The telegraph was a groundbreaking piece of technology in terms of transmitting information from one point to another with little delay. Prior to the telegraph, information was transmitted via horseback and took significant time depending on the distance the information was being sent to.
The telegraph was invented in 1838 and was a point-to-point system. The telegraph is fundamentally a digital system because it transmits information in distinct states of pulses which in this case is on or off. To decipher these pulses, a code was created for all 26 letters, and the numbers 0-9.
Although it had its flaws and limitations, such as requiring skilled operators to send and recieve and interpret this data, was especially expensive to set up because of the copper wires, and was easily affected by the outside enviorment and weather conditions it connected the world as it minimized any delays displaying any information.
This revolutionized communication as we knew it as it allowed for information to be rapidly sent from point to point in a digital system.