May 24 in History

Four words hummed across 38 miles of copper wire and the speed of human communication changed forever. On May 24, 1844, Samuel Morse sat in the old Supreme Court chamber in the U.S. Capitol and tapped out "What hath God wrought" in the dot-dash code that bore his name. His assistant Alfred Vail received the message at a railroad depot in Baltimore, and the electromagnetic telegraph was no longer an experiment. Morse was a portrait painter, not an engineer. He had conceived the idea for an electric telegraph during a transatlantic voyage in 1832 after a conversation about electromagnetism. The next twelve years were spent building prototypes, refining the code system, and lobbying Congress for funding. The Senate appropriated $30,000 in 1843 to construct an experimental line between Washington and Baltimore, and Morse hired Vail and Ezra Cornell to build it. The biblical phrase was chosen by Annie Ellsworth, daughter of the U.S. Patent Commissioner, from the Book of Numbers. The message traveled at the speed of electricity, roughly 186,000 miles per second, covering in an instant a distance that would take a horse rider four hours. Commercial telegraph service opened within months. By 1846, private companies were stringing wire across the eastern United States. Western Union, founded in 1851, built a transcontinental line by 1861. Undersea cables crossed the Atlantic by 1866. Within two decades of Morse's demonstration, information could circle the globe in minutes. The telegraph rewired commerce, warfare, journalism, and diplomacy. Stock prices could be transmitted instantly. Generals could coordinate distant armies. Newspapers launched wire services. Diplomats could consult their capitals before making decisions. Every subsequent communications revolution, from the telephone to the internet, built on the infrastructure and the idea that Morse proved workable in that Capitol basement.

Nine French judges tasted California wine blind and scored it higher than their own grand crus. The world of fine wine has never recovered. On May 24, 1976, British wine merchant Steven Spurrier organized a tasting in Paris that pitted unknown California bottles against the finest French Bordeaux and Burgundy, and the Americans won both categories. Spurrier expected the French wines to dominate. He had assembled the tasting primarily as a publicity stunt for his Paris wine shop, inviting respected French wine critics and sommeliers to serve as judges. The California entries included a 1973 Stag's Leap Wine Cellars Cabernet Sauvignon and a 1973 Chateau Montelena Chardonnay. The French side fielded Chateau Mouton Rothschild, Chateau Haut-Brion, and Meursault-Charmes, among others. The judges tasted blind, without knowing which wines were which. When the scores were tallied, Chateau Montelena had topped the white category and Stag's Leap had won the reds. Several French judges, upon learning they had rated California wines highest, attempted to take their scorecards back. George Taber of Time magazine, the only journalist present, refused to let the story disappear. The French wine establishment dismissed the result as a fluke. A rematch organized in 1986 using the same vintages produced the same outcome: California on top. The Paris tasting shattered the assumption that great wine could only come from European soil and opened global markets to producers in Chile, Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand. The $7 bottle of Stag's Leap that beat Mouton Rothschild launched a billion-dollar industry. Napa Valley land prices quintupled within a decade, and the old European monopoly on fine wine was finished.

Nicolaus Copernicus spent thirty years refining the mathematics of a heliocentric solar system before publishing his findings. He was a canon in the Catholic Church, a physician, a diplomat, and an administrator. He was careful. He had to be. Born on February 19, 1473, in Torun, Royal Prussia (now Poland), Copernicus studied at the University of Krakow, the University of Bologna, and the University of Padua, where he learned medicine and law. He was appointed a canon of the cathedral chapter of Frombork, a position that provided income and left time for scholarship. He shared his heliocentric model privately for years, circulating a handwritten summary called the Commentariolus around 1514. The manuscript proposed that the Earth and the other planets revolve around the Sun, that the Earth rotates on its axis daily, and that the apparent motion of the stars is caused by the Earth's movement rather than theirs. The idea was not entirely new; Aristarchus of Samos had proposed a heliocentric model in the third century BC. But Copernicus provided the mathematical framework to make it work. His major work, De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), was completed by the early 1530s but not published until 1543. His reluctance was partly professional caution and partly fear of ridicule or worse. The Church had not yet taken a formal position against heliocentrism, but the idea that the Earth was not the center of creation had obvious theological implications. Georg Joachim Rheticus, a young mathematician, visited Copernicus in 1539 and persuaded him to allow publication. Andreas Osiander, a Lutheran theologian who oversaw the printing, added an unauthorized preface describing the heliocentric model as a mathematical convenience rather than physical reality, apparently to reduce controversy. Copernicus received a copy of the published book on May 24, 1543, the day he died, reportedly following a stroke. He was 70. The book was not banned by the Church until 1616, 73 years after publication, when Galileo's advocacy made its implications impossible to ignore.

Fourteen years of construction, 27 deaths, and a span of 1,595 feet connected two cities that would soon become one. The Brooklyn Bridge opened to traffic on May 24, 1883, stretching across the East River between Manhattan and Brooklyn as the longest suspension bridge in the world and one of the great engineering achievements of the nineteenth century. Designer John Augustus Roebling never saw it finished. He died of tetanus in 1869 after a ferry crushed his foot during site surveys. His son Washington Roebling took over as chief engineer but was crippled by caisson disease (decompression sickness) from working in the underwater foundations. For the last eleven years of construction, Washington directed the project from his Brooklyn apartment, watching through a telescope while his wife Emily relayed instructions to the work site. The bridge's construction demanded innovations that had never been attempted at this scale. Workers excavated foundations inside pneumatic caissons, pressurized wooden boxes sunk to the riverbed, where temperatures exceeded 100 degrees and the risk of fire and blowouts was constant. The steel cables, a first for suspension bridge design, were manufactured on-site by spinning individual wires across the towers. Opening day drew an estimated 150,000 pedestrians and 1,800 vehicles. President Chester Arthur and New York Governor Grover Cleveland walked across together. Within a week, a panic on the pedestrian promenade killed 12 people in a stampede when someone shouted that the bridge was collapsing. The Brooklyn Bridge did not merely connect two land masses. It demonstrated that industrial engineering could reshape geography, and its Gothic stone towers became symbols of American ambition that architects and engineers still study and tourists still photograph 140 years later.