19 Aug 2019

History:

Lost Capitol Hill: What Hath God Wrought?

At 8:45 AM on Friday, May 24, 1844, Samuel Morse sat down at a telegraph key set up in the Supreme Court room in the Capitol, just around the corner from where he had done his test just a little over a year earlier. He pressed the key briefly. Forty-four miles away, a dot appeared on a piece of paper. Then two longer presses produced two dashes, then a brief pause: In Baltimore, this was transcribed as a W. After that, four dots indicated an H, a dot and a dash an a, and finally a single dash was decoded as a T. The first word was completed: “What.” The next three words completed a phrase that ended the Bible verse Numbers 23:23 in the King James Version: “What hath God wrought.”

The telegraph operators in Baltimore immediately set about retransmitting the message back to its place of origin, and the first roundtrip was completed.

Morse had not come up with this as a first phrase himself, rather, it was a young friend Annie Ellsworth [pictued above], the daughter of a college friend of Morse’s that had suggested it. It has become a famous phrase entirely separately from its original source 400 years ago, and will be intimately connected to this momentous occasion forever.

Annie Ellsworth dictating the first message to Samuel Morse. Detail of picture from The Story of the Nineteenth Century of the Christian Era by Elbridge S. Brooks. Boston: Lothrop Publishing, 1900. (Archive.org)

Nonetheless, none of the newspapers at the time took notice of it. The Baltimore Patriot appears to have been the first newspaper to mention the telegraph, writing of the final connection and its first use the following day. Their reporting was picked up by the NY Daily Tribune and the Daily National Intelligencer, but nowhere do these first words appear. In their defense, all seem to be more intrigued by the actual information being passed, that of the Martin Van Buren’s chances in the upcoming Democratic National Convention, as well as votes taken in Congress. More surprising is the remarkable lack of interest in this new technology that was displayed by almost all newspapers at the time, especially in how it would irrevocably change the nature of news gathering from there on.

It would not be until August that the phrase would be given wide attention, though it was in a humorous column published in the The Rover magazine, under the name Major Jack Downing, a creation of the writer Seba Smith. However, in this case, the humorist was not making anything up. Many years later, in 1891, in the August 19 edition of The Electrical Engineer magazine, a facsimile of a note written by Morse to Ellsworth was published. Written apparently immediately after the message was sent, it starts with the letters W H A T, with the matching Morse code above it, it then continues:

This sentence was written from Washington by me at the Baltimore Terminus at 8:45 AM on Friday May 24th, 1844, bein the first ever transmitted from Washington to Baltimore by telegraph and was indicated by me much loved friend Anne G. Ellsworth. Saml. F. B. Morse, Superintendent of Elec. Mag. Telegraphs.


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