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.

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