Morse Telegraph (1844): 'What Hath God Wrought' and Morse Code

The Morse telegraph entered history on 24 May 1844, when Samuel F. B. Morse tapped out the words “What hath God wrought” in the United States Capitol in Washington and they were received almost instantly in Baltimore, about 40 miles away. The message opened the first long-distance electric telegraph line in the United States. Within a few decades Morse’s system and the code of dots and dashes that bears his name had spread across America and much of the world, making it possible for news, prices and orders to travel faster than any messenger.

Background: messages at the speed of horses

Before the telegraph, information moved only as fast as people, horses, ships or trains could carry it. Optical semaphore systems, such as Claude Chappe’s network in France from the 1790s, could relay signals between towers, but they needed clear weather, daylight and many operators.

Scientific discoveries in the early nineteenth century opened another possibility. The battery, developed by Alessandro Volta in 1800, provided a steady electric current, and Hans Christian Ørsted’s discovery of electromagnetism in 1820 showed that a current could move a magnetic needle. Inventors in several countries began building electric telegraphs. In Britain, William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone patented a needle telegraph in 1837 and put it into service on railways (see Cooke and Wheatstone telegraph).

Samuel Morse: from painter to inventor

Samuel Finley Breese Morse (1791–1872) was a well-known American portrait painter and a professor of painting and sculpture at the University of the City of New York. According to his own account, the idea of an electric telegraph came to him in 1832 aboard the packet ship Sully, returning from Europe, after a conversation with the physician and scientist Charles Thomas Jackson about electromagnetism.

Morse had limited scientific training. His early apparatus worked only over short distances until Leonard Gale, a chemistry professor, showed him how to use batteries with many cells and electromagnets with many turns of wire to send current further. In 1837 Alfred Vail, a skilled mechanic whose family owned the Speedwell Ironworks in New Jersey, joined the partnership, funding the work and improving the equipment.

Morse filed a patent caveat in 1837, demonstrated the system in New Jersey, New York, Philadelphia and Washington in 1838, and received a US patent in 1840. Attempts to win support in Europe failed.

Funding the first line

For several years Congress showed little interest. Finally, on 3 March 1843, it approved $30,000 to build an experimental line between Washington and Baltimore. Construction started that year beside the tracks of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.

The first plan was to bury insulated wires in lead pipes, laid by a machine designed by Ezra Cornell. The insulation failed, and the buried section was abandoned. The team switched to stringing copper wire on wooden poles, which was quicker and cheaper and became the standard method for telegraph lines.

Even before the line was finished it proved its worth. On 1 May 1844 news that the Whig convention in Baltimore had nominated Henry Clay for president was carried by train to the end of the completed wire and telegraphed to Washington, arriving well before the train itself.

24 May 1844: the first message

On 24 May 1844 Morse sat in the Supreme Court chamber, then located in the Capitol, and sent the official opening message to Vail at the Mount Clare railway station in Baltimore. The words, “What hath God wrought”, come from the Bible, Numbers 23:23. They were chosen by Annie Ellsworth, daughter of the Commissioner of Patents, Henry Leavitt Ellsworth.

Morse’s receiver used an electromagnet to press a stylus against a moving paper strip, embossing marks that could be read as dots and dashes. Vail repeated the message back to Washington. The original paper tape is preserved in the Library of Congress.

Days later the line showed its practical value during the Democratic convention in Baltimore, which nominated James K. Polk. When the convention chose Silas Wright of New York as vice-presidential candidate, news reached Wright in Washington by telegraph, and he wired back that he declined. Delegates at first doubted that a reply could arrive so quickly.

How Morse code works

Morse code represents letters and numbers as short and long signals, called dots and dashes, separated by gaps of different lengths. Common letters received short codes: in the code, E is a single dot and T a single dash. Operators soon learned to read messages by ear from the clicks of the receiving instrument rather than from paper tape, which made transmission faster.

Morse’s earliest scheme used numbers that stood for words in a code book. The change to an alphabetic code was made around 1838, and Alfred Vail is widely believed to have played a major role in it, although Morse took the public credit. The original American version, now called American Morse, was later modified in Europe. A revised code, worked out in Germany by Friedrich Clemens Gerke in 1848, became the basis of the International Morse Code adopted for European telegraph lines in the 1850s and 1860s.

