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 But thanks in part to historical documents at the Smithsonian Institution, we know enough about the people involved and the operation of the early telegraph to have a sense of the proceedings.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:
“We have had considerable excitement in playing chess between this place and Baltimore for the last 2 or 3 weeks.…I am inclined to think that Congress will do something for Prof Morse as very many of them appear to be very much interested with [chess].”
A week later, Morse wrote to George M. Bibb, Secretary of the Treasury, to lobby for the funding. The telegraph could relay congressional news, presidential convention results, or the whereabouts of wanted criminals, he argued. He also played the chess card:
On 18 November 1844, the Washington Chess Club challenged Baltimore to a game of telegraph chess. One telegraph operator asked his counterpart, “Are you tired of checkers?”Smithsonian Institution Archives
“To show the variety of the operations of the telegraph, a game of draughts [checkers], and several games of chess, have been played between the cities of Baltimore and Washington, with the same ease as if the players were seated at the same table.”
Chess had even been played on rainy nights, he noted. The telegraph’s continued operation in both inclement weather and darkness compared favorably with optical telegraphy. Such systems, popular in France, consisted of regularly spaced flag towers that relayed messages by semaphore; they were costly to build and operate and only worked in daylight and good weather.
While Morse played up people’s interest in telegraphic chess, the game itself didn’t obviously begin with promotional intent. It began with checkers. We know this because Morse’s associate Alfred Vail kept a “Journal of the Magnetic Telegraph between Washington and Baltimore” (now part of the Vail Telegraph Collection at the Smithsonian) in which he meticulously recorded messages sent over the wire for posterity.
Notes from a 26 November 1844 chess game record players’ moves, as well as other snippets of information, such as “I sent tea for Mr. Vail by 5 o’clock train.”Smithsonian Institution Archives
On 15 November 1844, Vail in Washington instructed Henry J. Rogers in Baltimore to “get a checkerboard and let us play a game tomorrow morning.” Vail promised to send instructions by regular mail on the five o’clock train. At first confused, Rogers came up with the idea of using numbered squares to communicate locations on the board. Later that day, Rogers announced that John Wills, a journalist with the Baltimore Patriot, would play in his place.
The next morning, before the checkers game began, Vail recorded a telegraphic exchange between himself and Rogers, in which Vail suggests the game is for private enjoyment, and he would prefer that Wills—a reporter—not write about it:
Do you think the game any advantage R
What game V
Checkers R
Amusement V
Don’t you think people will make remarks R
Not if it is done by ourselves V
yes have you any objections to Wills R
none if he does not publish it V
yes R
Wills was thoroughly impressed with the technology, calling it “another wonder of the age,” according to Rogers. And so the telegraphers agreed that he could publish an account of the game, which perhaps was Vail’s hope all along. The story was still being prepared for publication on 18 November when Vail tapped, “The Washington Chess Club challenge Baltimore to a game.”
How about a Nice Game of Chess?
Vail’s 1845 book about the telegraph includes a brief report on chess. He writes that in the Washington–Baltimore match, seven games were played, totalling 686 moves “transmitted without a single mistake or interruption.” These details reappear in The Book of the First American Chess Congress, which called the Baltimore–Washington games the first telegraphic chess match.
Alfred Vail, Morse’s associate, was instrumental in organizing the first telegraph chess match and kept detailed notes on messages sent over the line.Zoom Historical/Alamy
How did the games actually unfold? While many of the rules and conventions of chess would be familiar to modern chess players, the games were unusual in other ways. At the time, the standard way of describing chess moves was descriptive notation, says John McCrary, a former president of the United States Chess Federation who maintains a collection of some 100 chess books from before 1900. For instance, “pawn to queen’s bishop’s four” described moving a pawn in front of the bishop on the queen’s side of the board to the fourth row from the bottom.
Before the electrical telegraph, such descriptions would have been used in correspondence chess, played by mail. And The Oxford Companion to Chess (1984) describes a proposed 1823 match between France and England that intended to use semaphore telegraph, although the notation used was either never planned or has been lost to time.
But Vail and Rogers used a system that assigned a unique number to each of the 64 squares. So “pawn to queen’s bishop’s four” would have been rendered as “11 to 27.” Though the game itself can be remarkably complex, that system allowed individual moves to be communicated simply. “The exchange of information in chess is relatively low,” says David Kazdan, an engineer at Case Western Reserve University who has recently overseen a renewed collaboration between the school’s radio and chess clubs. “You don’t need much of a communication channel to play chess.”
To represent the positions on their telegraph chess board, Alfred Vail and Henry Rogers assigned a unique number to each of the 64 squares.Smithsonian Institution Archives
Vail’s book logs the moves for two of the chess games, and both accounts include an illegal move—probably errors that were introduced later. The accounts in Vail’s telegraphic journal, on the other hand, appear accurate, and even include a real-time correction of one move.
In the first game of telegraph chess, White was defeated.Google Books
In Vail’s journal, Washington claims the white pieces, but close examination shows that Washington either played the first move as black, or the board was mirrored left to right. At the time, the white pieces did not always take the first move. The sides also agreed to a limit of 10 minutes per move, even though time controls weren’t common in chess, and the chess clock had not yet been invented. And while Vail wanted “first rate players,” McCrary calls the overall play weak, with a poor understanding of the long-term planning needed to coordinate all of the pieces. Both teams also made tactical errors. For example, in the second game, Washington overlooked that one of their pawns was overworked defending two other pieces simultaneously, watched as Baltimore captured one of the pieces, and elected not to retaliate in order to continue defending a more valuable knight. “Even with changing conventions of that time, what was there in the description was atypical,” says McCrary.
