Invention.

Samuel F. B. Morse was not the only contender for the title of inventor of the telegraph. By the late 1830s many other inventors had come up with similar devices, but it was Morse who managed to outlast the other sixty-two claimants. One reason the telegraph attracted so many inventors was that the technology of sending communications through a wire was not particularly complex. An operator tapped out a message by opening and closing an electric circuit in a coded pattern while at the receiving end the current flowed through an electromagnet which moved a long arm (much like a doorbell works), typing out the message as a series of dots and spaces on a strip of paper. Morse, however, was the first to prove the idea practicable, with the use of his flexible "Morse code" of dots and dashes to represent letters...