This inquiry provides students with an opportunity to examine the role that the telegraph played in the Civil War. The telegraph system used in the Civil War emerged over two decades in the 1830s and 1840s as inventors and businessmen worked to find a way to send electronic messages over wires. Samuel Morse cracked the code, so to speak, when he and his partners Leonard Gale and Alfred Vail transmitted their famous message “What hath God wrought?” from Washington to Baltimore on May 24, 1844