5 of the Most Famous Telegrams in History
Although it still exists, the telegraph has been all but forgotten in a world dominated by instant digital messaging, relegated to the archives of 20th-century institutions alongside the corner phone booth and the horse and buggy. Yet there was a time when this form of communication was the best and most efficient way to deliver a message across significant distances. Western Union, the largest provider of the service, logged more than 200 million telegrams sent in its peak year of 1929.
Given the telegraph’s popularity, it’s not surprising that numerous important messages from the past two centuries traveled by way of telegram, some of which inspired notable changes to global events while others provided appropriate commentary to historic moments as they unfurled. Here are five such transmissions that have proved to possess staying power even as the technology that provided them has largely been pushed aside.
Samuel Morse’s Test Message From the U.S. Capitol
On May 24, 1844, some 12 years after he set about devising a way to transmit information by way of an electrical current, Samuel F.B. Morse prepared to showcase his perfected invention before an influential audience in the U.S. Capitol. Morse transmitted the words “What hath God wrought” — a message inspired by the Bible, suggested by the patent commissioner’s daughter — over a copper wire that followed the B&O Railroad line nearly 40 miles to a Baltimore station. There, his assistant Alfred Vail received the message and replied with the same phrase from a second machine.
This wasn’t the first example of a working telegraph. Inventors William F. Cooke and Charles Wheatstone had unveiled their version in the United Kingdom in 1837, and Morse and his team had previously conducted demonstrations across shorter distances. However, this particular showing, colored by a message hinting at divine intervention, has endured as the impetus for the rapid spread of this novel communication system over the following decade.
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Greetings From the Frozen North
“Stars and stripes nailed to the North Pole” — so came the telegraphed revelation from explorer Robert Peary to The New York Times on September 6, 1909, trumpeting a successful effort to reach the top of the world. However, Perry’s message arrived five days after a less emphatically worded telegram from explorer Robert Cook. His message — “Reached North Pole. April 21, 1908. Discovered land far north” — announced similar news to The New York Herald.
The dueling telegrams encapsulated the thrill of the race that gripped the public imagination at the time, and the drama that was to unfold over which explorer garnered the glory for reaching the finish line first. Although Cook’s claim was soon discredited due to a lack of proper documentation of the discovery, Peary’s “proof” was also dismissed several decades later, and to this day, it’s unclear if either man ever reached his elusive destination.
The World War I-Altering Zimmerman Telegram
In the early weeks of 1917, the United States government was still maintaining a neutral stance in the war that raged on the other side of the Atlantic. However, British code breakers in January intercepted a telegram sent from German Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmermann to the country’s minister to Mexico, which proposed an alliance and an offer to help America’s southern neighbor “reconquer the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.”
After waiting until tensions were inflamed by Germany’s resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare, British intelligence unveiled the Zimmermann telegram to U.S. officials in late February. The revelation had the desired effect, as calls for Germany’s punishment echoed throughout the American press over the next few weeks, until the United States formally entered World War I in April.
The Cold War-Igniting “Long Telegram”
Two weeks after Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin delivered a jarring election speech about the evils of capitalism, the acting U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, George F. Kennan, weighed in on the matter with an unusually lengthy telegram to the U.S. Department of State on February 22, 1946.
Often mistakenly said to total more than 8,000 words — although still a whopper at something closer to the 5,500-word mark — the so-called “Long Telegram” outlined its author’s views of USSR leadership as “impervious to logic of reason” and “highly sensitive to logic of force,” from which “no permanent peaceful coexistence” could be forged.
Coupled with the follow-up explanations in his 1947 article “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” for Foreign Affairs magazine, Kennan’s analysis became the basis for a decisive American policy stance that ignited the Cold War and shaped geopolitics for the next half-century.
The H-Bomb Creator’s Announcement
Even while helping to build the atomic bomb as a member of the Manhattan Project, Hungary-born physicist Edward Teller was obsessed with the idea of developing an even more potent explosive. He received the go-ahead from the White House in the wake of the Kennan-inspired shift toward a strategy of combating Soviet aggression, as well as an assist from Polish American mathematician Stanisław Ulam on the problem of introducing enough heat to trigger the immense energy-producing process of nuclear fusion.
On October 31, 1952, knowing that a secret test of the hydrogen bomb was underway some 4,700 miles across the Pacific Ocean in the Marshall Islands, Teller carefully watched a seismograph from a basement laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. Upon seeing a telltale flicker, Teller reached out to his former colleagues at the Los Alamos facility in New Mexico with a succinct telegram announcing the arrival of the most powerful weapon yet created by human hands: “It’s a boy.”
