Rise of the Telegraph #376: Phillip H. Ault Papers

Published April 16, 2024 at 6:00 AM MDT

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Photo of the telegraph office on Main Street in Salt Lake City, into which wires were run from east to west in October 1861, completing the transcontinental telegraph. Box 1, Phillip H. Ault papers, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.

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Drawing explaining the principle of the Morse telegraph key. Box 1, Phillip H. Ault papers, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.

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Photo of Samuel Morse, who developed the first practical telegraph sending and receiving instruments. Box 1, Phillip H. Ault papers, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.

The idea for the American telegraph is credited to Samuel Morse. He was an unlikely inventor, who, in the 1830s, was better known as an artist. Morse collaborated with Alfred Vail to create both the first telegraph system and the code to transmit messages across the wire.

That code lives on today as Morse code – a series of dots and dashes which spell out words. Morse and Vail set up the earliest telegraph system running between Washington D.C. and Baltimore, Maryland.

Much to the amazement of skeptics of the time, it was now possible to transmit messages via electrical pulses along wires strung across vast distances. Telegraph lines soon spread throughout the Eastern U.S. But it wasn’t until 1861 that the first American transcontinental telegraph line was completed, linking California and the western territories with the rest of the country.

Learn more about the rise of the telegraph in the Phillip H. Ault papers at UW’s American Heritage Center.

For more information, visit the American Heritage Center site.