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Western Union accomplished the transcontinental telegraph, bridging communications between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans for the very first time — simply because the Civil War tore aside north and south — on this day in historical past, Oct. 24, 1861.
The traces from every coast have been joined in Salt Lake City.
“The folks of California want to congratulate you upon completion of the nice work,” the state’s chief justice, Stephen J. Field, wrote in the absence of the governor to President Abraham Lincoln in Washington, D.C.
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“They believe it will be the means of strengthening the attachment which bind both east and west to the Union. They desire in this the first message across the continent to express their loyalty to that Union.”
“The people of California desire to congratulate you upon completion of the great work,” California chief justice, Stephen J. Field, wrote in the absence of the governor to President Abraham Lincoln in Washington, D.C., in the first transcontinental telegraph message on Oct. 24, 1861. (Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Abraham Lincoln Papers)
The completion of the telegraph, making coast-to-coast communication sooner than ever, immediately rendered out of date the earlier technique of transcontinental communication and ended a brief however storied chapter in American historical past.
The transcontinental telegraph “will be the means of strengthening the attachment which bind both east and west.”
“This technological advance, pioneered by inventor Samuel F.B. Morse, heralded the end of the Pony Express,” wrote the Library of Congress.
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“Only two days later, on October 26, the horseback mail service that had previously provided the fastest means of communication between the eastern and western United States officially closed.”
Pony Express rider passes the transcontinental telegraph line below building in this assembly of two epochs of communication in an 1861 drawing. The Pony Express was discontinued on Oct. 26, 1861, simply two days after the first transcontinental telegraph was despatched from California to President Lincoln in Washington, D.C. (Oregon Trail Museum through Getty Images)
The Pony Express had been based solely 18 months earlier in April 1860.
It took about 10 days in summer time and 16 days in winter to ship messages from St. Joseph, Missouri, to San Francisco.
“The Express logged its fastest time delivering President Lincoln’s first inaugural address — seven days and 17 hours,” proclaimed the Library of Congress of the president’s March 4, 1861, ascension to the White House.
“The push to create a transcontinental telegraph line had begun only a little more than year before when Congress authorized a subsidy of $40,000 a year to any company building a telegraph line that would join the eastern and western networks,” wrote History.com.
The transcontinental telegraph rendered out of date the Pony Express. It was ended two days later.
“The Western Union Telegraph Company, as its name suggests, took up the challenge, and the company immediately began work on the critical link that would span the territory between the western edge of Missouri and Salt Lake City.”
Illustration depicting Abraham Lincoln studying the draft of the Emancipation Proclamation to his cupboard in 1862 (undated). The president obtained the first transcontinental telegraph on Oct. 24, 1861. (Getty Images)
The transcontinental telegraph was one in every of a number of main milestones in the hunt by the American folks to satisfy their Manifest Destiny and unite a nation from sea to shining sea.
Explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark discovered a land-and-water path to the Pacific Ocean after an 18-month journey from St. Louis on Nov. 15, 1805.
The transcontinental railroad was joined with the driving of a ceremonial final gold spike in the tracks on May 10, 1869, in Promontory Point, Utah.
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The Panama Canal was accomplished throughout the Central American nation’s slim isthmus on August 15, 1914. It related the oceans by sea for the first time with out the lengthy, harmful journey round Cape Horn on the tip of South America.
Copy of an engraving celebrating the first telegraphic message from California, exhibiting an angelic determine carrying a telegram that reads, “May The Union Be Perpetual” whereas strolling alongside telegraph wires, Nov. 1861. The first transcontinental telegraph line was inaugurated on Oct. 24, 1861. (Interim Archives/Getty Images)
U.S. Army pilots Lt. John A. Macready and Lt. Oakley G. Kelly accomplished the first continuous transcontinental flight from Long Island to San Diego on May 3, 1923 — a journey that took 27 hours.
The challenge confronted quite a few challenges, amongst them the huge distances and lack of wanted sources and trade in the center of the continent.
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“Wire and glass insulators had to be shipped by sea to San Francisco and carried eastward by horse-drawn wagons over the Sierra Nevada,” reported History.com.
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“Supplying the thousands of telegraph poles needed was an equally daunting challenge in the largely treeless Plains country, and these too had to be shipped from the western mountains.”
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