New Media, Ancient Libels

On an otherwise ordinary day at a railroad station in Baltimore, Maryland, over one hundred fifty years before anyone had laid eyes on an iPhone, American inventor, Alfred Vail, sat beside a device he had developed with his partner, Samuel Morse. While listening to a sequence of electrical dots and dashes emitted by the new contraption, Vail jotted down the words, “What hath G-d wrought?,” and the world changed forever. Much more profound than anyone could have imagined, the question Vail recorded was taken from the Book of Numbers at the suggestion of Annie Ellworth, daughter of the U.S. commissioner of patents. That recording traveled some thirty miles from Washington D.C., in what seemed like no…