Read the Nonfiction Book and write an Informational Report explaining what you learned about the telegraph and telephone. Follow
the prompt and begin by clearly stating your main idea and leading with a fact that will really interest your readers. Set up your Report by grouping related ideas into paragraphs. Each paragraph can start with a topic sentence about a different aspect of these amazing inventions that changed our lives. You may want to include paragraph about the inventor Samuel Morse, a paragraph about the invention of the telegraph, and a paragraph about the first telephones, or come up with your own ideas. Develop each paragraph with interesting facts and information from the book
Long before Samuel F. B. Morse electrically transmitted his famous message "What hath God wrought?" from Washington to Baltimore on May 24, 1844, there were signaling systems that enabled people to communicate over distances. Most were visual or "semaphore" systems using flags or lights. In the eighteenth century, such systems used an observer who would decipher a signal from a high tower on a distant hill and then send it on to the next station. The young American republic wanted just such a system along its entire Atlantic coast and offered a prize of $30,000 for a workable proposal. The framers of this legislation had no way of knowing that when they used the word "telegraph" to refer to this visual semaphore system, they would be offered an entirely new and revolutionary means of communication--electricity.
