One-hundred sixty-seven years ago, on May 24, 1844, about a mile from where I’m sitting in Baltimore, an inventor named Alfred Vail (Samuel Morse’s number-two) is hanging around a train station waiting beside one of the first telegraph devices. It’s not the tappy tap key kind we think of now, but its predecessor, a pendulum thing that swings back and forth according to the electrical current and leaves dots and dashes on a long, narrow strip of paper.This is what comes:Vail, or perhaps some lackey, decodes the message to read, ’What hath God wrought" (from the Bible). And Vail sends the same message back to Washington. Success. Ten years later, 23,000 miles of wire crisscrossed the United States, delivering mainly information on train operations–information could now travel faster than a train–and business dealings. Information itself would never be the same, and the great string of technological dominoes that lead to the telephone, radio, and eventually, the internet was in motion.It’s worth noting, however, as Vail’s son does in a 1900 letter to the editor of The New York Times, that "What hath God wrought" was not the first telegraph message. The very first was an experiment done by Vail and Morse earlier in the month, on May 1, 1844, to see if they could get information from Annapolis Jct., Maryland, which is located between Baltimore and D.C., to the nation’s capital faster than a speeding train.They got their message from passengers traveling south from Baltimore – specifically, the message was simply that the Whig Party had nominated Henry Clay for president – and sent it along. The telegraphed message won, bumming out a great many train riders who thought they had the scoop."And when they heard the newsboys shouting their extras and saw there in cold print," wrote the younger Vail, "their supposed information, their astonishment knew no bounds for they had no belief in that little instrument they saw at Annapolis Jct to beat them in carrying the news to Washington." Kind of a weird foreshadowing of the digital divide to come a century-and-a-half later. He who can access the information —and fastest —wins.Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.
Advertisement