On Jan. 6, 1838, inventor and painter Samuel Morse successfully demonstrated his telegraph system, bringing the world into a new era of long-distance communication. He sent electrical signals over two miles of wire wrapped inside a house at the Speedwall Ironworks in Morristown, N.J.

While other people were crucial to the development of Morse’s telegraph (such as his partners Alfred Vaile and Leonard Gale) or developed their own system of electrical transmission around the same time, Morse remains the person most commonly associated with the project.  

The first telegraph line in the United States was federally funded, and ran from Washington, D.C. to Baltimore. Morse sent the first message (“What hath God wrought!”) over this line in 1844. Private telegraph companies which used Morse’s patent proliferated throughout the country after that, with the first transcontinental telegraph line stretching across the United States in 1861.