A New Means of Communication
CatkumaPatentPress. “Morse Code Patent Print Art 1840"
On Christmas Eve 1814, Andrew Jackson’s troops killed 2,000 British soldiers in New Orleans. The soldiers were unaware that two weeks earlier across the ocean, the Treaty of Ghent had ended the War of 1812. This event drove Samuel Morse, an American inventor, to develop a quicker communication method. Morse’s 1830s telegraph paved the way for transatlantic telegraph cables.
Text of the first telegraph message.
Morse, Samuel F. B. “The First Telegraph Message,” 1844
A telegraph machine from the 1800s.
Trainor, Sean. “How Samuel Morse and the Telegraph Still Influence Your Life”
With the telegraph completed and anticipation at a high, Morse gave a woman named Annie Ellsworth the honor of sending the first message. She quoted Numbers 23:23, “What Hath God Wrought!”
After many over-land telegraph cables had been established, the Brett brothers developed an idea for an underwater cable to connect the UK and France. The success of the Dover-Calais telegraph cable energized the construction of cables all over the world. Most cables connected land that was far apart, but none were yet trans-oceanic.
A section of the first undersea telegraph cable, laid in 1850, picked up in 1875.
Burns, Bill. “1850 Dover-Calais Cable.”