The telegraph and the telephone were spawned from a need for new forms of communication.

Before the time of the internet, or transatlantic cables, communication was much slower than it is today. Sending a message across the country would take weeks by train instead of the seconds it takes now to pick up the phone. Society had reached a point where the need for a faster form of communication became painfully obvious. New, faster forms of communication were needed. And from this need spawned the two inventions that would revolutionize the way we communicate over long distances forever.

Contrary to popular belief, the first instances of the telegraph were not the electrical components that made dots and dashes to form a sentence. Instead, the first instances of the telegraph were optical, and had been used hundreds of years before Samuel Morse had come along. For example, the Romans built 3,197 watchtowers along the coastlines and used fires and smoke signals to warn of pirates or enemy ships.(Headrick,2000) Many other cultures had their own forms of optical communi...