison advanced the technology in 1874 by inventing the quadruplex telegraph, which allowed multiple messages to travel simultaneously on a single line.
Alexander Graham Bell's invention of the telephone in 1876 enables voice transmission across distances, quickly surpassing the telegraph as society's preferred method of telecommunication.
Guglielmo Marconi invents wireless telegraphy that same year.
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The Telautograph is invented, enabling folks to send signatures via long distances.
This is the precursor to the fax machine.
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A telegraph boy was discovered by police of being a secret prostitute of brothel on 19 Cleveland Street in London.
Leading to arrests of prominent people known as the Cleveland Street Scandal.
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By 1900, over 10 million miles of telegraph lines connected the world's cities and continents.
The advent of automatic telegraphy in the early 1900s replaced manual encoding with faster, mechanized systems.
In January 1917, the German Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmermann sent a secret telegram to Mexico, proposing a military alliance against the United States in the event of America entering World War I.
The telegram was intercepted and decoded by British intelligence, and its revelation played a significant role in swaying American public opinion in favor of joining the war against Germany.
In the early 20th century, radio and telegraph technologies merged to create radiotelegraphy, enabling wireless message transmission across vast distances.
The first transatlantic radiotelegraph in 1927 freed communication from undersea cables, while the system's SOS capability—famously used during the Titanic disaster—revolutionized maritime safety.
The telegraph starts making a debut in classic movies like Alfred Hitchcock's thriller "The 39 Steps".
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In the mid-1900s, the telex system was invented by combining telephone and telegraph technology to enable rapid, direct message transmission.
In WW2, Navajo Code Talkers are trained to send a secret code over telegraph wires.
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The telegraph's dominance in communication faded during the 1960s as newer electronic systems emerged.
Though still used in some specialized fields today, its greater legacy lies in how it transformed 19th-century society by enabling instant long-distance messaging.
This breakthrough changed how people conducted business, shared news, and understood their world, setting the foundation for our modern digital communications.
The last telegram was sent in India in 2013 in Hindi saying, "Long live the telegram".
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