25 for 25. Morse’s telegraph (1844)

Snapshots from a quarter-millennium

For a hundred millennia the human world had been expanding. Humans ventured out of Africa to Asia, Europe, Australia, the Americas and the Pacific. The farther they went, the less they recalled of the region of their species’ birth. The farthest might have been on another planet for all they knew of their distant cousins.

Then, on May 24, 1844, an American painter and tinkerer named Samuel Morse suddenly made the human world smaller. It’s been shrinking ever since.

What Morse and the others who contributed to the invention of telegraphy did was break the historic chain that bound communication to transportation. Until the telegraph, a message could travel no faster than the person carrying it. There were minor exceptions to this rule. The noise of the firing of a cannon might travel a few miles and signal the start of a battle. Homing pigeons carried messages to specific spots, namely their homes. But by and large, information was transported by humans.

The telegraph handed the transporting to electrons. They travel faster than any human, indeed almost instantaneously. At first the electrons were confined to wires, which had to be strung from the sender to the recipient. Morse’s first message, “What hath God wrought,” traveled from the basement of the U.S. Capitol in Washington to a station of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad in Baltimore on a wire beside the B&O track.

Soon telegraph lines snaked out across the country, often along railroad tracks, which already had rights of way. By 1850 more than ten thousand miles of telegraph lines were in operation in America. A submarine cable was laid beneath the Atlantic Ocean during the late 1850s and 1860s, connecting America with Europe. In the decades that followed, cables linked every inhabited continent with every other.

Telegraphy was liberated from wires when the Italian Guglielmo Marconi and others realized that electrical impulses—the dots and dashes of the code named after Morse—could radiate through space, and radio telegraphy was born. By then Alexander Graham Bell had shown that wires could carry electrical waves that encoded sound waves, giving rise to the telephone. The principle was applied to radio telegraphy, producing what we know as radio. 

Radio added a second revolution to the one already effected by real-time communication over distance. Telegraph and telephone transmitted from one sender to one recipient. Radio allowed one sender to reach many recipients. Radio transformed public communications, for better and for worse. Franklin Roosevelt's radio “fireside chats” offered comfort to millions of Americans during the Great Depression. Adolf Hitler 's broadcast rallies whipped up fervor for the Nazis' malign agenda.

Television added pictures to radio’s sound, eventually giving nearly everyone a window on nearly everything. Broadcast television was confined to an oligopoly of networks, but cable television multiplied the bandwidth and allowed hundreds of channels.

The next wave of the communications revolution was, ironically, something of a throwback to the first wave. The internet, popularized during the 1990s, was based on digitized information—essentially the dots and dashes of the Morse code. But the processing power of computers enormously increased the quantity of information sent and received. And the spread of smartphones meant that, to a rough approximation, everybody on earth lived in the same communications village.

Not everyone was happy with this development. Governments began erecting digital walls to keep the world out of their parts of the village. As long as there has been communication, there have been secrets. Knowledge is power, and people with power don’t want to share it.

“What hath God wrought," telegraphed Morse in kicking off the communications revolution, quoting from the biblical book of Numbers. With no disrespect to the God of the Bible, it was Morse and other humans who did the work. (In the time of King James, wrought was the past tense of work.) What humans had done, other humans might undo. 

But they couldn't undo it all. A mantra of the early internet was "Information wants to be free.” This wasn't true. Information, being inanimate, doesn't want anything. But people who get a taste of free information do want it to be free. And they don't give it up easily.