Morse code - The First Social Media
/Washington Post Retropolis story discusses the history of social media, tracing the concept all the way back to Morse Code.
Internet histories record Jack Dorsey’s first tweet as a pivotal moment in the rise of social media. However, it is possible that social media began almost two centuries earlier, on 24th May 1844, when Samuel F.B. Morse, a painter-turned-inventor, sent a message from Washington to Baltimore.
Back then, Morse wasn’t typing with his thumbs but was instead tapping dots and dashes “on a device of cogs and coiled wires,” as one historian later put it. While the telegraph had been around in idea and rudimentary form, Morse devised a way to use electricity for sending a series of codes signaling letters of the alphabet.
Suddenly, the country began shrinking in ways that sound distinctly familiar.
Media Story - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/05/24/before-there-was-twitter-there-was-morse-code-remembering-social-medias-true-inventor/