From “The First Wired President,” Tom Wheeler’s smart New York Times Disunion post about Abraham Lincoln’s embrace of technology:

“Up until May 1862 Lincoln had sent, on average, a little over one telegram a month. But things changed when a telegraph office was opened next door to the White House, in the War Department. On May 24 the president had his online breakout, sending nine telegrams. That week he would send more than all his previous messages, combined. From May 24 — 18 years to the day since Morse had first tapped out ‘What hath God wrought’ — forward, Lincoln and the telegraph were inseparable.

The new telegraph office became the first Situation Room. Several times a day the president would walk into the telegraph office, sit down at the desk of its manager and begin going through the copies of all telegrams received, whether addressed to him or not. During great battles the president would even sleep in the telegraph office, just to be close to his oracle.

Using the telegraph to extend his voice was an obvious application of the technology. ‘You are instructed…to put twenty thousand men (20,000) in motion at once for the Shenandoah,’ the president ordered Gen. Irvin McDowell on May 24. Less obvious, however, was how Lincoln made the telegraph his eyes and ears to distant fields and the keyhole into his generals’ headquarters. As he sat in the telegraph office reading messages, he gained insights, felt the pulse of his Army in the field and reacted.”