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The teams took a break during the first game and then reconvened on 28 November. With a pawn in position to advance to the last row, where it would be “promoted”—that is, replaced by a more dangerous piece of the player’s choice—Baltimore swept in with its queen and readied checkmate in one move. Unable to salvage the game, Washington resigned. “Ha ha,” wrote Rogers. “Ha ha,” responded Vail.
There is no record of overall standings, and no winner was declared between the two cities after all games had been played.
By today’s standards, the hardware that relayed the moves was relatively simple, mainly consisting of a battery, a switch, and a magnet. “It’s not all that different from a doorbell,” says David Hochfelder, a historian at the State University of New York at Albany who has studied the early American telegraph.
Laying the line between the two cities had been difficult, with costly delays after failed attempts to bury the cable and to use cheaper noninsulated wire. Eventually, overhead insulated copper wire was strung the distance between poles.
On 24 May 1844, this telegraph register received the first message sent by telegraph: “What hath God wrought.”AP
Years before the chess match, Morse had considered a messaging system that used only numbers, which corresponded to set words or phrases listed in a code book. But he soon realized that a practical communications service would need an alphabetic component to spell out proper names.
This led to Morse’s eponymous code, which assigns a series of short and long signals to different alphanumeric characters. By tapping on a key, telegraph operators would interrupt a battery-powered current that ran the length of the telegraph wire. At the other end, an electromagnet moved a stylus, pen, or pencil, to mark a piece of paper with the corresponding dots and dashes, which an operator would then read. (The sounder, which turned the signals into audible sounds, hadn’t yet been invented.)
Related: Morse Code’s Vanquished Competitor: The Dial Telegraph
During the chess games, the telegraph operators occasionally asked each other how many people were in the room. At times, a dozen kibitzers looked on. At others, only the rotating cast of chess players and telegraph operators was present.
Telegraph Chess Moves On
The Baltimore–Washington telegraph line was an immediate hit with a general public that embraced popular science through lectures and popular books and magazines. Scientific American was founded in 1845, for example. But people were more curious to see the telegraph at work than they were to use its services, even though the line operated free of charge for the first year. “Operators tended to show its capabilities rather than handling actual message traffic,” says Hochfelder.
The lack of activity is sometimes evident in the telegraph journal. Many of the messages are purely functional (“I am ready,” “stop 30 minutes”); simple greetings; notifications of letters sent and received; or requests for daily newspapers. The Baltimore end of the telegraph was in the Mt. Clare station of the B&O railroad, and the telegraph line ran alongside the tracks. Mail delivered by train took half a day door to door, says Hochfelder, and the telegraph offered little practical advantage.
On 5 December 1844, Rogers wrote to Vail:
“I hear from several sources that we are making rather an unfavorable impression with the religious part of the community, and I am under the impression if we continue after the present party is through that we will be injured more than any benefit might or can be derived from it.”
The exact nature of the religious community’s complaint with telegraph chess is unclear.
Although Morse wrote to Vail on the day of the first chess game that he “was much pleased with your game of drafts,” he came to feel that chess was too frivolous for the telegraph, as noted by the chess writer Tim Harding in his Correspondence Chess in Britain and Ireland, 1824–1987 (McFarland, 2011). Whatever the reasons, it appears that after 17 December 1844, no more chess was played on the line. And in the end, Congress didn’t fund a telegraphic connection to New York, nor did it acquire perpetual rights to the telegraph, in part because Morse’s business partner had other designs, says Hochfelder. The Baltimore–Washington line operated under the auspices of the Postal Service from 1845 to 1847, when funding ended.
When U.S. chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer was prevented from attending an international tournament in Havana, his moves were relayed via teletype. Left: Everett Collection Historical/Alamy; Right: Smith Archive/Alamy
After that, the U.S. telegraph thrived in private ventures. Over the next few years, companies built local lines and networks to connect cities across the country. Most notably, Ezra Cornell’s Western Union completed a transcontinental telegraph in 1861, and eventually became a monopoly in the United States. Ordinary people rarely used the telegraph, says Hochfelder, but it transformed industries such as finance and journalism.
Meanwhile, telegraph chess was taken up elsewhere. In 1845, for example, a match between London and Gosport, England, involved inventor Charles Wheatstone and chess master Howard Staunton. But it would take another few decades for telechess to become more widespread, with prominent club matches played over telegraph from the 1890s into the 1920s.
High-level chess competitions tend to be held in person, but games have been played remotely from time to time. For example, in 1965, U.S. grandmaster Bobby Fischer relayed his moves by teletype over telephone lines from New York City to Havana, after the U.S. State Department prevented his attending a tournament there. And in 1999, a couple of years after losing a rematch to the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue, world champion Garry Kasparov played a promotional game against a team representing “the world,” which consulted on moves via a Microsoft forum.
In a promotional game in 1999, Russian grandmaster Garry Kasparov played an online game against “the world.” Jeff Christensen/Getty Images
Today, the internet has taken telecom chess to fabulous new heights, with one site alone, chess.com, often hosting up to 20 million games a day. Indeed, the growth in online play has sometimes stretched the capacities of the servers and the engineers who maintain them.
Why have technologists taken the opportunity to play chess using so many generations of telecommunications? It may simply be that chess is popular, and by its nature can actually be played with short messages and perfect information, unlike soccer or poker.
But is there something more, maybe a natural affinity? “There are similarities in thinking processes [between] engineering design, and the sort of puzzle solving that a chess game involves,” says Kazdan of Case Western Reserve. The connection may be one-sided. “Many engineers like chess. I’m not sure many chess players like engineering.”
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