The Telegraph

Samuel Morse's inventions: Morse code and the telegraph, were very important to the Transatlantic Cable, seeing as the cable was an extension to the telegraph, which allowed the telegraph to send messages between continents using Morse code.

The first system of Morse code was created in the 1830s for the electric telegraph. His system included dots dashes and spaces, to represent letters, numbers, and punctuation.

After Morse code was developed, people could finally begin work on the telegraph, which was created in 1837. It consisted of a device he made, called a portarule, and the receiver with wires connecting them. The portarule, sent out his code of dots and dashes, as an electrical current which was then sent through the wires to the receiver. People then took the code from the receiver and deciphered it into a message. It eventually got more efficient, because the workers had spent so much time with morse code that they didn’t have to decipher it because they already knew it so well.

The telegraph became successful and the government even decided to fund Morse, to use it in a project for them. The goal was to build a telegraph system over the thirty miles between Washington D.C., and Baltimore, Maryland. To do this, he set up the telegraph and receiver, on their respective sides, and then attached long wires inside glass insulating poles to the sides of the railroads heading from Washington to Baltimore. In 1844, the system was complete, and on May 24, the first message was sent stating What hath God wrought!