Hiram Sibley and the Wire That Crossed a Continent

Rochester has a habit of producing companies that wire things together. In eighteen fifty-one, a Rochester businessman named Hiram Sibley helped found what was initially called the New York and Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Company, a name that did not exactly trip off the tongue. Within five years, through a series of mergers with competing telegraph firms, it was renamed the Western Union Telegraph Company. The company that became Western Union was organized in Rochester.

Sibley's ambition was not local. By the early eighteen sixties he had become convinced that a single telegraph wire could be strung from coast to coast, an idea that most investors considered delusional. The distances involved were enormous; the terrain was brutal. But Sibley helped organize the effort and drove the project forward. On the twenty-fourth of October, eighteen sixty-one, the first transcontinental telegraph line was completed. The message sent that day went to President Abraham Lincoln.

The transcontinental telegraph instantly made the Pony Express obsolete. The Pony Express had been in operation for less than two years. What Sibley's wire accomplished in terms of binding the American continent together is difficult to overstate: information that had taken weeks or months to travel could now move in minutes. It made real-time national financial markets possible. It made coordinating Union armies during the Civil War practical. And it began from an office in Rochester, the same city that would later give the world the photograph, the photocopier, and the contact lens.