Developed independently by Samuel Morse in the US and Cooke and Wheatstone in the UK, the telegraph was the first invention to allow instant long-distance communication. It worked by sending electrical pulses over a wire, which were translated into messages. Samuel Morse also co-developed Morse Code, a system of dots and dashes representing letters of the alphabet. For the first time in history, the speed of information was no longer limited by the speed of a horse or a ship. The telegraph revolutionized journalism, banking, and warfare, and it served as the technological precursor to the telephone and the internet. It 'shrank the world' and laid the groundwork for the modern globalized information age.