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The first message in Morse code: “What did God do”

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Prologue, not short, to this column: I strongly wanted an innovation Almanac; a place where every day remember something memorable, successes but also failures, which have marked humanity’s journey towards the future. Knowing “the future of the past” is not just an exercise in style or a way to pay homage to those who have changed the world, but an important tool for understanding how innovation takes place, what are the factors that lead to success and how to they overcome the obstacles that inevitably encounter each time. After all, in the Anglo-Saxon world the formula “This Day in Tech” is well known and it is easy to choose something to tell every day. In Italian. As if innovation wasn’t ours. And perhaps, one might think, some of our difficulties in looking ahead lie precisely in this lack of collective memory: we don’t know where we come from, so we don’t know where to go.

When I was entrusted with the task of creating this magazine, I began to build an almanac of Italian innovation: I consulted the – few – sources available; contacted those who in recent years have cataloged apparently irrelevant documents; and written to dozens of people, asking them for a date to remember. I am at a good point, I would say halfway: in short, often – not today – in this space we will tell a story linked to Italian innovation. But there are still many facts or anecdotes missing, I know: if you know them, report them to me. I wait for you on [email protected]

On May 24, 1844, at 8:45 am, the painter and inventor Samuel Morse sent the first telegraphic message in history: he had chosen a phrase from the Bible (“What things God created”) and those words traveled for the first time on power lines from Washington to Baltimore. We know this, and we also know that what pushed Morse was the sudden death of his wife, many years before: he was not there and if the telegraph had been there he could at least have attended his funeral, we have been repeating ever since. But the true story is even more beautiful if possible. The British journalist Tom Standage, chief editor for innovation at the weekly The Economist, told it in a delightful little book from 1998 from which it was also taken a documentary, “The Victorian Internet”. The fundamental thesis is that the spread of the telegraph was, in the 19th century, something comparable to the spread of the Internet today. Everything changed. Even culture and vocabulary: new words were born to express new concepts. The telegraph was, Standage writes, “the mother of all networks”.

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But let’s go back to Samuel Morse because his story is incredible and reveals some fundamental mechanisms of innovation. Meanwhile, it must be said that several inventors had been struggling for a long time to find a way to exchange messages faster than carried by a messenger on horseback. Just in the year that Morse was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts, in 1791, there was the first demonstration of an optical telegraph, a sort of semaphore that put the towers in communication. Morse had a fair talent for painting and made a living by making portraits. In 1825, on February 7, while he was in Washington to portray the Marquis Lafayette, his wife died; he unaware, on February 10 he wrote to her “I miss you, I’m coming back” and so he was unable to be present at the funeral. The intuition of the telegraph comes several years later: in 1832, while he was on a sailing ship, in the middle of the Atlantic, returning from a trip to Europe in which he was convinced that there was a market in making copies of the masterpieces of the Louvre museum. , met a passenger who told him that electricity could be used to send instant messages. Morse, who knew nothing of the research (and failures) underway in various parts of the world, was thunderstruck and began to think about how to solve the missing piece: the creation of a code of signals with which to replace the letters. He made several attempts before arriving at the famous intuition of the dot-line (short or long pulse).

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In reality, years passed: he had stopped being a painter and had been appointed professor of literature and art at New York University, had a modest salary and was spending his time looking for the solution to the puzzle. Alone he would never have made it: in fact, he made a startup. He managed to build a telegraph prototype with the help of a chemistry professor and with the financial support of a young enthusiast (practically a venture capitalist). Morse was enthusiastic: he was convinced that one day Europe and the United States would be instantly connected and that the whole world would one day be wired: “If a message can travel ten miles without stopping, it can go anywhere,” he said. But the problems were not over. He had to convince politics that this made sense. In 1838 he went to Washington, to Congress, to ask for the construction of one telegraph line between New York and New Orleans. But the parliamentarians did not understand it. Then he went to Europe in search of support, but even here no one listened to him. Morse’s associates wanted to surrender, but he persisted. In December 1842 he returned alone to Washington, set up a link between two rooms, sent a message, many of those present laughed and teased him but this time someone was impressed. Congress approved the project with 89 votes in favor, 83 against and 70 abstentions. A telegraph line was built to connect Washington to nearby Baltimore (less than 60 kilometers). In the spring of 1844 everything was ready for public demonstration but Morse was surrounded by skeptics: they considered him “impracticable or crazy” and his invention a madness (“foolishness”). The decisive test was the transmission of the names of the people nominated by a convention in Baltimore: in Washington a small crowd watched curiously. The names with the telegraph arrived 64 minutes earlier than with the train that connected the two cities. So on May 24th there was not the first message, but the inauguration of the service: from the Supreme Court of Washington Morse he sent to Baltimore the famous sentence taken from the Bible “What Hath God Wrought”, usually translated as “The things that God made”, but I like it more “what a wonder God made”. The newspapers put the news on the front page but for the spread of the telegraph it still took some time: Standage says that at first people used it to play chess remotely.

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But when Morse died on April 2, 1872 in New York, the telegraph had changed the world.

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