Electric telegraph

The electric telegraph was the first technology to transmit information faster than a person could travel. Before 1837, a message could move only as fast as a horse, a ship, or the semaphore stations that relayed visual signals across hilltops. Within years of the telegraph's commercialization, information crossed continents in minutes. The world shrank.

The adjacent possible for the electric telegraph required three things to align: reliable electrical circuits, the understanding that electricity could carry signals over distance, and economic demand for faster communication. The first two arrived through scientific progress; the third came from the railways. Trains moved faster than horses, which meant that news of a derailment or scheduling change couldn't reach stations by any conventional means before the next train arrived. Railways needed real-time communication—and they would pay for it.

In England, William Fothergill Cooke saw a telegraph demonstration in Germany and immediately recognized its railway applications. He partnered with Charles Wheatstone, a physicist who understood electrical circuits. On June 12, 1837, they patented a system using needles on a board that pointed to letters when current flowed through specific wire combinations. By July 25, 1837, their four-needle system was operating on the railway line between Euston and Camden Town in London.

Samuel Morse in America, working independently, patented his own system the same year. Morse's approach used a single wire and a code of dots and dashes rather than multiple wires and pointing needles. The Morse system would eventually dominate because it required less copper wire per mile—a significant cost advantage over long distances.

The telegraph's impact extended far beyond railway safety. In 1845, a murderer named John Tawell fled by train from Slough to Paddington. A telegraph message arrived before he did, enabling police to arrest him as he stepped off the train. The newspaper coverage made the telegraph famous—technology had outrun crime.

More fundamentally, the telegraph standardized time itself. Railways needed synchronized schedules, but every town kept its own local time based on the sun. The telegraph distributed Greenwich Mean Time across Britain, replacing thousands of local times with a single standard. Within decades, the same logic would synchronize the world into time zones.

The convergent emergence of the telegraph in Britain and America within the same year suggests the technology was ripe for invention. Cooke, Wheatstone, and Morse all built on the same scientific foundations—the voltaic pile, electromagnetism, and the understanding that electrical signals could be transmitted through wire. Once the prerequisites existed, the application followed independently in multiple places.