Long before there was an Internet or an iPad, before people were social networking and instant messaging, Americans had already got wired. Yesterday was the 150th anniversary of the completion of the transcontinental telegraph. From sea to sea, it electronically knitted together a nation that was simultaneously tearing itself apart, North and South, in the Civil War.
Americans soon saw that a breakthrough in the spread of technology could enhance national identity and, just as today, that it could vastly change lives. On October 24, 1861, with the push of a button, California's chief justice, Stephen J. Field, wired a message from San Francisco to President Abraham Lincoln in Washington, congratulating him on the completion of the transcontinental telegraph that day.
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