It was May 24, 1844. A few days earlier, specifically on the 13th, the Civil Guard was founded in Spain, while in mid-March Queen María Cristina officially returned to Madrid after her exile. But on that day something very special happened: the inventor Samuel Morse sent the first telegram from the United States , through a telegraph line between Washington and Baltimore, a distance of about 40 miles, on a line that was originally built with the help from a $ 40,000 grant from Congress.
And what was your first message? What hath God wrought. Or, what is the same, “What God has worked”, which was transmitted using the recently developed system of dots and dashes, which became known under the name Morse Code.
To do this, Morse used equipment of his own invention, very different from that created a few years earlier on the other side of the Atlantic, when Charles Wheatstone and William Cooke pioneered the use of the electric telegraph in Great Britain. In fact, his electric telegraph, a forerunner of the telephone , made its first appearance on July 25, 1837, using electromagnetism to pinpoint different alphabetic symbols with which to spell messages.
Two years later, in 1839, the Great Western Railway had established a telegraph line, beginning at Paddington Station and ending at Slough. Shortly thereafter, on May 16, 1843, this line was officially opened for others to use, thus becoming the world’s first public telecommunications service , thereby inspiring the opening of a veritable wave of new telegraph companies in Great Britain. Brittany. Until 1870, when all British electric telegraph lines were brought under government control, and officially transferred to the General Post Office.
But as with great technological innovations, not everyone was able to see the potential of this new form of long-distance, almost instantaneous telecommunications.
For example, in 1858 the prestigious newspaper The New York Times called the telegraph “superficial, sudden, unchanged and too fast for the truth.” While the writer and critic Matthew Arnold, in 1903, referred to the transatlantic telegraph as “that great rope, with a Philistine at each end speaking non-profit!”.
Be that as it may, in addition to the news, telegrams gradually became a popular way of celebrating special events . For example, in 1936, a company sold 50,000 Valentine’s Day telegrams in striking bright green, decorated with hearts and cupids.
But after World War II, as the telephone network began to expand, the relatively expensive medium of telegrams eventually lost some luster, until Western Union of the United States decided to continue its telegram service until 2006.
The last country to use telegrams on a large scale was India, which officially suspended its telegram service in 2013.
