A World of Words and Wires
Updated Jan 31, 2021;
Posted Jan 31, 2021
Clinton Square, circa 1900. Wires abound in this photograph of a city at the dawn of a new century. By 1909, when the citys 3 major telegraph/telephone companies merged, they had removed an estimated 2,636 poles, with 4,600 cross arms, and 775 miles of copper wire from the city streets. Photo courtesy of Onondaga Historical Association.
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By Robert Searing | Curator of History, Onondaga Historical Association.
“What hath God wrought?” On May 24, 1844, Samuel Morse sat amongst a gathering of Congressmen in the U.S. Capitol Building. He transmitted this simple and profound question from the Bible’s Book of Numbers, to a railroad station in Baltimore. To the astonishment of the onlookers, moments later, Alfred Vail transmitted the message back to the Capitol, sending electric signals across the telegraph lines Morse had painstakingly developed (with some Congressional funding) over the previous twelve years. These four little words, transmitted in bursts of dots and dashes, marked the beginning of a new epoch. Morse’s invention, the telegraph, a revolutionary method of rapid, long-distance communication, transformed the world.