Samuel Morse demonstrates the telegraph with the message What hath God wrought
In a demonstration witnessed by members of Congress American inventor Samuel F.B.Morse dispatches a telegraph message from the U.S.Capitol to Alfred Vail at a railroad station in Baltimore Maryland.
The messageWhat Hath God Wroughtwas telegraphed back to the Capitol a moment later by Vail.The question taken from the Bible (Numbers 2323) had been suggested to Morse by Annie Ellworth the daughter of the commissioner of patents.Morse an accomplished painter learned of a French inventors idea of an electric telegraph in 1832 and then spent the next 12 years attempting to perfect a working telegraph instrument.During this period he composed the Morse code a set of signals that could represent language in telegraph messages and convinced Congress to finance a Washington-to-Baltimore telegraph line.
On May 24 1844 he inaugurated the worlds first commercial telegraph line with a message that was fitting given the inventions future effects on American life.Just a decade after the first line opened more than 20000 miles of telegraph cable crisscrossed the country.The rapid communication it enabled greatly aided American expansion making railroad travel safer as it provided a boost to business conducted across the great distances of a growing United States.
