Member-only story
The First Online Wedding Happened in 1876
Love endures even the craziest of circumstances
As the Covid-19 pandemic wears on, more and more of life has moved online — school, playdates, conferences, civic events, court proceedings, and even weddings. According to Wired, more than 450,000 couples were married between March and May 2020, at the height of coronavirus lockdowns. A whole industry has sprung up around Zoom weddings, with services like Wedfuly offering professionally produced events complete with virtual photographers, DJs, and the bandwidth to handle up to 1,000 guests.
Most people assume that online weddings are a new thing. But they’re not. The first online wedding occurred almost 150 years ago, in 1876.
As Tom Standage describes in his book The Victorian Internet, the telegraph was the hot, new technology of the time. Every bit as revolutionary and world-changing as today’s internet, the telegraph allowed people to communicate via electronic networks across vast distances almost instantaneously. Messages that would previously take up to a year to send could suddenly be sent in minutes. Even the term “online” originated with the telegraph industry — the “line” part referred to a physical telegraph line.
Faced with the possibility of calling off his wedding, Storey had an idea.
As Standage writes, people used the telegraph for nearly everything — conducting business, sending news, transferring money, and committing crimes. It was only a matter of time before someone used the brilliant new technology to conduct a remote wedding. One of the first documented couples to do so were William Storey and Clara Choate, who were married over a telegraph line in 1876. This story of their marriage is recounted in Standage’s book, as well as in the 1891 edition of the telegraph journal Western Electrician.
At the time, Storey was serving as the telegraph operator at Camp Grant in Arizona. He applied for military leave to travel…
