Today in 1837, The U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution requesting the Treasury Secretary, Levi Woodbury, to report to the House at its next session, “upon the propriety of establishing a system of telegraphs for the United States.”
“Of the eighteen responses that Woodbury received, seventeen assumed that the telegraph would be optical and that its motive power would be human… The only respondent to envision a different motive power was Samuel F. B. Morse… [who] proposed, instead, a new kind of telegraph of his own devising that would transmit information not by sight but, rather, by electrical impulses transmitted by wire”—Richard John, Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications, 2015.
For more than 100 years, the telegraph (“to write at a distance”) was the principal means of transmitting printed information by wire or radio waves. By the late 20th century, the telegraph was replaced by digital data-transmission systems based on computer technology. "Telegram services” are still available in many countries, but the transmission is usually done via a computer network.