Wilhelm Eduard Weber

Born 24 October 1804, Wilhelm Eduard Weber trained as a physicist in an era when electricity was still more curiosity than tool. His collaboration with Carl Friedrich Gauss produced the first electromagnetic telegraph, a device that proved current could carry information and prefigured the wired world. The invention married Gauss's theoretical rigor to Weber's experimental skill, and together they strung a working line that pulsed with meaning. He died 23 June 1891, decades after the spark they'd sent down a wire had multiplied into networks spanning continents.