Before the nineteenth century, sending a message over a long distance required a person, a ship, or a horse to carry it. Information could travel only as fast as people and objects moved. Some systems used flags or lights from high places, but they depended on weather and a clear view.
The electric telegraph changed this relationship. Signals could move through a wire, allowing words to travel without a physical letter. In the code developed by Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail, combinations of short and long signals represented letters and numbers.
On May 24, 1844, Morse transmitted a famous message from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore. The experimental line connected two cities about 64 kilometers apart and demonstrated that a practical telegraph could work.
As telegraph networks later expanded, people could learn about distant events much sooner than before. Newspapers, businesses, and governments used the telegraph to send important information across great distances. Distance itself had not become shorter, but the waiting time for news had changed dramatically. The telegraph was one of the first important technologies to make communication move faster than transportation.