-- .- .-. .-. -.-- / -- .

The Victorian Internet, Chapter Eight: Love Over The Wires
Tom Standage

The daughter of a wealthy Boston merchant had fallen in love with Mr. B., a clerk in her father's countinghouse. Although her father had promised her hand to someone else, she decided to disregard his intentions and marry Mr. B. instead. When her father found out, he put the young man on a ship and sent him away on business to England.
The ship made a stopover in New York, where the young woman sent her intended a message, asking him to present himself at the telegraph office with a magistrate at an agreed-upon time. At the appointed hour she was at the other end of the wire in the Boston telegraph office, and, with the telegraph operators relaying their words to and fro in Morse code, the two were duly wed by the magistrate. "The exchange of consent being given by the electric flash, they were thus married by telegraph," reports a contemporary account.