Civil War telegraph
Young Willie Kettles was in right place
at right time when southern capital fell

Telegraph operator Willie Kettles, at age 15, was at the right place at the right time.

In the spring of 1865, President Abraham Lincoln stopped by the telegraph room in the Washington, D.C.,War Department sometimes more than once a day. He was awaiting good news from Richmond, Va.

Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy, was ripe for takeover by the Union army. When the principal manufacturing, medical and supply center for the South fell, all hope for the Confederacy would die.

On April 3, Willie was on duty and received the key dispatch that Richmond had been captured. Union cavalry had entered the town that morning and flew two guidons of the 4th Massachusetts Cavalry over the capitol building.

Willie was an instant hero.

The Vermont youngster was the youngest telegraph operator in the War Department at a time when many teenagers were into such duty.  Young people adapted to the new technology quicker and more effectively than their older counterparts. Many early telegraph offices were run by those as young as twelve.

After Willie took the dispatch about Richmond, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton hoisted Kettles to a window for a “speech,” but Willie was too modest to give one.

The magnetic telegraph - along with rifled weapons and the railroad - changed the way wars were fought and heralded the beginning of the information revolution.

In Washington, the telegraph lines were connected to the War Department, not the White House, and Lincoln spent countless hours in the War Department, often spending the night. He developed a cordial everyday relationship with the young telegraph operators including young Kettles, who later worked for Western Union in Boston.

Samuel F.B. Morse, a portrait painter and part-time inventor who twice ran unsuccessfully for mayor of New York, came up with the idea for the telegraph. He said he was inspired about the possibilities following a discussion about electromagnetics with a fellow passenger on an ocean liner.

Morse obtained a patent for his telegraph in 1840, and four years later, sent his famous message – “What hath God wrought?” – over a line he’d strung from Washington to Baltimore with $30,000 in federal money.

The Yale College alumnus realized that pulses of electrical current could convey information over wires. He developed a working model of an electric telegraph using a home-made battery and old clock-work gears and, in 1837, devised a one-wire system that produced an EKG-like line on tickertape. The dips in the line had to be de-coded into letters and numbers using a dictionary composed by Morse, this assuming that the pen or pencil wrote clearly, which did not always happen. By the following year he had developed an improved system, having created a dot-and-dash code that used different numbers to represent the letters of the English alphabet and 10 digits.

The telegraph, first proposed in 1753 and first built in 1774, was an impractical machine up until that point, requiring 26 separate wires, one for each letter of the alphabet.

Around that time. two German engineers had invented a five-wire model, but Morse wanted to be the first to reduce the number of wires to one.

Although Morse didn’t invent the telegraph and did not single-handedly create Morse Code, he may have been telegraphy's greatest promoter, and, undoubtedly, contributed to its rapid development and adoption throughout the world. The telegraph spread across the U.S. more quickly than had the railroads, whose routes the wires often followed.

By 1854, there were 23,000 miles of telegraph wire in operation. Western Union was founded in 1851, and, in 1866, the first successful trans-Atlantic cable link was established.