If you lived in America in 1843 and wanted to communicate with someone in a distant state, you would have to send that person a written message delivered by land.
But that year, as noted on the official website of the House of Representatives, Congress approved $30,000 in spending "to test the feasibility of creating a telegraph system."
In 1838, five years before that appropriation, according to the House website, Samuel Morse had met with members of Congress in Washington, D.C., to show them how the telegraph machine he had invented worked. Then, in 1840, Morse received a patent for the device.
Four years later, an American telegraph system was born. "Surrounded by an audience of Congressmen," notes the House website, "Samuel Morse sent the first official telegraph from the Supreme Court Chamber, then located in the Capitol, to his partner, Alfred Vail, in Baltimore. He tapped the message, 'What hath God wrought!'"
Yet, as revolutionary as this technology was, the age of the telegraph did not last long.
Just 32 years later, Alexander Graham Bell received the first patent for a telephone. "Bell is known as the father of the telephone as his design was the first to be patented," notes the Library of Congress, "and it was Bell who continued the work beyond this patent to make a working device that would revolutionize the way we communicate."
"Bell was granted US Patent Number 174,465 for 'an improvement in Telegraphy' on March 7, 1876," notes the Library of Congress, "and it was on March 10, 1876 that Bell declared to his assistant, 'Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you!' over the lines of his working telephone, as he wrote in his laboratory journal."
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Thirty-nine years after that, as the Library of Congress notes, Bell once again called Watson. This time, however, Bell was in New York City and Watson was in San Francisco. It was the first call ever from coast to coast.
Americans born in the 1950s and '60s can remember an era when, if you wanted to phone someone, you had to find a telephone that was attached to a landline -- just like an 1840s telegraph machine. Americans had landline telephones in their homes and workplaces, but elsewhere they would need to resort to public "payphones" that they could activate by dropping coins into them.
Then came the era of the cellphone -- a device you could put in your pocket, carry with you anywhere, and use to take or receive calls from people anywhere in the country.
Then cellphones became a portable door to the internet. "Blackberry launched its first Internet-enabled mobile device in 2002," according to an online history of the mobile phone published by AT&T. "It wasn't until 2007 that the original (Apple) iPhone came out."
Some might ask whether this modern telephone technology is a good thing or a bad thing. The true answer is not in the device itself but in how someone uses it.
A child could sneak a cellphone into a classroom at his school and use it to look at stupid things rather than pay attention to a teacher who is instructing him in something it is imperative he learn. That would be a bad thing.
Or an elderly person could suffer a serious health crisis riding in a car on a country road, and someone he is traveling with could immediately get on their cellphone and call for an ambulance. That would be a good thing.
If that school child did not have that cellphone in his classroom, he would be more likely to learn the good lessons being taught there. If the companion of that elderly person in crisis did not have that cellphone in the car, that elderly person would be in greater peril.
Now the world is confronting the emergence of artificial intelligence.
Pope Leo XIV has released his first encyclical letter -- "Magnifica Humanitas" -- examining this new technology. "In recent years, it has become increasingly evident how rapidly and profoundly digitalization, artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics are transforming our world," he writes. "Technology should not be considered, in itself, as a force antagonistic to humanity. On the contrary, it has formed part of our history since the beginning as 'a profoundly human reality, linked to the autonomy and freedom of man.' Over the centuries, technological development has significantly improved the living conditions of humanity. At the same time, each phase of progress has also revealed the ambiguity of tools that can cause harm when not oriented toward the good."
"Technology has the power to heal, connect, educate and protect our common home; but it can also divide, exclude and generate new forms of injustice," writes the pope. "In the abstract, technology in and of itself is not a solution to humanity's problems, just as it is not inherently evil. In practice, however, technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it. Therefore, the primary choice is not between a 'yes' or 'no' to technology, but rather between constructing a Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem; between a power that claims to dominate the heavens and a people who work together in the presence of God to rebuild the walls of fraternal coexistence."
St. Ignatius of Loyola was a Catholic priest who founded the Jesuit order in the 16th century. In his "Spiritual Exercises," he wrote: "Man is created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save his soul. And the other things on the face of the earth are created for man and that they may help him in prosecuting the end for which he is created. From this it follows that man is to use them as much as they help him on to this end, and ought to rid himself of them so far as they hinder him as to it."
New technologies such as artificial intelligence should be both created and used in keeping with this principle.
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