Perhaps no exchange spoke so directly, and with such sad irony, to Hawai'i's geographic isolation as the official notice from Washington in 1898 that the Islands had been annexed by the United States.
The message, as historian and author Helen Chapin notes, took a week to arrive by steamship.
The great divides of time and distance that for so long defined the relationship between Hawai'i and the rest of the world would be bridged four years later by more than 2,000 miles of submarine cable that ran from Ocean Beach in San Francisco to Sans Souci Beach in Waikiki.
The ambitious project to provide direct, real-time communication between Hawai'i and the Mainland was undertaken by the Commercial Pacific Cable Co., which used the cable ship Silvertown to lay the cable according to routes mapped by the U.S. Navy 10 years earlier.
In his annual address to Congress in 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt reported on negotiations between his office and Commercial Pacific Cable to install the line.
Roosevelt was intrigued by the company's designs for extending the cable to China and, in his address, he referenced the establishment of "an all-American line between our Pacific Coast and the Chinese Empire by way of Honolulu and the Philippines."
The first telegraph message carried on the system was sent from Hawai'i and received by Roosevelt on New Year's Day 1903.
While letters, newspapers and other communications were still subject to the glacial slowness of ocean delivery, the new cable allowed for immediate communications between Hawai'i and a growing network of senders and receivers around the world.
By summer, Commercial Pacific Cable had completed connections from Hawai'i to Midway to Guam to the Philippines, allowing for history's first round-the-world message.
Roosevelt did the honors on July 4, 1903, signaling "a happy Independence Day to the U.S., its territories and properties."
