Stanford swings and misses; the telegraph operator sends "DONE" anyway

At 12:47 p.m. on May 10, 1869, Central Pacific president Leland Stanford lifted a silver spike maul at Promontory Summit, Utah Territory, and swung — and missed. The telegraph operator hit his key anyway, and the single word "DONE" flashed from coast to coast. Six years of blasting through the Sierra Nevada, bridging the Platte, and driving tens of thousands of Chinese and Irish laborers across 1,911 miles of continent had come down to a ceremonial tap, a polite fiction, and a message that brought cities to a standstill…