On May 24, 1844, Samuel Morse tapped out four words that would shrink the planet: "What hath God wrought." His message traveled from Washington to Baltimore in seconds—a journey that took hours by train. Within decades, this primitive electric pulse evolved into a global nervous system of copper cables stretching across continents and beneath oceans.

The telegraph didn't just speed up communication; it fundamentally rewired human civilization. For the first time in history, information could travel faster than any physical object. News from India reached London in hours, not months. Stock prices synchronized across continents. Empires could be managed from metropolitan capitals. The Victorian era had invented its own internet, complete with information overload, market crashes triggered by false rumors, and a new anxiety about keeping up with the constant flow of news.

Before the telegraph, news traveled at the speed of horses and ships. The Battle of New Orleans in 1815 was fought two weeks after peace had been signed—nobody knew the war was over. By the 1860s, telegraph networks meant readers in New York learned about events in London the same day they happened. This compression of time created something entirely new: a global present moment where events thousands of miles away felt immediate and urgent.

Newspapers transformed overnight. The Times of London spent £10,000 annually on telegraph fees by 1870—more than most papers' entire budgets a generation earlier. Reuters and other wire services emerged, creating standardized international news that appeared simultaneously in papers worldwide. The phrase "stop press" entered the language as papers literally stopped their printing presses to insert breaking telegraph dispatches.

This instant news created unexpected psychological effects. Victorian readers complained of "news fatigue" from the constant stream of telegraphic updates. Stock markets became volatile as traders reacted to rumors spreading at electric speed. The American Civil War became the first conflict where civilians read about battles within hours of their conclusion, creating a new kind of home-front anxiety. The telegraph had given humanity its first taste of information overload—a phenomenon we still struggle with today.

The telegraph didn't just carry news—it fundamentally restructured how business worked. Before electric communication, regional offices operated independently for months at a time. A London merchant might wait six months for a round-trip message to Sydney. The telegraph compressed this to hours, enabling something revolutionary: real-time management of global operations.

Railroad companies pioneered telegraph-based business coordination. By transmitting train positions instantly, they could run multiple trains on single tracks safely—increasing capacity tenfold. The Pennsylvania Railroad used 6,000 miles of telegraph wire by 1860, creating the prototype for modern corporate communication systems. Standard Oil and other emerging corporations copied this model, using telegraphs to coordinate refineries, shipping, and sales across continents.

Financial markets transformed most dramatically. The first transatlantic cable in 1866 synchronized London and New York stock prices within minutes instead of weeks. Arbitrage—profiting from price differences between markets—shifted from a weeks-long gamble to minute-by-minute calculation. The telegraph enabled the first truly global financial crashes too: the Panic of 1873 spread worldwide in days as telegraph lines carried collapsing prices from Vienna to San Francisco. Modern high-frequency trading, where algorithms exploit microsecond advantages, is the direct descendant of Victorian telegraph speculation.

The British called them "All Red Lines"—telegraph cables connecting London to every major colony, never leaving British-controlled territory. By 1902, a message could travel from London to Sydney entirely through British cables. This electronic nervous system transformed how empires functioned, allowing unprecedented centralized control over global territories.

Colonial administrators no longer operated independently for months between dispatches. The Viceroy of India received daily instructions from London after the 1870 cable connection. During the 1857 Indian Rebellion, news took six weeks to reach Britain; by the 1880s, frontier skirmishes triggered immediate responses from Whitehall. France managed Algeria from Paris, Russia controlled Central Asia from St. Petersburg. The telegraph made truly global empires possible—and ultimately more brittle.

Submarine cables became strategic assets worth fighting over. Britain's cable monopoly gave it enormous advantages: during World War I, Britain immediately cut Germany's overseas cables, forcing German communications through easily monitored neutral lines. Colonial subjects also learned to use the telegraph for resistance—Indian nationalists coordinated protests across the subcontinent, while colonial newspapers used wire services to spread anti-imperial sentiment. The same technology that enabled imperial control also accelerated imperial collapse by connecting resistance movements and spreading revolutionary ideas at electric speed.

The telegraph created our modern relationship with information: always connected, perpetually updated, anxiously aware of distant events. Victorian telegraph operators even developed "glass arm"—a repetitive stress injury from constant key-tapping that prefigured modern tech-related ailments.

Every aspect of our digital age—from internet addiction to high-speed trading to global surveillance—has Victorian precedents in telegraph networks. The telegraph proved that connecting humanity changes humanity. It taught us that information traveling at light speed doesn't just accelerate existing patterns of life; it creates entirely new ways of being human.