Patented by William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone in Britain in 1837 and demonstrated by Samuel Morse in the United States in 1844, the electric telegraph transmitted coded messages along wires almost instantaneously. For the first time information could travel far faster than any horse, ship or train carrying it. Networks of wires spread rapidly alongside railways and, from the 1860s, beneath the oceans by submarine cable.
By severing communication from physical transport, it let railways, ports and dispersed firms be coordinated from central offices, binding cities into national and eventually global networks of trade, finance and news.
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