Showing posts with label Telegraph. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Telegraph. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 28, 2017

Woodrow Wilson releases the contents of the Zimmerman Telegram

After having had it for some time, the United States released the contents of the Zimmerman Telegram which, as we have been following, proposed a German-Mexican alliance in the event of an American entry into World War One.

American public opinion was becoming increasingly hostile to Germany in 1916 and 1917 and it was already hostile to Mexico given the numerous border problems that had being going on for years and the strained relationship with Carranza.  The release of the telegram was one more event that helped push the United States towards going to war with Germany.  In some ways, the telegram confirmed suspicions that were already out there as presence of German military advisors in Mexico was well known and they had taken an active role in advising Mexico's prevailing army.  They had even been in one instance in that role in which Mexican troops had directly engaged American troops.  In recent weeks there's been speculation in the press about German activities in Mexico and Carranza's relationship to Germany.  So, while Zimmerman's suggestion seems outlandish to us in retrospect, to Americans of 1917 it would have seemed to confirm what was already widely suspected, but with details far more ambitious than could have been guessed at previously.

Tuesday, April 5, 2016

The Telegraph


Recently I posted this item on Communications during the Punitive Expedition:  The Punitive Expedition and technology. A 20th Century Expedition. Part Two. Radios and Telegraph.

One of the things that this really brought into the forefront of my mind was the state of communications in general in the decades leading up to the Punitive Expedition of 1916, and it relates on top of it, in a synchronicitous fashion the topic I also posted about in More Medieval than Modern?  Indeed, the history of the telegraph argues really powerfully for what George F. Will wrote about in the column that entry references.

Prior to the telegraph, no news traveled any faster than a horse or boat.

None.

On continental landmasses, this made the postal service extremely important and most nations had extremely developed post offices.  The British post office delivered mail all day long in urban areas, so that a letter posted in the morning wold tend to arrive midday, and a reply letter could be there by evening.  In nations with larger masses the post office was a critical governmental entity.  There's a real reason that the drafters of the Constitution provided for the head of the U.S. Post Office to be in the cabinet and there's a real reason that delivering the mail was one of the few duties that the Federal Government was actually charged with.  The mail needed to get through.

But it was carried by a postal rider.  That rider trotted, and indeed he probably "posted the trot", which game him some speed, but it was still horse speed.

In wet areas quite a bit of news went by boat or ship.  For that matter, anything going from North America to Europe, or vice versa, went by ship.  Sailing ship at that.  We wouldn't consider it fast, but the people of the pre telegraph age would have considered that to be what it was.

This only came to an end, and a dramatic and sudden end, with the telegraph and railroad.  And oddly enough, those two changes came at the same time, and were complementary to each other.  Indeed, it was the railroads that first really exploited telegraphs.

The telegraph, or more properly the electrical telegraph was first thought of in the late 18th Century as the properties of electrical transmission started to become known.  The first working telegraph was constructed by an English experimenter in 1816, an experiment that actually used eight miles of wire but which failed to gain much attention.  Various experiments by various individuals followed such that by the 1830s there were a fair number of individuals experimenting with similar concepts.  One such individual was Samuel Morse, whose code was adopted for telegraph transmissions.  By the late 1840s telegraph lines were going up everywhere.

By 1861 a telegraph line had been stretched across the vast expanse of the American West such that telegraph transmission from the Atlantic end of the United States to the Pacific could be achieved rapidly for the first time, replacing the Pony Express mail service, used only for mail that required rapid delivery, in short order.  What formerly took about ten days now took, as a practical matter, hours.

Transcontinental telegraph line.

Three years prior, in 1858 an even more amazing feat was accomplished when the Transatlantic submarine cable was put in. The thought of what was involved, and that it worked, is astounding.  Ships remained partially in the age of sale, and partially in the age of steam, at the time.  And that, in 1858, a cable could be stretched that vast distance, and work, is amazing, seeming to be more of our own age than of that of the Pre Civil War world. 


That it was a monumental achievement was known at the time and could hardly be missed.    The impact on time caused by the cable was massive. What had taken days to achieve in terms of communications could now take place, when it needed to, in hours.


