The first transatlantic telegram took 16 hours to send: Queen Victoria's 98-word greeting to the US president in 1858.

1858

The cable itself lasted about three weeks.

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The event

• Morse telegraph line1844 · Washington. 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.

19th century

More amazing facts

• 1859 · 1869 Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) and Mendeleev's periodic law (1869) are just ten years apart.
• 1859 Big Ben is still regulated with old pennies.
• 1859 · 1872 The only casualty of the Pig War between the US and Britain was a pig. The border dispute that began with a farmer’s shot in 1859 dragged on for 13 years and was settled by an arbitrator: the German Kaiser.
• 1859 In 1859 telegraph operators sent messages without batteries; space supplied the power.
• 1859 In 1859 the aurora was so bright that gold miners in the Rocky Mountains woke in the night and began making breakfast, thinking it was morning.
• 1859 · 1915 Having found Neptune on paper, Le Verrier used the same method to predict a planet that isn't there.

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