On May 24, 1844, Samuel Morse sent the first official long-distance electric telegraph message from the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., to his station in Baltimore, Maryland. The four-word dispatch—“What hath God wrought?”—was suggested by Annie Ellsworth, daughter of a key congressional supporter, and marked the inauguration of the Washington–Baltimore telegraph line, funded by a $30,000 appropriation from Congress, according to records at the Smithsonian.

The Technology Behind the Telegraph

Samuel Morse, formerly a portrait painter, partnered with machinist Alfred Vail to build an electromagnetic telegraph. Morse devised the dot-and-dash code that bears his name—Morse Code—to encode letters and numbers as electrical pulses. When the key at Washington was pressed, it completed a circuit and sent a series of electrical signals over a single iron wire. At Baltimore, the pulses actuated a marking device that produced long and short ink impressions on paper tape, which an operator then decoded into text.

Transformative Impact

The telegraph was the first system enabling near-instantaneous, long-distance communication, with profound effects:

  • Military Uses: During the American Civil War, President Lincoln’s administration leveraged telegraph lines for real-time strategic coordination and intelligence sharing.
  • Financial Markets: Telegraph networks allowed merchants and bankers to receive stock and commodity price updates across cities within minutes, knitting together regional markets.
  • Journalism: In 1846, five New York newspapers formed the Associated Press to pool telegraphed war reports—founding the modern wire-service model.

By 1866, the first successful permanent transatlantic cable linked Europe and North America, reducing message time from weeks to minutes.

Catalyst for Future Communications

Morse’s invention laid the groundwork for subsequent breakthroughs:

  • Telephone (1876): Alexander Graham Bell’s apparatus built on telegraphic principles to transmit vocal vibrations electrically.
  • Wireless Telegraphy & Radio: Guglielmo Marconi’s experiments in the 1890s transmitted Morse Code signals without wires, leading to broadcast radio.
  • The Internet: Concepts of digital encoding, switching, and networked transmission trace back to telegraphic signaling and network design.

Greece’s Entry into the Telegraph Age

Although the telegraph was an American invention, Greece joined the electric-communications era in 1859 when the British Eastern Telegraph Company laid a submarine cable between Athens and Syros, creating Greece’s first telegraph link, according to records at OTE. Syros then served as a Mediterranean hub connecting to broader European networks. In the late 1860s, Greece became one of the early national members of the International Telegraph Union, precursor to today’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU).

Enduring Legacy

Samuel Morse died in 1872, but his telegraph reshaped human interaction by collapsing distances and accelerating information flow. From battlefield dispatches and real-time market data to the very notion of “being online,” the thread can be drawn from Morse’s dots and dashes to every email, text message, and data packet in today’s global communications network.