Other submarine cables would soon follow all over the globe, although it would take until 1902-1903 to stretch the vaster distance of the Atlantic and reach significant points therein.  Still, by 1902 Canadians could telegraph to New Zealand and Americans to Hawaii.  The world, in terms of communications, had been connected.

So, by the last couple of decades of the 19th Century, there wasn't a significant region of the Untied States that couldn't be reached by telegraph. That doesn't mean that there was a telegraph office in every town by any means, but telegraphs were extremely widespread.  And if railroad reached a town, telegraph certainly did.  So, in a fairly short expanse of time, news which had once taken days or weeks to travel anywhere now could get there within hours.  A person in New York could send a message to a person in Sacramento.  And nations could exchange information nearly instantly.  The impact of this change was immense.  We think of the second half of the 19th Century, if we think about it at all, as being in an era of slow communications. But it wasn't.  It's part of our own age of rapid communications.  Just not quite as rapid as our own in many ways, but rapid still.

Of course, part of the reason we don't' think about telegraphs is that we don't use them. They've fallen away.

In the late 19th and early 20th Century they were a huge part of the culture in some ways, conveying good and bad news.  They were fairly institutionalized in fashion. Messages went from one telegraph office to another, with the sender usually paying a charged based upon the number of words in a telegram.  On the receiving office, while in some instances a person took the telegram at the telegraph office, usually a runner employed by the telegraph office delivered the message to the address of the recipient.

Western Union telegram delivery personnel, 1943.  Note the man on the right is wearing leggings, something we typically associate with soldiers of that era but which were also worn by people to who rode horses, motorcycles or bicycles.  That individual was probably a bicycle deliveryman for the Western Union telegraph company.
 
By the 20th Century, people were using telegrams to send fairly routine, but important, communications.  Often just to let family know where they were and that they were well.

Marine drafting telegram to his parents, early 1940s.  This Marine had just returned from duty in Cuba.  The telegraph is being sent from a booth owned by the Postal Telegraph Company, one of the major American telegraph companies up until 1943, when it merged with the most famous of telegraph companies, Western Union.

And they were also used by "wire services" to convey important new, about which we will have a subsequent post.

United Press dispatch of a news item to its subscribing news services.

 And they also conveyed tragic news, often officially.

Woman and child receive news of serviceman's death in this war time poster. The U.S. Army and the British Army in fact gave notice to families of soldiers who were killed, wounded or captured in this fashion during World War One and World War Two.

Now, you couldn't send a telegram even for sport.

And no wonder.  Telegrams have become a victim of other forms of rapid communication.  The ended in the United Kingdom, which was really responsible for their creation, in 1982.  Western Union in the US managed to carry on until 2006, which is frankly really amazing.  In India, which had less advanced communications, they carried on until 2013.  By they're gone now.  In an age of Internet communication, texts, and mass use of cell phones, they have no place.  

But they had been revolutionary.

Saturday, April 2, 2016

The Punitive Expedition and technology. A 20th Century Expedition. Part Two. Radios and Telegraph

 Army Signal Corps recruiting poster for World War One depicting telegraphers.  This same equipment was in use in 1916.

Recently we published a long entry entitled "The Punitive Expedition and technology. A 20th Century Expedition" that dealt with motor vehicles, small arms, aircraft and artillery, making the point that the expedition was a modern military campaign not something that was the last adventure of the Frontier Army.  Here we one on a singular topic.  

Here we look at Communications.  Radios and telegraphs, that is.

I'll confess that this is an item I started on, thinking I knew quite a bit about it, but I had to go back and redo it.  I knew a lot less than I thought I did.  And oddly its is quite related to a topic we just posted, More Medieval than Modern?, which itself was an amplification of Are Robert J. Gordon and George F. Will reading my blog?  The reason for this is that both of those posts related to the rapid expansion of technology in the late 19th and early 20th Century, and this is certainly an example of that.   Although this story really starts in the first half of the 19th Century.  It starts with the telegraph.

