what hath God wrought

What hath God wrought? The famous message was sent by American inventor Samuel Morse, who also developed the Morse code, and was delivered 175 years ago at a demonstration before members of Congress.

Who transmitted the first official telegraph message, 'What hath God wrought' in 1844?

Morse transmitted the message "What hath God wrought'' from Washington to Baltimore as he formally opened America's first telegraph line.

That centuries other than the twentieth have not escaped the historian's urge to categorize is evidenced by Daniel Walker Howe's What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (2007).

A massive magnum opus covering a mere thirty-three years in some 900 pages, some wit might reject such voluminosity by quoting architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's quip that "less is more." As I see it, an appropriate rejoinder, qua What Hath God Wrought, would be another Miesian aphorism, "God is in the details." Fitting these into a magnificent, vibrant mosaic has been Daniel Walker Howe's great achievement.

McDougall); (2) What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (Daniel Walker Howe); (3) Teaching about Slavery (Michael Johnson); (4) The Technological Revolution (Maury Klein); (5) Honest Abe: Abraham Lincoln and the Moral Character (Daniel Walker Howe); (6) Women in the Civil War (Jane Schultz); (7) Teaching Military History: The Civil War as Case Study (Karl Walling); and (8) Postwar Reconstruction (Herman Belz.)

Among this assembly of learned scientists and worldly statesmen, nobody seemed to think it passing strange that the first message conveyed by cable was taken from the Book of Numbers: "What Hath God Wrought."

Still, even among the religio-horror ranks, "The Reaping" stands out for its bold advertising ("What hath God wrought?" scream the posters) and its loony conviction as it rains down all 10 of the biblical plagues--frogs, lice, boils et al.--on a small Louisiana backwater town called Haven.

Samuel Morse sent the first telegram 162 years ago, from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore: "What hath God wrought!" The last, in the United States at least, was sent last month, its topic and sender unknown, when Western Union quietly dropped its telegraph service.

In 1844, Samuel Morse showed telegraphy could be used over land by tapping out the famous message, "What hath God wrought." But the technology for transmitting messages over long distances at sea was unknown.

Morse tapped out the first telegraphic message, "What hath God wrought?" In doing so, he created the inflection point we can call the beginning of the end of the paper industry.

And we were different because of it, more different, I suspect, than our parents, grandparents, and great grandparents were after hearing "what hath God wrought" on the radio.

In 1843 he managed to persuade the United States Congress to appropriate money, and in 1844 he strung wires from Baltimore to Washington and sent the message, in Morse code, "What hath God wrought?" (a quotation from the book of Numbers in the Bible).

The first telegraph message, "What hath God wrought," was sent from the U.S.

"The women's-rights movement, which grew out of the antislavery movement, which grew out of revivalism, which was made possible by advances in transportation and communication, is the strongest evidence for the interpretive weight that Howe places on social, cultural, and religious forces as agents of change, and makes What Hath God Wrought a bold challenge.