Welcome to History's Not Boring by Kidopoly.com. I'm Mira! And I'm Finn. Before we jump in, we have a huge shout out to Camille, who is eight, and Andre, who is five.
SPEAKER_01They listen all the way from Philadelphia and asked us to do an episode about Morse Code. Great pick, you two.
SPEAKER_00This one is for you both. Now, Finn, imagine you have big news. Maybe you got a new puppy. You want to text your best friend, but instead of taking one second, the message takes four whole days to reach them.
SPEAKER_01Four days? That's a nightmare. I wouldn't even remember what I was excited about by the time they replied.
SPEAKER_00Well, before the 1830s, that was normal life. If you wanted to send a letter to another city, a person had to physically ride a horse across dirt roads, sometimes taking weeks to travel from state to state.
SPEAKER_01Wait, so how did we go from super slow horses to instant messages? Did someone just wake up and invent a phone?
SPEAKER_00Nope. It all started with an American painter named Samuel Morse, his brilliant partner Alfred Vale, and a terribly sad event that changed the course of world history forever. We are talking about the electric telegraph. The year is 1825. Samuel Morse isn't an inventor yet. He's actually a famous portrait painter. A painter?
SPEAKER_01I thought he was this big scientist who invented the telegraph.
SPEAKER_00Not yet. He's 33 years old and in Washington, DC, painting a massive portrait of the famous French general Marquis de Lafayette. But Samuel's young wife Lucretia is back home in New Haven, Connecticut. Where exactly is that? How far away? It is about 300 miles away. And remember, there are no phones, no internet, and no high-speed trains yet. Travelling 300 miles took days on horseback or by stagecoach.
SPEAKER_01Oh no. So if something goes wrong, they are completely cut off.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. Lucretia suddenly gets very sick. Samuel's father immediately sends a letter by horse messenger to warn him. But a horse can only travel maybe 50 miles a day.
SPEAKER_01How long did the letter take to get to Washington DC?
SPEAKER_00Days. By the time the exhausted horse messenger finally reaches Samuel, a second messenger arrives right behind him with terrible news. His wife had passed away.
SPEAKER_01That is so sad. He didn't even know she was sick until it was too late. He must have been devastated.
SPEAKER_00He was. Samuel immediately travels the 300 miles home. But because the message was so terribly slow, by the time he arrives, she's already buried. He didn't even get to say goodbye.
SPEAKER_01That's awful. There has to be a faster way to communicate.
SPEAKER_00That is exactly what Samuel Morse thought. He was heartbroken and angry at how slow the mail was. He decided right then and there that he was going to invent a way to send messages instantly across huge distances.
SPEAKER_01So how do you invent instant messaging in the 1830s? You can't just build a smartphone out of wood.
SPEAKER_00No smartphones. But Samuel Morse had heard about electromagnets. He thought, what if we could send pulses of electricity down a long copper wire?
SPEAKER_01Like zapping a message across the country. Just sending electricity from one town to another.
SPEAKER_00Yes, but he isn't a scientist, he's a painter. So he teams up with a brilliant young inventor named Alfred Vale. Vale's family owns a big ironworks factory in New Jersey, which means he has the tools to actually build the machine. Oh, so it was a team effort? A huge team effort. Together, they build a machine called the Electric Telegraph. When you press a little lever on one end, it sends an electrical zap down the wire to a receiver at the other end.
SPEAKER_01But a zap isn't a word. How do you know what the zap means? Does it print a letter?
SPEAKER_00That is where Alfred Vail and Samuel Morse are absolute geniuses. They invent a special language of short zaps and long zaps. Wait, I know this. Dots and dashes. Exactly! A short electrical pulse is a dot. A long pulse is a dash. They assign a unique combination of dots and dashes to every single letter of the alphabet and every single number.
SPEAKER_01So you could spell out literally anything just by holding down a button for different amounts of time.
SPEAKER_00Yep. And Alfred Vail goes to a local newspaper printing press to count which letters are used the most. He figures out that the most common letter in the English language is E. So he makes E the easiest code of all.
SPEAKER_01Just one single dot. That is so smart. That saves so much time. Dot. There's an E. Next letter.
SPEAKER_00By 1843, Samuel Morse finally convinces the United States Congress to give him $30,000 to build a real, working telegraph line.
SPEAKER_01$30,000? Back then? That's a massive fortune. That's like millions today. It is!
