Before people relied on nearly 750,000 miles of undersea fiber optic cables to facilitate their internet communication, they used telegraph cables to exchange messages. The first transatlantic telegram was sent fourteen years after Samuel Morse sent the first telegram. In 1858, Queen Victoria sent the first transatlantic telegram to President James Buchanan in just sixteen hours, and Buchanan’s response arrived in ten, as opposed to the twelve days it would have taken via ship and land. The telegraph would continue to be the dominant mode of long-distance communication, used to share both personal news and major world events. When the Titanic sank in 1912, for example, the news was transmitted via telegram.