The first electrical technology to send complex written information faster than a human could carry it. By pulsing electrical signals along a wire in coded patterns, the telegraph separated communication from transportation for the first time in history. A message that once required days of travel could now arrive in seconds. The network of copper wire that spread across continents and beneath oceans in the nineteenth century remade news, markets, diplomacy, and warfare, laying the foundation for every wired communication system that followed.
On May 24, 1844, a woman named Annie Ellsworth chose the words, and Samuel Morse tapped them out from Washington toward Baltimore, forty miles away: "What hath God wrought." The reply came back in moments. For the first time, complex information could travel at the speed of electricity, day or night and far beyond the line-of-sight reach of the older optical signal towers. Before that afternoon, the fastest any message could move was the speed of a horse or a ship. After it, the speed of thought and the speed of wire were nearly the same. The world would never again be quite as large.