Before the telegraph, the fastest way to send a message across the country was by horseback. It could take weeks. Samuel Morse, born on April 27, 1791, changed everything. Morse was actually a painter, not a scientist. But his wife died while he was away. The letter telling him arrived too late. Morse became determined to find a faster way to communicate. He spent years developing the telegraph, a machine that sent electrical signals through wires. He also created Morse code. This system turns every letter into a pattern of short and long signals called dots and dashes. In 1844, Morse sent the first telegraph message from Washington, D.C. to Baltimore, Maryland. The message read: "What hath God wrought?" Within years, telegraph wires stretched across the entire country. By 1866, a cable was laid across the Atlantic Ocean floor, connecting America and Europe. For the first time in history, people on different continents could communicate in minutes instead of weeks. The telegraph was the internet of the 1800s.