ShmoopTube

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Picture it: it's 1843.

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The written word has spread around the world in the form of cheap books and daily newspapers. [Old car driving down a black and white street]

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New forms of transportation, like railroads and steamships, have made mail much more efficient. [Train drops off parcels]

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It's becoming almost impossible to avoid nagging letters from annoying relatives.

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Almost.

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But those annoying relatives were about to have some revolutionary new tools at their [Woman opens her postbox and takes out a letter]

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disposal...

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The ability to speak to someone instantly, whether they were in another room, another

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state, or on the other side of the world. [People in the different places]

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Was it magic…?

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Wormholes?

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Telepathy?

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No, no, and not a chance.

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It was actually something cooler than all three of those things. [People getting electrocuted]

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Electricity!

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So the first of these breakthrough electrical technologies was the telegraph.

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This handy dandy long distance communication machine was created in the early 1800s by [Early telegraph machine]

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a guy named Samuel Morse.

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How did it work?

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Y'know…science and stuff.

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Okay, okay…we’ll be more specific. [Magnifying glass highlights post it note with specific written on it]

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The basic idea was that it sent electric pulses through a wire between telegraph stations. [Telegraph wires with electricity pulsing through them]

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So a person on one end would tap out a series of these pulses on their telegraph… [Person tapping on a telegraph machine]

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And then a person on the other end would interpret the message.

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But wait…how did the guy on the other end know what a series of electric pulses meant?

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Who communicates in electric pulses, besides robots and maybe those guys from Daft Punk? [Daft Punk and a robot zap each other with electricity]

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Well, turns out humans do if they know Morse code.

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That’s right…as some have probably figured out already, Samuel Morse was the guy behind [Picture of Samuel Morse holding up the morse code]

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Morse code.

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Thus continuing the time honored tradition of naming stuff after yourself.

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Such humility.

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Morse code took letters and numbers and assigned them a series of dots and dashes. [Samuel Morse using a telegraph machine]

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Short clicks from the telegraph equaled dots, and long clicks equaled dashes.

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Letters that got used all the time, like E, have a simple code…

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While neglected letters, like Q, got a complex one.

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Poor Q…look on the bright side, that'll be good material for your therapist. [The letter Q sat on a therapist's chaise longue]

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The very first telegraphs actually made marks on paper showing the dot and dashes.. [Letters appearing on a piece of paper]

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But it didn’t take long for people to figure out that telegraph operators could hear the

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clicks coming through…

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So newer telegraphs amped up the sound, allowing the operators to write down the message. [Man writing on a piece of paper]

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Morse sent his first telegraph message in 1844.

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It traveled from Washington, D.C. to Baltimore, and it said…"Is your refrigerator running?" [Refrigerator bounces along revealing the quote]

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….Okay, just kidding, it actually said "What hath God wrought?" [The quote is written out on paper]

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Yeah, it may sound a little melodramatic, but there’s no denying that the telegraph

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had major effects on the world. [People hold the arms up to the telegraph machine]

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As telegraph lines spread across the U.S. and the globe, information could be spread much

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more quickly.

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Journalism spread faster….

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Money could now be wired… [Man pulls money out his postbox]

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And wars were fought in new ways…

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Of course, like every amazing new technology, the telegraph was eventually made obsolete. [A telephone and the telegraph machine fighting]

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By the end of the 19th Century, a new fangled doo-hickey called the telephone was already

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taking over…

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In much the same way real floating hover boards will one day replace these fake ones with [Man on a hoverboard flies past man on a segway]

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wheels…

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Hey, a boy can dream.

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