Birth Of The Information Highway...!

I think it's safe to say that if this wasn't the start, it certainly was a close second!

When you stop and think about it, the amount of time between this discovery and the place we are at today is fairly short! New discoveries are being made even as we speak that will make the information sharing beyond our wildest dreams!

May 24, 1844:

What hath God wrought?

In a demonstration witnessed by members of Congress, American inventor Samuel F.B. Morse dispatches a telegraph message from the U.S. Capitol to Alfred Vail at a railroad station in Baltimore, Maryland. The message--"What Hath God Wrought?"--was telegraphed back to the Capitol a moment later by Vail. The question, taken from the Bible (Numbers 23:23), had been suggested to Morse by Annie Ellworth, the daughter of the commissioner of patents.

Morse, an accomplished painter, learned of a French inventor's idea of an electric telegraph in 1832 and then spent the next 12 years attempting to perfect a working telegraph instrument. During this period, he composed the Morse code, a set of signals that could represent language in telegraph messages, and convinced Congress to finance a Washington-to-Baltimore telegraph line. On May 24, 1844, he inaugurated the world's first commercial telegraph line with a message that was fitting given the invention's future effects on American life.

Just a decade after the first line opened, more than 20,000 miles of telegraph cable crisscrossed the country. The rapid communication it enabled greatly aided American expansion, making railroad travel safer as it provided a boost to business conducted across the great distances of a growing United States.

If Mr. Morse and his friends could see us today, I wonder what they would think?

I'm sending out an invitation to all my friends to join me on the patio for some fresh coffee this morning. Are you in?