Morse telegraph line
For the first time, news outruns the messenger
On 24 May 1844 Samuel Morse sent the message "What hath God wrought" from the US Capitol to Baltimore. The electric telegraph let news travel faster than any messenger for the first time and soon wired whole continents together.
Wikipedia (Russian) · Wikipedia (English) · 19th century
Did you know
In May 1844 Morse sent the first telegram from Washington to Baltimore; ten days later the last pair of great auks was killed in Iceland.
Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Europe
- 1839 Birth of photography: the daguerreotype — 5 years earlier
- 1845–1852 Great Famine in Ireland — 1 year later
- 1848–1849 Revolutions of 1848 — 4 years later
- 1848 The Communist Manifesto — 4 years later
- 1861 Unification of Italy — 17 years later
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1853–1856 Crimean War — 9 years later
- 1861 Emancipation of the serfs in Russia — 17 years later
- 1867 Alaska Purchase — 23 years later
- 1869 Tolstoy's War and Peace — 25 years later
Middle East
- 1828 Treaty of Turkmenchay — 16 years earlier
- 1839 The Edict of Gülhane opens the Tanzimat — 5 years earlier
- 1839–1842 First Anglo-Afghan War — 5 years earlier
Africa
- c. 1835–1846 The Great Trek — 9 years earlier
- 1847 Liberia declares independence — 3 years later
- 1869 Opening of the Suez Canal — 25 years later
Asia
- 1819 Raffles founds modern Singapore — 25 years earlier
- c. 1831 Hokusai's Great Wave off Kanagawa — 13 years earlier
- 1839–1842 First Opium War — 5 years earlier
- 1853–1854 Commodore Perry's Black Ships — 9 years later
- 1868 Meiji Restoration — 24 years later
Oceania
- 1851 The Australian gold rushes — 7 years later
Alive at the time
- Charles Darwin (aged 35)
- Abraham Lincoln (aged 35)
- Karl Marx (aged 26)
- Queen Victoria (aged 25)
- Fyodor Dostoevsky (aged 23)
- Leo Tolstoy (aged 16)
- Dmitri Mendeleev (aged 10)
- Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (aged 4)
- Katsushika Hokusai (aged 84)
- Andrew Jackson (aged 77)