Wires: The Telegraph, the Telephone, and the Atlantic Cable

The semaphore proved a message could outrun a horse. The electric wire proved a message did not need a body, or even open air, at all. Distance stopped being a matter of geography and became simply a matter of price.

Key Milestones

• The electric telegraph, 1837 with Cooke and Wheatstone in Britain, 1844 with Morse in the United States. Electrical pulses replaced mechanical towers, carrying messages through a wire regardless of weather, darkness, or line of sight.
• The telephone, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell. The wire learned to carry a human voice directly, not just a code, collapsing the distance between speaking and being heard.
• The transatlantic cable, 1858, made durable in 1866. A cable laid across the ocean floor connected two continents that had never before exchanged a message in less than a week.

The Energy, Social, and Economic Impact of Wires

Before 1866, a message between Europe and North America had only one path: a ship, and a journey of roughly 10 to 12 days at sea, against minutes once the cable held. The phrase coined at the time, "two weeks to two minutes," undersold it slightly, but not by much. News, prices, and diplomatic instructions that once needed a week to cross the Atlantic now needed less time than it took to read them.

View chart in the full report

The telephone took it to a different level: it removed the operator and the code in between. A voice could travel the wire directly, and for the first time two people could hold something like a conversation across a distance neither could walk in a day.