WIRED FOR SUCCESS

“What hath God wrought?” Those were the words that the daughter of Henry Leavitt Ellsworth famously suggested Samuel F. B. Morse send from the basement of the U.S. Capitol on May 24, 1844, to officially open the much-anticipated telegraph line from Washington to Baltimore. Ellsworth, the commissioner of the U.S. Patent Office, had traveled extensively in the West before his appointment to the post in 1835 and understood the need for better means of communications to bind Americans together. Consequently, he had taken an interest in Morse’s electric telegraph and been instrumental in getting Congress to provide financial assistance.

Before long military leaders would find the telegraph to be a mixed blessing.

It didn’t take long for Ellsworth’s and Morse’s efforts to pay off. By 1850, some 20 companies were operating about 12,000 miles of telegraph lines in the United States, and it was soon clear that the telegraph would have a profound effect on all aspects of human activity—not least the conduct of war. In the mid-1850s, the British and French governments relied on the telegraph to help them manage and monitor their forces in the Crimean War. British authorities also used the telegraph in responding to the Indian Rebellion of 1857, as did Napoleon III’s government in supporting the French operations in Italy that culminated in the Battle of Solferino in 1859.

A few years later, to the great fortune of the Union effort in the Civil War, the U.S. government found men with the technical knowledge and administrative