The Forgotten Women Who Built America's First Cross-Country Communication Lines

The Forgotten Women Who Built America's First Cross-Country Communication Lines

There’s a reason telegraph operators rarely appear in the paintings. The frontier mythology America built for itself had a specific cast — explorers, railroad barons, cowboys — and the women who sat at those clicking machines, translating the pulse of a nation into dots and dashes, didn’t fit the frame. But without them, the frame wouldn’t exist. The first cross-country communication network didn’t run on wire and voltage alone. It ran on the la…