What Hath God Wrought Mystery Cache
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Size: 
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The cache is NOT at the posted coordinates. Posted coordinates are for a nearby landmark of great historical significance. If you have time, the cache owner suggests taking a tour and learning about this great milestone in American history.
 The Vail Homestead, or Speedwell Village, is just north of Morristown, New Jersey and is part of the Morris County Park Commission. The site is presently set up as a 19th century farm, complete with residential buildings, a granary, and a carriage house. The Speedwell Ironworks located near this site provided most of the machinery for the S.S. Savannah, the first steamship to cross the Atlantic Ocean. However, the Factory building on this site is most famous for being the place where Alfred Vail and Samuel Morse first publicly demonstrated the operation of the electric telegraph.
  Beginning in 1836, Samuel F. B. Morse and Alfred Vail developed an electric telegraph, which sent pulses of electrical current to control an electromagnet that was located at the receiving end of the telegraph wire. The technology available at the time made it impossible to print characters in a readable form, so the inventors had to devise an alternate means of communication. Morse's original telegraph receiver used a mechanical clockwork to move a paper tape. When an electrical current was received, an electromagnet engaged an armature that pushed a stylus onto the moving paper tape, making an indentation on the tape. When the current was interrupted, the electromagnet retracted the stylus, and that portion of the moving tape remained unmarked. |
 In his earliest code, Morse had planned to only transmit numerals. Operators would translate the indentations marked on the paper tape into numbers, which could then be converted to text messages using a dictionary. However, Morse’s Assistant, Alfred Vail, developed a signaling alphabet that expanded the code to include letters and special characters. This signaling alphabet, which came to be known as Morse Code, used shorter marks called "dots" and the longer ones called "dashes", and the letters most commonly used in the English language were assigned the shortest sequences.
Although Morse and Vail had done most of their research and development in the Speedwell Ironworks facilities, they chose the Factory house as the site for the first public demonstration on January 11, 1838. This first demonstration took place entirely within the building, where the inventors had pulled and looped 2 miles of copper wire around the interior of the structure. America’s first telegraph message read "A patient waiter is no loser." |
Starting in 1838, Morse made several trips to Washington, D.C. to demonstrate his invention in an attempt to obtain funding for the construction of a long distance communication network. However, the general public was highly skeptical of the machine, and there were also a great many skeptics in Congress. To win Congressional support, Morse eventually strung wires between two committee rooms in the Capitol, and sent messages back and forth. Finally, in December 1842, a bill was passed allocating $30,000 towards the construction of an experimental line.
With these funds, a thirty-eight mile line was constructed between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, Maryland along the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad line. On May, 24 1844, the line was officially opened as Morse sent his famous words "What hath God wrought", quoting Numbers 23:23, from the Old Supreme Court Chamber in the Capitol to the old Mt Clare Depot in Baltimore. This event ushered in the era of high-speed, long-distance communication and forever changed the world.
 In original Morse telegraphs, the receiver's armature made a clicking noise as it moved into and out of position to mark the tape. Operators soon learned to translate the clicks directly into dots and dashes, making it unnecessary to use the paper tape. When Morse code was adapted to radio, the dots and dashes were sent as short and long pulses. Morse code was used extensively for early radio communication beginning in the 1890’s, and for the first half of the twentieth century, the majority of high-speed international communication was conducted in Morse code using telegraph lines, undersea cables, and radio circuits. |
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Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
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