the Pony Express was quietly superseded by the telegraph, which in that year had completed its circuits all the way to San Francisco, seven years ahead of the first transcontinental railroad.

And in four more years Cyrus W.Field and Peter Cooper had carried to complete success the Atlantic Cable; and the Morse telegraph was sending intelligence across the sea, as well as from New York to the Golden Gate.
And today ships at sea and stations on land, separated by the sea, speak to one another in the language of the Morse Code, without the use of wires.

Wireless, or radio, telegraphy was the invention of a nineteen-year-old boy, Guglielmo Marconi, an Italian; but it has been greatly extended and developed at the hands of four Americans: Fessenden, Alexanderson, Langmuir, and Lee De Forest.

It was De Forest's invention that made possible transcontinental and transatlantic telephone service, both with and without wires.
The story of the telegraph's younger brother, and great ally in communication, the telephone of Alexander Graham Bell, is another pregnant romance of American invention.

But that is a story by itself, and it begins in a later period and so falls within the scope of another volume of these Chronicles.* * "The Age of Big Business", by Burton J.Hendrick, "The Chronicle of America", vol.XXXIX.
Wise newspapermen stiffened to attention when the telegraph began ticking.