SPEAKER_00They take that money and string 40 miles of copper wire on wooden poles all the way from Washington DC to Baltimore, Maryland. They used 700 chestnut wooden poles.
SPEAKER_0140 miles? What if the wire breaks? What if the electricity just fades out and doesn't go that far? That was the big question.
SPEAKER_00On May 24, 1844, a huge crowd of politicians and scientists gathers to see if it works. Samuel Morse is sitting in the United States Capitol building in Washington.
SPEAKER_01Oh man, the pressure. What does he do?
SPEAKER_00He sits at his wooden telegraph machine. He taps out a special message suggested by a friend's daughter, taken from the Bible. The historic message is What hath God wrought? What hath God wrought? What does that mean? It basically means look at the amazing things God has done. He taps it out on the key. Dot dash dash dot dot dot dot dot dash dash all the way through the phrase.
SPEAKER_01And did Alfred Vale get the message all the way in Baltimore?
SPEAKER_00Yes! The electricity travels 40 miles in a fraction of a single second. Alfred Vale receives it on his end, decodes the dots and dashes, and sends the exact same message right back. It worked! Instant messaging is officially born! It was a miracle to them! Suddenly, a message that used to take days by a tired horse now takes less than a second. The world shrank that very day.
SPEAKER_01I bet everyone wanted a telegraph after that. They could talk to anyone instantly. They did!
SPEAKER_00Within just a few years, tens of thousands of miles of telegraph wires covered the whole country. They even built a transcontinental line all the way to California.
SPEAKER_01Whoa! And didn't they lay a cable underwater across the Atlantic Ocean too?
SPEAKER_00Yes. By 1866, America could talk to Europe instantly using an underwater cable. Presidents use it to command armies during the Civil War, and newspapers could report a story the exact day it happened.
SPEAKER_01And what about ships? I've heard they used Morse code to call for help when they were sinking.
SPEAKER_00They absolutely did. Before radios had voice capabilities, ships had wireless telegraph machines. In 1906, an international conference created a worldwide emergency signal for ships in danger.
SPEAKER_01Do you know what it is? SOS. I definitely know that one. It stands for Save Our Souls, right? Or Save Our Ship.
SPEAKER_00Actually, fun fact time, SOS does not stand for Save Our Souls. And it doesn't stand for Save Our Ship either.
SPEAKER_01Wait, what? No way! Literally everyone says it means save our souls. Then what does it mean?
SPEAKER_00It doesn't mean anything at all. It's not an abbreviation. They chose the letters SOS purely because it was the absolute easiest thing to tap out on a machine, and the hardest to misunderstand in an emergency.
SPEAKER_01What is the code for SOS that makes it so easy?
SPEAKER_00It is exactly three dots, three dashes, and three dots. Dot dot dot, dash dash dash, dot dot dot. It was so clear and fast to send that they made it the official emergency code.
SPEAKER_01That is so cool! It's just a pattern. Three little signals saved so many lives, even on the Titanic.
SPEAKER_00Alright Finn, quiz time! Let's see what you remember about the invention of Morse code.
SPEAKER_01Oh boy, okay, my brain is ready. Let's do this.
SPEAKER_00First question. What was Samuel Morse's original job before he invented the telegraph? Next one. How long was the very first telegraph wire built from Washington to Baltimore? Question three. Who was the brilliant partner that helped Morse invent the docked and dash code? Here's number four. What was the very first message sent in 1844? Last question, what does SOS actually stand for? Great job, let's see how you did. The first answer is, Samuel Morse was originally a portrait painter. For question two, that first telegraph wire was 40 miles long. Number three, the answer is, his genius partner was Alfred Vail. Question four. The first official message was, what hath God wrought? And the final answer is, SOS doesn't stand for anything. It was just chosen because three dots, three dashes, three dots is super easy to send.
SPEAKER_01Wow! I still can't believe instant messaging only started because a painter missed his wife and was mad at a horse messenger. History is wild.
SPEAKER_00It really is. From slow horses taking days to deliver a letter to electricity zooming 40 miles in a fraction of a second. Communication changed forever.
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SPEAKER_01Oh, and don't forget to check out our site kidopoly.com. We've got loads of awesome learning resources and fun activities waiting for you there.
SPEAKER_00And if you want to shout out on the show, like Camille and Andre got today, or if you just want to say hi, email us at hello at kidopoly.com.
SPEAKER_01See you next time on History's Not Boring.
SPEAKER_00Bye everyone!