I've dealt with communications quite a bit here, but I've never dealt with telegraphs specifically.  It's quite an omission.  And the omission of it, I think, related to how little they are used today. Indeed, they're a dead technology, for all practical purposes. But they played  a huge revolutionary role for nearly a century after their invention and provide an example of a technology that expanded amazingly quickly, and into every area of society. We will have to deal with most of that in some other posts, but the extent to which it is true cannot be denied.

Wire telegraphs (the first "telegraphs" were semaphore signaling towers) were invented in the 1830s.  The technology exploded almost immediately and by the 1850s they were a hugely important technology everywhere where there was civilization.

Prior to the telegraph, no news of any kind traveled any faster than a horse or ship, for all practical purposes.  After telegraph wires were strung up, however, news  could be transmitted nearly instantly.  They were strung everywhere in the inhabited areas of North America and everywhere in Europe.  New York and Washington D.C. were connected by telegraph in 1846.  Western Union was formed in 1856.  The Transatlantic Telegraph line, a submarine line, was laid down in 1858, two years before the American Civil War.  In twenty years the technology had gone from non existent to shrinking the globe.

Not surprisingly, telegraph became militarily important quickly  By the American Civil War it was being used by armies to transmit information whenever it could be used, and conversely telegraph lines were targets for enemy raids.  This was known even on the Frontier where the Army spent a lot of time guarding telegraph stations and lines, and rebuilding them as Indians tore them down and burned the poles.  Guarding the transcontinental telegraph line was just a much a role of troops stationed along the Oregon Trail as guarding the trail was.


Army Telegraph Corps, Civil War.

The U.S. Army introduced the Military Telegraph Corps to its organization in 1861.  A unique military unit, it employed civilian operators and was somewhat outside of the command structure of the Army.  It's role was a dangerous one as it strung wires and posted poles in front line conditions with special equipment, the first time that the US Army had taken on what would become a familiar wire stringing role for soldiers in later years.


The end of the Civil War meant the end of the Telegraph Corps, but ultimately the telegraph would come into the Signal Corps.  The significance of the telegraph was simply too large to be lost.  Prior to the telegraph in military application, and indeed well after it, the news from the front, including the news of enemy troops and movements, came no faster than a man or horse could carry it.  And often that meant it didn't come at all, as for example in the famous case of J.E.B. Stuart's separation from Robert E. Lee prior to Gettysburg, a separation that left Lee blind in the field and which may have ultimately resulted in the Confederate loss in that battle.  Prior to the telegraph, all such scouting news, a prime role of the cavalry that was equally as important as any combat role it had, had to come via dispatch rider.  The telegraph offered new possibilities.

 Army telegrapher, Civil War.

Not new possibilities, however, that were of much use in the field during the Indian Wars, where distances were simply too vast.  Civilian telegraphs were used when available, of course, and by the 1890s they were playing an important role of getting news from town to town, and out of the state.  The military importance of telegraphs at that point may perhaps best be demonstrated by the actions of both sides in the private Johnson County War in tearing telegraph lines down to keep news of what was going on from getting out.  By 1916 the Army had the ability to set up its own lines in the field, which is not surprising.

Prior to 1916, however, a new technology had come on, that being the radio.  Radio, however, didn't come on the way we think.  Now we think of radio in the context of local AM/FM radio broadcasts. Radio quickly developed to allow for voice transmissions, but prior to that, radio really developed for "Wireless Telegraph", or what was later called radio telegraphy.

Telegraphs, that is wire telegraphs, relied upon Morse Code to relay their messages. For technical reasons I'll omit, early radio worked better in that fashion than in voice transmission.  While I'll omit the discussion of that, it's fairly obvious that this would be the case.  Transmitting signals is, by its nature, easier than transmitting voice.  Experiments with this sort of telegraphy go back into the early 19th Century, but it was not until Marconi's pioneering work with the radio that it became practical. It began to expand thereafter.

 Signal Corps telegraphers, 1904, using a very early truck in the field that has been adapted for this support role.

The Army appreciated the meaning of the new technology almost immediately.  By 1906 the Army had incorporated pack radio telegraph and wagon radio telegraph units into its structure. They used quite of bit in the way of resource to operated. According to the manual "The wagon wireless section is normally composed of 18 mounted men, the wagoner and engineer, who ride on the wagon, and one wagon wireless set, drawn by 4 mules."  The mule borne pack set "section normally composed of 10 mounted men and 4 pack mules."

