Morse and the Electric Telegraph

The electric telegraph separated communication from transport for the first time: a message no longer had to travel as fast as a horse, train or ship. In Britain, William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone patented a needle telegraph in 1837 and installed it along railway lines. In the United States, the painter Samuel Morse, working with Alfred Vail, developed a single-wire system and a code of dots and dashes.

On 24 May 1844 Morse sent the message 'What hath God wrought' from Washington to Baltimore. Telegraph lines spread alongside railways, which used them to coordinate trains safely. Newspapers, stock exchanges, police and governments quickly adopted the technology. Because messages were charged by the word, telegraph writing encouraged a clipped style, and later historians have linked it to the brief, factual style of wire-service news reporting.