Episode 1015: Greatest American Inventions — The Electric Telegraph
Newt's World
Gingrich 360
4.6 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 27 July 2026
⏱️ 6 minutes
🔗️ Recording | Apple Podcasts | RSS
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Summary
In 1844, a painter named Samuel Morse and machinist Alfred Vail shattered the oldest limit on human civilization: the speed of information. Their electromagnetic telegraph sent messages by wire at the speed of electricity, ending an era when news traveled no faster than a horse or a ship. Host Newt opens his 15-part series, Greatest American Inventions: 1776 to 2026, with Morse's historic first transmission—"What hath God wrought"—and traces how the telegraph created the template every future network would follow: infrastructure, standards, and value that grows with scale. It's the origin story of modern markets, journalism, and connected America.
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.3 | Guaranteed Human. |
| 0:07.9 | Welcome to Neut's World Podcast on the IHeart Podcast Network. |
| 0:11.7 | This is the first episode in a special 15-part series called Greatest American Inventions, 1776 to 2026. Over these 15 episodes, we're going to look |
| 0:26.5 | at the breakthroughs born on American soil that didn't just change this country. They changed |
| 0:32.6 | every human being on earth. I want to start not with the most recent invention or the most famous, |
| 0:39.8 | but with the one that first broke the oldest constraint on human civilization, the speed of |
| 0:46.8 | information. Before Samuel Morris, there was a hard ceiling on how fast news could travel. |
| 0:57.2 | It moved at the speed of physical transport. |
| 1:02.2 | A galloping horse, a sailing ship, a human runner. |
| 1:07.2 | A battle won on Monday night might not be known on Washington until Thursday. |
| 1:14.1 | A ship lost at sea might not be mourned for weeks. Morse changed all that. |
| 1:21.9 | Working with machinist Alfred Vale, he developed a practical electromagnetic telegraph and a code of dots and dashes that could carry messages over wire at the speed of electricity. |
| 1:28.9 | On May 24, 1844, he sent the first message from Washington to Baltimore, |
| 1:35.5 | quote, What hath God wrought? |
| 1:39.2 | Within 17 years, the transcontinental telegraph connected the coast. |
| 1:43.9 | The pony express, that romantic symbol of American frontier communication, |
| 1:50.0 | shut down two days after the Transcontinental Line was completed. |
| 1:54.0 | It simply could not compete. |
| 1:57.0 | By 1866, a cable across the Atlantic connected America and Europe, and a message that had taken 10 days by steamship could cross the ocean in minutes. |
| 2:12.9 | The effects in American commerce were immediate. |
| 2:16.9 | Stock prices in New York could influence |
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