On 18 November 1844, the Washington Chess Club challenged its counterparts in Baltimore to a match. Two teams were organized, and at 4 p.m. on 26 November, the first game commenced with three consulting members to a side. Washington began conventionally, pushing a pawn to the center of the board. Baltimore immediately responded by mirroring the move. But this was unlike any chess game ever played before. The Baltimoreans were still in Baltimore, the Washingtonians were still in Washington, D.C, 60 kilometers away, and they were playing by electrical telegraph.
Successive moves were transmitted over the new Baltimore–Washington telegraph line, the first in the United States, which Samuel Morse and company had inaugurated in May of that year with the message “What hath God wrought.”
Samuel F.B. Morse pushed for the first U.S. telegraph, which connected Washington, D.C., to Baltimore, Md. Mathew B. Brady/Library of Congress
One chess game led to another, and play continued on and off for days. Records of the games are incomplete and sometimes inconsistent—181 years later, it’s unclear who exactly dreamt up chess over wire and why. But thanks in part to historical documents at the Smithsonian Institution, we know enough about the people involved and the operation of the early telegraph to have a sense of the proceedings. We know that Morse would cite chess in lobbying Congress to fund the extension of the telegraphic network to New York via Philadelphia. And we know that there was much more chess by telegraph to come.
Not simply a novelty or a one-off tech demo, telegraph chess eventually became a well-known, joked-about trend in the United States and Britain, writes historian Simone Müller-Pohl. Chess by telegraph also prefigured chess played through other means of telecommunications. There are records of recreational and serious games played over radio, on telephone lines, satellite, and through online interfaces including forums, email, and dedicated live services. Most recently, chess has evolved into an esport. Earlier this year, chess joined the likes of Call of Duty, Street Fighter, and Rocket League at the 2025 Esports World Cup in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Last August, chess grandmaster Magnus Carlsen won the first ever Chess Esports World Cup. Esports World Cup
The number of adults worldwide who play chess regularly is often estimated at around 600 million, and many of them use whatever means available to play games across long distances with friends, rivals, and strangers. Indeed, the 1,500-year-old game and the latest in telecommunications always seem to find each other, starting just months after the first telegraph was built in the United States, when chess went electric.
The Birth of Chess by Telegraph
The Baltimore–Washington telegraph was financed in 1843 with US $30,000 (about $1.3 million today) appropriated by Congress, with the help of Morse’s business partner, Francis O.J. Smith, who had supported the project in 1838 while still a sitting congressman from Maine. By late 1844, a bill to extend the line to New York was in front of the U.S. House of Representatives. In at least one way, drawing the attention of legislators to the new line was relatively easy—the Washington end moved back and forth between the Capitol building and the post office, near the present-day National Portrait Gallery. If you were a lawmaker in Washington at the time, the telegraph would’ve been hard to miss.
But perhaps they needed more persuading. Orrin S. Wood, a telegraph operator, thought so. On 5 December 1844, Wood wrote a letter to his brother-in-law, engineer Ezra Cornell, who had worked on the line and would go on to cofound Western Union:
... continue reading