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Hey, history lovers.

I'm Mike Rosenwald with Retropod, a show about the past, rediscovered.

Do you recognize this sound?

No, your speaker isn't on the fritz.

That's Morse code.

And that gets us to our subject for today, the history of social media.

You might think social media begins with the first tweet sent by Jack Dorsey in March of 2006

on a site he'd just finished coding.

It was called Twitter, spelled T-W-T-R.

They eventually added some vowels.

Or maybe you'd go back further to the first post on a little site for Harvard students called the facebook.com.

Now it's just Facebook and one of the biggest sites in the world.

Wrong.

The history of social media began almost two centuries earlier in 1844, when Samuel F.B. Morse, a painter-turned inventor, sent a message

from Washington to Baltimore. The message contained this question, What hath God wrought?

Back then, Morse wasn't typing with his thumbs, but was instead tapping dots and dashes

on a device of cogs and coiled wires. The telegraph had been around as an idea and in rudimentary form, but Morse devised a way

to use electricity for sending a series of codes signaling letters of the alphabet.

...