Telegraph line reaches Seattle on October 25, 1864.

HistoryLink.org Essay 167 : Printer-Friendly Format

On October 25, 1864, the Western Union telegraph line reaches Seattle. To celebrate, a cannon is fired and a flag is hoisted. At 4 p.m. on the following day, the first dispatches are received from the East Coast. The Seattle Gazette (a weekly newspaper) publishes an extra edition, reporting Civil War news and other news from the East Coast dated October 24, 1864.

The Communications Revolution

The telegraph suddenly and for the first time, made the world much smaller. Maury Klein writes, "Before 1840 news moved in the same ways it had since antiquity: a message could travel no faster than the messenger who carried it. Then a stunning new technology revolutionized the flow of information by transmitting it almost instantly."

Samuel F. B. Morse (1791-1873) was the chief inventor of the telegraph. Telegraph messages were sent along wires strung along railroad tracks. They were sent in the form of Morse Code, a system of short and long sounds that represented letters of the alphabet. Morse gave the telegraph its first public demonstration in 1844. It was another 20 years before the country was wired from the East Coast all the way to Seattle.

Sources:
Clarence B. Bagley, "Pioneer Papers of Puget Sound" The Quarterly of the Oregon Historical Society, Vol. 4, No. 4 (1903), 377; J[ames] Willis Sayre, This City of Ours (Seattle: J. W. Sayre, 1936), 112; Maury Klein, The Flowering of the Third America: The Making of an Organizational Society (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1993), 23.

By Greg Lange, November 04, 1998

Travel through time (chronological order):
< Browse to Previous Essay | Browse to Next Essay >

Related Topics: Science & Technology |

Licensing: This essay is licensed under a Creative Commons license that encourages reproduction with attribution. Credit should be given to both HistoryLink.org and to the author, and sources must be included with any reproduction. Click the icon for more info. Please note that this Creative Commons license applies to text only, and not to images. For more information regarding individual photos or images, please contact the source noted in the image credit.

Seattle, looking north on Commercial Street (1st Avenue S), ca. 1864
Photo by E. M. Sammas, Courtesy MOHAI

Telegram from Citizens of Seattle to Abraham Lincoln: "Citizens of the Northwestern terminus of the American telegraph send greeting praying for the suppression of rebellion and the extension of Science." October 26, 1864
Courtesy Library of Congress (Abraham Lincoln Papers)