Samuel's fingers flew across the telegraph key, tapping out a message in Morse code. He was fourteen years old and worked as a telegraph operator in a small town in Kansas. It was 1875, and the telegraph was the fastest way to send messages across long distances.
Tap-tap-tap. Tap. Tap-tap. Each letter had its own pattern of short taps and long taps. Samuel had memorized the entire code. He could send and receive messages as fast as most adults.
The telegraph wire stretched from his office all the way to cities in the East. Messages that once took weeks to deliver by horseback now arrived in minutes. Samuel thought it was like magic.
The telegraph key clicked, and Samuel grabbed his pencil. An incoming message! He listened carefully to the pattern of clicks and wrote down each letter. "TRAIN DELAYED STOP WILL ARRIVE THREE HOURS LATE STOP."
Samuel handed the note to Mr. Henderson, the stationmaster. "Good work, Samuel," Mr. Henderson said. "Your Morse code is getting faster every day." Samuel felt proud. Last year he had been just a boy running errands.
A farmer burst into the office. "I need to send a telegram to my brother in Chicago!" Samuel wrote the message: "Father is ill. Come home soon." It would cost fifty cents. Samuel tapped out the message and imagined another operator in Chicago writing the same words.
Samuel looked at the telegraph key with wonder. This small machine connected people across vast distances. He was part of something that was changing the world.