The telegraph spreads

After the Washington–Baltimore demonstration, private companies licensed Morse’s patents and built lines rapidly. By the early 1850s many thousands of miles of wire linked the cities of the eastern United States. Competition and patent disputes were intense. In O’Reilly v. Morse (1854) the US Supreme Court upheld most of Morse’s patent but rejected his broadest claim to all uses of electromagnetism for writing at a distance.

Many small companies were gradually absorbed into larger ones. Western Union, which took that name in 1856, became the dominant firm. On 24 October 1861 the first transcontinental telegraph line was completed, linking the East and the Pacific coast and ending the Pony Express after only about eighteen months of service. In 1858 a first transatlantic telegraph cable briefly linked Europe and North America; a lasting connection followed in 1866.

In Europe, many states adopted Morse’s recording instrument and code during the 1850s, often in place of needle telegraphs, because a single wire and a simple key were cheap and reliable. Lines crossed borders, and messages had to be passed between national systems. In 1865 twenty European states founded the International Telegraph Union in Paris to agree common rules, codes and tariffs. It survives today as the International Telecommunication Union, an agency of the United Nations.

How it changed news and business

The telegraph transformed journalism. In 1846 several New York newspapers began cooperating to gather news by telegraph during the Mexican–American War, an arrangement that grew into the Associated Press. Readers came to expect reports from distant cities on the same day or the next.

Business changed too. Merchants and banks could compare prices in different markets almost at once, so price gaps between cities narrowed. Railways used the telegraph to control train movements on single-track lines, improving safety and capacity. Governments and armies relied on it, and during the American Civil War President Abraham Lincoln followed events closely through telegrams at the War Department.

The telegraph also changed science and daily life. Observations gathered by wire from many places allowed the first weather warnings and forecasts; in Britain, Robert FitzRoy began issuing storm warnings in 1861. Astronomers used telegraph signals to compare clocks and measure longitude precisely, and railways and telegraph companies later spread standardised time across whole countries.

Key people

• Samuel F. B. Morse (1791–1872): painter and inventor who promoted the system, secured patents and won funding from Congress.
• Alfred Vail (1807–1859): partner and mechanic who built much of the equipment, received the first message in Baltimore and helped develop the code.
• Leonard Gale (1800–1883): chemistry professor who helped solve the problem of sending current over long distances.
• Ezra Cornell (1807–1874): builder of the first line, later a major investor in Western Union and founder of Cornell University.
• Annie Ellsworth: suggested the words of the first official message.

Myths and facts

• Myth: Morse invented the electric telegraph. Several telegraphs were developed in the 1830s; Morse’s system succeeded because it was simple, used a single circuit and could record messages.
• Myth: “What hath God wrought” was the first message ever sent by telegraph. It was the first official message on the Washington–Baltimore line; Morse and others had sent test messages over shorter distances for years.
• Myth: Morse created Morse code alone. Alfred Vail’s contribution was significant, although its exact extent is debated.

Timeline

• 1832, October: Morse conceives the idea of an electromagnetic telegraph on the voyage home from Europe.
• 1837: Morse files a patent caveat; Alfred Vail joins the project.
• 1838, January: Demonstration at the Speedwell Ironworks in New Jersey.
• 1840, 20 June: Morse receives a US patent for his telegraph.
• 1843, 3 March: Congress grants $30,000 for an experimental line.
• 1844, 1 May: News of Henry Clay’s nomination travels partly by telegraph.
• 1844, 24 May: “What hath God wrought” is sent from Washington to Baltimore.
• 1856: Western Union adopts its name.
• 1861, 24 October: The transcontinental telegraph is completed.
• 1872, 2 April: Morse dies in New York.

Why it matters

The Morse telegraph separated communication from transport for the first time on a large scale. Within a generation it carried news, prices, weather and military orders across continents and, by cable, under oceans. Later inventions such as the telephone and radio built on the networks, habits and businesses that the telegraph created, and Morse code itself remained in use on ships and radio for more than 150 years.