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Updated June 5, 2005
"How fast will electricty travel along a wire, and how far will it go?"

Question asked by everyone
during the 1830s/40s prior to Morse, Cooke and Wheatstone
as they worked on their versions of the electric telegraph.
This 1930 magazine advertisement details the human handling and physical routing of a message that streaked by wire from San Francisco westward under the Pacific,
across Asia, across Europe, under the Atlantic and finally across the continental
United States back to the very same typing telegraph machine that sent the message
a mere
5 minutes, thirty-two seconds earlier!
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