America's First 'Wireless Newspaper' Killed Catalina's Carrier Pigeons

America's First 'Wireless Newspaper' Killed Catalina's Carrier Pigeons

If you lived on the small Southern California island of Catalina at the turn of the century, news was hard to come by. The island had a rather unreliable carrier pigeon system and copies of the L.A. Times wouldn’t arrive by boat until around 1:30 in the afternoon. News was slow moving. But all that changed on March 25, 1903 when Catalina got the country’s first "wireless newspaper" — the latest news sent wirelessly from Los Angeles via Morse Code which was then printed and sold for 3 cents a pop.

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