One Latter-Day Agency for the Spread of Knowledge by W. A. S.

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jun 11, 1914

One Latter-Day Agency for the Spread of Knowledge

By W. A. S.

THE Springfield Republican reminded us the other day that the seventieth anniversary of the introduction of the electric telegraph in America had just been passed. The article (in the issue of May 28) gives an interesting review of the facts:—

It was just seventy years ago Sunday that the telegraph was formally introduced. Samuel F. B. Morse, the inventor, who had worked for twelve years on electro-magnetic communication, and his associate, Alfred Vail, had strung the first line between Washington and Baltimore. On the morning of May 24, 1844, Annie G. Ellsworth, daughter of the then Commissioner of Patents, burst into the United States Supreme Court chambers in Washington, where men were gathered around his telegraph instrument, and brought the news that Congress had appropriated $30,000 for official tests of the invention, after a disheartening series of refusals. Morse reached for the sending key and ticked off the historic message, "What hath God wrought!" Vail, in a

station at Baltimore, surrounded by another group of distinguished men, read the message upon a paper tape. Two days later the telegraph gave out its first public news by announcing that Polk had been nominated for the presidency in the Baltimore convention.

Today the telegraph is one of the most important strands holding modern civilization together. It is estimated that something like half a billion news dispatches, business communications, and social messages are transmitted every year over the 6,000,000 miles of telegraph wire connecting practically all the important settlements in the world. Nearly 300,000 miles of submarine telegraph also have been laid. One invention after another led to the reading of messages wholly by sound, to the sending of as many as a dozen messages simultaneously over one circuit, and in a crude form the sending of pictures over the wire by intermittently flashing beams of light. In its most advanced form the telegraph has eliminated wires altogether, and from hundreds of stations ashore and from the masts of almost every large ocean-going vessel, the exchange of messages through the air has lately become almost as commonplace as ordinary wire communication.

Thus the world is brought closely together in these days. All peoples are watching the unfolding of world events day by day as the history is made. It was never so in any former generation. With the coming of the generation that is to witness the events that betoken the very end of time, the agencies have come into being by which all mankind may watch the closing drama of earth's history as one vast audience together. And all these facilities are pressed into service in hastening on the message that is to be carried to all peoples. Who can fail to recognize the providential timeliness of the arrival of these agencies as the last generation came upon the stage of history?

W. A. S.