Telegraph is first used in Washington, D.C.

Charlestown native Samuel F.B. Morse transmits the first telegraph message, “What hath God wrought?” to his partner, Albert Vail, in Baltimore. Morse and Vail had first publicly demonstrated the telegraph in Morristown, New Jersey, on January 6, 1838, and received a patent for it on June 20, 1840. The New York Sun subsequently declares its invention results in “the annihilation of space.” But Henry David Thoreau questions its value if its users “have nothing to communicate.”