Electricity discovered, few had any practical ideas on how to harvest the force into a commercial form. Samuel F. B. Morse was one of those few. The application of electricity being able to move a mechanical object, he realized, could also be done at a great distance, as electrical currents travel fast. The first crude telegraphs Morse built worked, and he used them for public demonstrations.

On this day, May 1, in 1844, one of the first experimental telegraph messages, announcing the Whig Party nominated Henry Clay for president, were sent over Samuel Morse’s telegraph line, from Baltimore to Washington, D.C.

Morse by that time had already demonstrated his apparatus to lawmakers in Washington, D.C., and obtained funding for a series of telegraph cables lining the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. The first official telegraph message over the line would come three weeks later, when Morse telegraphed “What hath God wrought,” a line from the Book of Numbers, from the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C. to the Mount Clare Station of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.