Morse applied to Congress to aid him in his plans and in 1843 he secured an appropriation of $30,000 for establishing a telegraph line between Baltimore and Washington. Morse and Vail now hurried the great work on and by May, 1844, the wires had been stretched between the two cities and the instruments were ready for trial. And such heavy, clumsy affairs the instruments (Fig. 11) were! "The receiving apparatus weighed 185 pounds and it required the strength of two strong men to handle it. At the present day an equally effective magnet need not weigh more than four ounces and might be carried in the vest pocket." But, awkward and clumsy as it was, the new telegraph did its work well. On May 24, 1844, Morse sent from Washington the historic message, "What hath God wrought?" (Fig. 12) and in the twinkling of an eye it was received by Vail at Baltimore, forty miles away. [Illustration: FIG. 12.--THE FIRST TELEGRAPHIC MESSAGE SENT FROM WASHINGTON TO BALTIMORE, MAY 24, 1844.] The Morse system proved to be profitable as well as successful and after 1844 the electric telegraph was soon in general use in all parts of the world. In the United States cities were rapidly connected by wire and by 1860 all the principal places in the country could communicate with each other by telegraph. In 1861, a telegraph line extended across the continent and connected New York and San Francisco. Five years later, thanks to the perseverance and energy of Cyrus W. Field, of New York, the Old World and the New were joined together by a telegraphic cable passing through the waters of the Atlantic from a point on the coast of Ireland to a point on the coast of Newfoundland. With the laying of this cable, in 1866, all parts of the world were brought into telegraphic communication and it seemed that the last step in the development of the message had been taken. But the story of the Message did not end with the invention of the telegraph and the laying of the Atlantic cable. Almost as soon as inventors had learned how to send a current along a wire and make signals at a distance they began trying experiments to see if they could not also send sounds, especially the sound of the human voice, along a wire; as soon as they had made the _telegraph_ they began to try to make the _telephone_.[25] In 1855 Professor Wheatstone of England invented an instrument by means of which musical sounds made in one part of a building were carried noiselessly along a wire through several intervening halls and reproduced at the other end of the wire in a distant part of the building. About the same time a Frenchman named Bourseul produced a device by which a disk vibrating under the influence of the human voice would, by means of an electric current, produce similar vibrations of a disk located at a distance.