How the West got wired

Long before there was an Internet or an iPad, before people were social networking and instant messaging, Americans had already got wired.

Today is 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.

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