Cooke and Wheatstone telegraph
The Cooke and Wheatstone telegraph was an early electrical telegraph system dating from the 1830s invented by English inventor William Fothergill Cooke and English scientist Charles Wheatstone. It was the first telegraph system to be put into commercial service. The receiver consisted of a number of needles which could be moved by electromagnetic coils to point to letters on a board. This feature was liked by early users who were unwilling to learn codes, and employers who did not want to invest in staff training.
Harrison Gray Dyar
Dyar erected the first telegraph line and dispatched over it the first telegraph message ever sent in America — as determined by Levi Woodbury of the Supreme Court of the United States. Dyar had used over half a mile of bare electrical wire to transmit the message. He employed mechanical and electrical means that Samuel Morse used many years later for the telegraph system he patented in 1847. The author Munroe explains that Dyar made his telegraph line at least eighteen years before the actual materialization of the first practical Morse telegraph line that was made between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, Maryland.