How America Wired a Continent in 112 Days Before the Telephone Existed

How America Wired a Continent in 112 Days Before the Telephone Existed In 1861, two crews raced to string 2,000 miles of telegraph wire across America — 27,500 poles in 112 days, while the Civil War raged. The prize: instant communication. The casualty: the Pony Express. On October 24, 1861, the first transcontinental telegraph connected the eastern United States to California — a message that once took ten days by horse now crossed three thousand miles in seconds. This is the story of the Pacific Telegraph Act's $40,000 gamble, Hiram Sibley of Western Union, the eastern crew of Edward Creighton racing James Gamble's western crew to Salt Lake City, the assembly line of surveyors, hole-diggers, pole-setters, and wire parties laying three to eight miles of line a day, the wire shipped around Cape Horn, Brigham Young's $11,000-in-gold timber deal, bison, lightning, and Confederate saboteurs — and the October 26, 1861 shutdown of the Pony Express, two days after the wire won. SOURCES: nps.gov/articles/000/the-transcontinental-telegraph.htm ethw.org/Transcontinental_Telegraph_Line_(U.S.) ethw.org/Milestones:Transcontinental_Telegraph,_1861 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_transcontinental_telegraph en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overland_Telegraph_Company history.com If you care about the men who built this country with their hands, subscribe to The Grit Age. #AmericanHistory #HistoryDocumentary #PonyExpress #Engineering #19thCentury Visuals and voiceover in this video were generated with AI. CHAPTERS: 0:00 The night the continent went electric 1:07 The problem — California was alone 2:49 The race is called 4:18 The assembly line 6:01 The pole problem 7:40 The finish — October 24, 1861 9:32 The cost 10:59 Legacy of the singing wire