MORSE’S TELEGRAPH.--This wonderful invention or discovery of a new means of transmitting intelligence, is in full and perfectly successful operation. Mr. Morse is the magician at the end of the line, and an assistant who does not spell with perfect correctness officiates.
There have arrived numerous telegraphic dispatches since the meeting of the Convention at Baltimore at nine o’clock this morning. By one we are informed of the nomination of Mr. George M. Dallas, of Philadelphia, for Vice-President.
All the New York newspapers, the _Herald_ leading, shortly had a column of telegraphic news, and from that in the _Evening Post_ we can trace the steady extension of the wires. In the early spring of 1846 communication was opened between New York and Philadelphia. When war was declared, April 24, the line to Washington was incomplete, not having been finished between Baltimore and Philadelphia, but the gap was soon closed. The fastest carriage of news between the capital and New York, 220 miles, had been that of Harrison’s inaugural message, weighty with its Roman consuls and Greek generals, in eleven hours; now eleven minutes sufficed. By the middle of September, when the line to Buffalo was complete, the country had 1,200 miles of telegraph, reaching above Boston towards Portland, to Washington on the south, and to Harrisburg on the west.
During 1847 the expansion of the telegraphic system amazed all who did not stop to think how much simpler and cheaper the installation of a line was than the building of a road. By March it had reached Pittsburgh on the west, and by September, Petersburg on the south. The next month saw it in Cincinnati and Louisville, and that fall the _Evening Post_ printed telegraph news of a Cincinnati flood which made 5,000 homeless. In its New Year’s message the journal congratulated its readers upon such progress that “the moment a dispatch arrives at New Orleans from our armies in Mexico its contents are known on the borders of the northern lakes.” The next year Florida alone of the States east of the Mississippi was untouched by it. When the President’s message opening Congress in December, 1848, was transmitted to St. Louis, the _Evening Post_ remarked that “the idea of a document filling twelve entire pages of the Washington _Union_ appearing in a city nearly one thousand miles from Washington, twenty-four hours after its delivery, is almost beyond belief.” Christopher Pearse Cranch contributed a poem to the _Post_ upon the marvel: