The Importance of the Invention of the Telegraph

    The telegraph is in my opinion one of the most underrated and underappreciated inventions in human history. Not only did it advance our understanding of telecommunications and expand the possibilities of how we can harness the power of electricity, but it brought the world together in a way that was never before possible.

    Samuel Morse invented the telegraph in 1844, but he held onto the idea for far longer. He originally came up with the idea for the telegraph in 1832, when he heard about Michael Faraday's new electromagnet, and wondered if he could harness its power for the use of telecommunications. He had an idea for how he wanted to create his new invention, but he would need some help from a few folks before being able to properly execute it.

    He enlisted the help of one of his colleagues at the City University of New York, Leonard Gale, to help him really understand the inner workings of how batteries and magnets work. Gale directed him to a Princeton professor named Joseph Henry, who had studied the subject very closely, and actually had created his own idea for a telegraph. With the help of Alfred Vail, a technician hired by Morse to help construct the machine, Morse finished his invention and sent the first successful message on May 24, 1844. The message was sent from Washington D.C. all the way up to Baltimore. 

    The telegraph changed everything and was quickly adopted by our society. This map of the United States in 1953 shows just how fast it took for the telegraph to become a popular and widely used instrument. Over 27,000 miles of telegraph lines...in just 9 years! It definitely had an immediate impact on society and changed the way people lived and communicated. Now, if you wanted to contact a loved one thousands of miles away, you didn't have to send out a letter in hopes of it getting to its destination within a few weeks (only to wait just as long to receive one back.) No, now messages could be sent almost instantly and over thousands of miles. It even connected the United States and the U.K. in less than 25 years after its invention. Information that used to take months would now take a mere minutes to reach its destination. 

    This helped businesses and services of all types. The military could now be much more efficient, companies could more quickly and easily correspond with other locations over long distances, and newspapers could now get their stories printed out the very next day in order to inform the public of any notable news happening. We could now be much more efficient as a species, and could coordinate more quickly and easily to get bigger tasks done while saving a lot of time and energy, and it's all thanks to this almost magical invention of the telegraph. The world was now fully connected as a species, and though there have been new inventions that have outlived the telegraph, it was the first one that really unified us as a people, and was the first step into taking us into the age of communication that we're currently living in today.