May 24 · This Day in America
After fourteen years, twenty-seven deaths, and a tragedy that nearly stopped it, the great bridge over the East River opens. Its designer, John Roebling, died of an infection before the first stone was laid. His son Washington, the chief engineer, was crippled by caisson disease and watched the rest of construction through a telescope from his bedroom window. So the work fell to his wife, Emily Warren Roebling, who taught herself higher mathematics and engineering and carried his orders to the site for eleven years until people quietly wondered who was really building it. On opening day she rides across first, a rooster — an old symbol of victory — on her lap. Then the crowds come: more than a hundred and fifty thousand people walk between two cities that had never touched. The longest suspension bridge on Earth, strung from steel wire, holds. It is still holding.
Source: www.history.com
Also on this day · 1844
From a room in the U.S. Capitol, Samuel Morse taps out four words chosen by a young woman named Annie Ellsworth — "What hath God wrought" — and thirty-eight miles away in Baltimore, Alfred Vail sends them straight back. The first long-distance telegraph message works. One witness wrote that "time and space have been completely annihilated." The wired world begins on this day.
Source: www.senate.gov
“What hath God wrought”First long-distance telegraph message, sent by Samuel Morse, 1844