“What hath God wrought?” is one of those famous quotations associated with great historical events, like Neil Armstrong’s “One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” But “What had God wrought?” wasn’t spoken: it was sent as a series of dots and dashes from Baltimore to Washington over the first public telegraph line exactly 150 years ago this May 24.
The man doing the tapping was Samuel Finley Breese Morse. Although most people would probably say Morse “invented the telegraph,” telegraphs already existed, and had for many years. Their principle, after all, was simple: pressing a key completed a circuit that allowed a short burst of electrical current to flow into a wire from a battery. The flowing current created a magnetic field which would noticeably deflect a magnetic needle. Messages were sent using codes based on electrical pulses of varying lengths.
Morse invented a better receiver by attaching an electromagnet to the telegraph line. The pulse of current energized the magnet, which attracted a soft iron armature, which would deflect a pencil drawing a line on a moving piece of paper. The pencil and paper proved unnecessary: telegraph operators could easily determine the dots and dashes of Morse’s simple code from the sound of the armature clicking against the electromagnet.
Morse’s system soon became the standard, as did his code. He may not have invented the telegraph, but he made it practical for widespread use–and ushered in the age of lightning-fast long-distance communication.
Long-distance communication was important in the United States of Morse’s day because of the vast Western regions that were rapidly being settled (or, from the Indians’ point of view, unsettled). That process began 40 years before Morse’s famous message. On May 14, 1804, two former army officers, Meriwether Lewis, private secretary of President Thomas Jefferson, and William Clark, Lewis’s close friend, set out from St. Louis to pursue a dream of Jefferson’s: finding the Northwest Passage, a water route linking the Mississippi with the Pacific Ocean.
Lewis and Clark intended to travel up the Missouri River as far as the Rockies by winter, cross what they thought would be the “short portage” from the Missouri to the Columbia River, and reach the Pacific in the spring of 1805. But by November they’d only made it as far as central North Dakota, where they wintered with the Mandan Indians and gathered information about lands further to the west.
They still thought they wouldn’t have far to portage between the Missouri and the Columbia when they pressed on the following spring. At the Missouri’s Three Forks, in Montana, they took the most westerly of the rivers, which they called the Jefferson. Their “short portage” turned out to consist of the Continental Divide and some of the roughest country in the Rocky Mountains, which proved conclusively to them that the hoped-for Northwest Passage didn’t exist. They didn’t reach the mouth of the Columbia River until November, 1805–about the time they’d hoped to be back in St. Louis.
The next spring they retraced their steps to the Continental Divide, then split into two groups, one travelling down the Yellowstone and the other the Missouri. They rejoined in August and returned to St. Louis on September 23, 1806. Even though, strictly speaking, their expedition failed–it didn’t find a Northwest Passage–historically, it was a smashing success, handing the United States the keys to its vast new western lands.
Lewis and Clarke’s expedition, however, pales in comparison with the journeys of the Space Age, like Apollo 10’s 400,000-kilometre jaunt to the moon 25 years ago this month.
The Apollo 10 command module (Charlie Brown), piloted by Lt.-Cmdr. John W. Young, orbited the moon 31 times, while Col. Thomas P. Stafford and Cmdr. Eugene A. Cernan climbed into the lunar module (Snoopy) and descended to within 16 kilometres of the lunar surface. Their flight set the stage for the first lunar landing, just two months later. (Neil Armstrong was probably already rehearsing “One small step…”, though “What hath God wrought?” might have been just as appropriate.)
Finally, there is a birthday to celebrate this month: on May 14, George Lucas turned 50. He’s not a scientist, but allow me a momentary lapse in subject matter. For someone like me, for whom the path to an interest in science began with an interest in science fiction, the birthday of the man who gave us Star Wars is worth some kind of notice.
Besides, I began this column with a famous quotation, and this gives me the opportunity to end with one:
May the Force be with you!
