HISTORY’s Moment in Media: Morse Code -- The Message That Changed the World

It’s a Bible quote, sure: Numbers 23:23, expressing awe and wonder at God’s works. But it’s also the first message sent by Samuel Morse’s electromagnetic telegraph, transmitted from the U.S. Supreme Court chamber, then in the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C., to the Mount Clare train station in Baltimore, some 40 miles away.

Morse sent the message to his assistant, Alfred Vail, and Vail sent a confirmation message back to Morse, on May 24, 1844 -- 181 years ago this month.

Morse didn’t invent the telegraph, and he didn’t come up with the term telegraph. But he devised a simple, efficient, effective system -- and the dots-and-dashes code that conveyed messages across it -- that made near-instantaneous communication practical. Within two decades, telegraph lines had spread across the United States and throughout Europe. By 1940, 40 transatlantic cables united the two continents. Morse’s telegraph, along with Morse code, transformed the world. For the first time, news was conveyed instantly. Western Union messengers delivered messages from around the world. Money could be “wired.”

Telegraph is derived from the Greek: tele, which means distant, and graphein, which means to write. The term was initially used to refer to semaphore indicators, flags or other objects that could be displayed or arranged to convey messages across long distances. By 1800, there were telegraph networks -- semaphores that passed messages from hill to hill or tower to tower, all based on a line-of-sight view. Telegraph Hill in San Francisco was so named when a semaphore station was established at its peak, relaying a message to local merchants when a ship was seen entering the Golden Gate.

But a visual telegraph only worked where it could be seen. The distance between stations couldn’t be too far, and foul weather (or nighttime) made messaging impossible. By the early part of the 19th century, discoveries about electricity and magnetism, and the development of the first electric batteries, led to experiments in using electrical pulses to communicate over distances. In 1831, a physicist in Albany developed a method for using a battery to send a signal that rang a bell a mile away. In London, two scientists devised an electromagnetic telegraph that used needles to spell out letters, which they patented in 1837. In 1839, it was installed along England’s Great Western Railway, allowing messages to be sent between London’s Paddington Station and the station in West Drayton, 13 miles away.

Morse, a portrait painter with an early interest in electricity -- whose wife died in 1825 while he was traveling to paint the Marquis de Lafayette, and who, by the time he learned the news, was unable to make it home before she’d been buried -- became intrigued with electromagnetism in 1832, after a conversation with a fellow passenger on a steamship returning to the U.S. from Europe. He built on the discoveries of those earlier scientists, focusing especially on overcoming the electrical resistance that made it difficult to send a signal over great distances. In 1843, he got funding from Congress for his work. After hiring the mechanic Ezra Cornell to run his line on a railroad right-of-way from Washington to Baltimore -- he’d go on to become wealthy from telegraph-related businesses and then found his namesake university in upstate New York -- he was ready for the fateful test.

Morse’s system succeeded because it was so simple and portable. All it required was a portable, battery-powered transmitter, to tap out those dashes and dots, and a similarly portable receiver on the other end. As the easy-to-use technology expanded around the world, Morse’s code evolved, too. International Morse code, developed to accommodate necessary accent marks in European languages, is the version we know today (to the extent we know it at all). SOS, dot dot dot dash dash dash dot dot dot, is International, not American, Morse code.

But as much as Morse’s telegraph ushered in the era of electronic communication, its heyday was destined to be short-lived. The transcontinental telegraph line was completed in 1861 -- the first coast-to-coast message was sent by the chief justice of the California Supreme Court to President Abraham Lincoln. In 1869, the transcontinental railroad was completed. And in 1876, Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone. What Morse wrought -- an expectation for instant, electronic communication, and the infrastructure necessary to deliver that -- would ultimately lead to worldwide telephony, to live television broadcasts beamed around the globe, and even to the internet -- whose fiber-optic backbone spreads around the world and under the oceans, just as the telegraph networks did.

And yet still the telegraph hung on. Western Union transmitted its final U.S. telegram in -- believe it or not -- 2006. For decades, the service had continued as a way to mark milestone occasions and ensure keepsake messages. By the end -- more than 160 years after the technology was invented -- it was mostly used by corporations sending formal notices. The final ten messages, as Western Union reported, were birthday wishes, condolences and several people attempting to send the last telegram.

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