For more than years, messages of joy, sorrow and success came in signature yellow envelopes hand delivered by a courier. Now the Western Union telegram is officially a thing of the past. The company formed in April to exploit the hot technology of the telegraph to send cross-country messages in less than a day. It is now focusing its attention on money transfers and other financial services, and delivered its final telegram on Friday.
Several telegraph companies that eventually combined to become Western Union were founded in Born in Viking 1, an unmanned U. On June 19, , the spacecraft entered into orbit around Mars and devoted the next month to imaging the Martian surface with the purpose of finding an appropriate landing During the Lebanese Civil War, a multinational force including U.
Marines lands in Beirut to oversee the Palestinian withdrawal from Lebanon. It was the beginning of a problem-plagued mission that would stretch into 17 months and leave U. In , a Czechoslovakians protested the invasion with public demonstrations and other Sign up now to learn about This Day in History straight from your inbox.
Policy in the Far East. On August 20, , seven men, including legendary all-around athlete and football star Jim Thorpe, meet to organize a professional football league at the Jordan and Hupmobile Auto Showroom in Canton, Ohio. The meeting led to the creation of the American Professional Football Politics had long been the Harrison family business.
Sergeant Charles Floyd dies three months into the voyage of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, becoming the only member of the Corps of Discovery to die during the journey.
Lewis and Clark left St. Louis the previous May, heading up the Missouri River with a party of 35 men, First, in , the Italian physicist Alessandro Volta invented the battery, which reliably stored an electric current and allowed the current to be used in a controlled environment. Second, in , the Danish physicist Hans Christian Oersted demonstrated the connection between electricity and magnetism by deflecting a magnetic needle with an electric current. While scientists and inventors across the world began experimenting with batteries and the principles of electromagnetism to develop some kind of communication system, the credit for inventing the telegraph generally falls to two sets of researchers: Sir William Cooke and Sir Charles Wheatstone in England, and Samuel Morse, Leonard Gale and Alfred Vail in the U.
In the s, the British team of Cooke and Wheatstone developed a telegraph system with five magnetic needles that could be pointed around a panel of letters and numbers by using an electric current. Their system was soon being used for railroad signaling in Britain. During this time period, the Massachusetts-born, Yale-educated Morse who began his career as a painter , worked to develop an electric telegraph of his own.
He reportedly had become intrigued with the idea after hearing a conversation about electromagnetism while sailing from Europe to America in the early s, and later learned more about the topic from American physicist Joseph Henry In collaboration with Gale and Vail, Morse eventually produced a single-circuit telegraph that worked by pushing the operator key down to complete the electric circuit of the battery.
This action sent the electric signal across a wire to a receiver at the other end. All the system needed was a key, a battery, wire and a line of poles between stations for the wire and a receiver. To transmit messages across telegraph wires, in the s Morse and Vail created what came to be known as Morse code.
Initially, the code, when transmitted over the telegraph system, was rendered as marks on a piece of paper that the telegraph operator would then translate back into English. Rather quickly, however, it became apparent that the operators were able to hear and understand the code just by listening to the clicking of the receiver, so the paper was replaced by a receiver that created more pronounced beeping sounds.
In , Morse and Vail received funding from the U. Congress to set up and test their telegraph system between Washington , D. Among these improvements was the invention of good insulation for telegraph wires. The man behind this innovation was Ezra Cornell , one of the founders of the university in New York that bears his name. Another improvement, by the famed inventor Thomas Alva Edison in , was the Quadruplex system, which allowed for four messages to be transmitted simultaneously using the same wire.
Use of the telegraph was quickly accepted by people eager for a faster and easier way of sending and receiving information. However, widespread and successful use of the device required a unified system of telegraph stations among which information could be transmitted.
The Western Union Telegraphy Company, founded in part by Cornell, was at first only one of many such companies that developed around the new medium during the s. By , however, Western Union had laid the first transcontinental telegraph line, making it the first nationwide telegraph company. Telegraph systems spread across the world, as well. Extensive systems appeared across Europe by the later part of the 19th century, and by the first permanent telegraph cable had been successfully laid across the Atlantic Ocean; there were 40 such telegraph lines across the Atlantic by The electric telegraph transformed how wars were fought and won and how journalists and newspapers conducted business.
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