Technology

In the early 1990s, the Smithsonian found itself embroiled in national controversy over one of its planned exhibitions, making enemies of newspapers, veterans groups, and even Congress. What was the right way to display the plane that dropped the atomic bomb?

What was the first message telegraphed to the Capitol in 1844? If you answered "What hath God wrought?" you're wrong! Read about the long road to Samuel Morse's most famous telegraphed words, and the messages that preceded it.

It's the Census 2: Electric Boogaloo! In 1888, the Census Bureau stares down a mountain of data that threatens to overwhelm the capacity of its clerks. It sends a message out to the nation and receives ingenious machines that will tabulate the first electrified Census. 

Of all the great minds to inhabit Washington, D.C. through the years, perhaps one of the most consequential yet often overlooked, was Alexander Graham Bell. Though his famous 1876 telephone experiment took place in Boston, Bell moved to the District shortly thereafter and worked on what he considered to be his greatest inventions in several Northwest labs over the next few decades. Of his many D.C.-based achievements, perhaps the most significant occurred at his small lab on L Street and led to the eventual birth of fiberoptic communication.

As the Civil War raged, Abraham Lincoln used the War Department telegraph office next to the White House as a wartime nerve center. He read intercepted messages, issued rapid orders to generals, and relied on telegraph operators as cryptographers to shape strategy in real time.