ABSTRACT
The telegraph industry emerged from the first successful test of a telegraph system in the United States. On January 6, 1838, in Morristown, New Jersey, Samuel F.B. Morse used a crude device to send electrical impulses along a two-mile circuit, activating a pencil that recorded a series of dots and dashes on a paper tape at the other end. Six years later, on May 24, 1844, Morse transmitted the well-known first message, “What Hath God Wrought?” from Washington, DC, to his assistant Alfred P Vail forty miles away in Baltimore, over wires erected with a federal grant of $30,000.