Photograph of a Wireless Telegraph pack set, March 24, 1916.  Mobile by equine transportation, obviously, but not so mobile that it could keep up with the cavalry.

Starting in 1914, the Army began to experiment more extensively with trucks in place of wagons, although the Army was already using trucks in a support role for conventional telegraph, uniting two new technologies in hopes of making both more efficient. These were mobile units entitled the 1914 Radio Tractor, although oddly the trucks that existed in the Army with that designated were not standardized.  I.e, they were not one pattern.  Trucks were built by White, FWD and Thomas B. Jeffrey Company.

1914 Radio Tractor No. 3, built on a White Chassis.

They all carried the same radio, however, a SCR-50, 2 kilowatt spark transmitter with a crystal or vacuum tube detector receiver that operated at 0.15-0.50 Megahertz.

 1914 Radio Tractor No. 2, built on a Thomas B. Jeffrey or FWD four wheel drive (yes, 4x4) chassis.

All of this, that is the pack units and the radio tractor units, went into Mexico with Pershing.

The story of their use, however, is short as the number of radios used, in practical terms, by the U.S. Army in the Punitive Expedition was limited and their impact quite small.  Pack radios were not sufficiently small that cavalry units could carry them and the special radio units simply cold not keep up with the cavalry..  Therefore, those radios, and indeed any radio could not keep up with the cavalry and were of little immediate field use.  The Army did set up two mobile receiver units, one at Pershing's headquarters in Mexico and another at Columbus, which after the raid because a substantial support base for the expedition, but atmospheric conditions made their use spotty.
Indeed, this pioneering effort turned out to be somewhat like that for aircraft.  The mere fact that the Army had radio trucks and radios showed that it new radios were coming on, but they were weren't a success in field operations.  The trucks were too primitive, like most of the trucks used in the expedition, and the radio sets were frequently defeated by the high altitude atmospheric conditions in Mexico in which they were expected to operate.  Nonetheless the Army's Signal Corp ultimately set up nineteen radio stations during the campaign.  They may not have worked well, but they worked well enough that the effort wasn't abandoned.

 World War One Signal Corps poster emphasizing the new technology of radio over the older ones of telegraph and telephone.

As a result of radio's limited utility, the Army Signal Corps constructed miles of telegraph lines in Mexico to support the expedition.  677 miles of telegraph line were set up during operations, running lines as far forward as could be done.  So the "old", if it could be considered that, technology remained important.  But even it wasn't that old. 

Fairly obviously, given the situation, much of the communications during the campaign truly were of the old fashioned variety, word of mouth by dispatch personnel. That would be true, however, all the way through World War One, even though the new technologies were increasingly applied..  It wasn't really until the 1920s that effective field radios started to some into use.  It was really World War Two where they had a real impact, showing again the blinding pace of technological change in the mid 20th Century.  For the Punitive Expedition, as with aircraft, what was introduced showed what clearly would be in terms of communications.  Not what was there yet.

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Friday, March 11, 2016

The Punitive Expedition. Carranza Telegrams

Mexican President Carranza telegrams Woodrow Wilson indicating his desire that the recent raid upon Columbus New Mexico not result in war between the United States and Mexico.  Telegrams would go back and forth between the two nations for the next two days.

Wednesday, March 9, 2016

The Raid on Columbus New Mexico: The Telegram.

The following telegram arrived in Washington, DC:
Columbus attacked this morning, 4:30 o’clock. Citizens murdered. Repulsed about 6 o’clock. Town partly burned. They have retreated to the west. Unable to say how many were killed. Department of Justice informed that between 400 and 500 Villa troops attacked Columbus, New Mexico about 4:30. Villa probably in charge. Three American soldiers killed and several injured; also killed four civilians and wounded four. Several of the attacking party killed and wounded by our forces. Attacking party also burned depot and principal buildings in Columbus. United States soldiers now pursuing attacking parties across the line into Mexico. No prisoners reported taken alive