A couple with three children waited in line at San Francisco's Pier 41 to purchase tickets for a boat trip to Alcatraz. Others watched with varying degrees of sympathy and irritation as the young children fidgeted, whined, and punched one another. The frazzled parents reprimanded them to no avail.
Finally they reached the ticket window. "Five tickets, please," the father said. "Two round trip, three one way."
Telegraph registerIn 1849, a telegraph register was patented by Samuel F. B.Morse (No. 6,420). Although Morse first thoughts of an electromagnetic telegraph (1832) led to building an experimental version (1835), he constructed his first truly practical system in 1844. That line ran from Baltimore to Washington, DC. This patent incorporates the basic features of the 1844 receiver and a method for marking dots and dashes on paper. Within ten years after the first telegraph line opened, 23,000 miles of wire crisscrossed the country. The invention profoundly affected the development of the West, made railroad travel safer, and allowed businessmen to conduct their operations more profitably. |
