A major milestone in the history of telecommunications was the invention of the electric telegraph. It was the beginning of communication via wire. The computer industry is typically thought of as new, but the essential technology of computer networks was developed when Americans were migrating westward. The Magnetic Telephone Company, as well as dozens of other high tech companies of the nineteenth century, followed the railways with miles and miles of telegraph lines. (Derfler & Freed, 2003).

Morse code was a grand new technology and was first demonstrated in the grandest of locations, the Supreme Court chamber of the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C. In 1844, the first data communications was sent from our nation's capitol to Baltimore, Maryland. This concept was so huge and so widely accepted that within seven years there were fifty telegraph companies operating in the U.S. (Bruno).

Morse code and the telegraph...