A momentous message marked the dawn of a new era in communication on May 24th, 1844. American inventor Samuel Morse successfully transmitted the first ever telegraph message from the U.S. Capitol in Washington D.C. to his assistant Alfred Vail stationed in Baltimore, Maryland. The message, chosen by Morse’s young friend Annie Ellsworth, was a fittingly profound one: “What hath God wrought?” This seemingly simple phrase, derived from the Bible (Numbers 23:23), heralded a revolution in long-distance communication. The success of the telegraph dramatically shrunk the time it took to send information across vast distances, forever altering the landscape of business, news dissemination, and even warfare.
