Transcontinental telegraphIn 1861, the first transcontinental telegraph message was sent by Justice Stephen J. Field of California to President Abraham Lincoln, on the same day the first transcontinental telegraph system was completed. The section, built during 1861 by the Western Union Telegraph Co. and its associates, connected St. Joseph, Missouri and Sacramento, California. The Civil War had made obtaining labor and supplies difficult. Nature's obstacles had included the Rocky Mountains, the Sierra Nevada, and the Great Plains where timber for telephone poles was in short supply. Now it had become possible to transmit messages so rapidly from coast to coast, the Pony Express, previously the fastest communication between the East and the West, closed two days later. |
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