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.

The Messengers

G. Leary, age 14.  $5.00 per week wages, $2.50 per week tips.

 Edward Williams, $5.00 a week.  No uniform.  Note the classic working man's newsboy cap.

Joseph Amico, 14 years old, $5.00 per week, deliverer of shoes.

January 23, 1917.

Admiral Reginald Hall of the Royal Navy reveals the Zimmerman Note to Edward Bell . . .and the telegram makes it to Mexico City.

Royal Navy Admiral Reginald Hall, who was involved with British signals intelligence in World War One, after the British spent a couple of days pondering what to do with the information, revealed the contents of the Zimmerman Telegraph to Edward Bell, Secretary of the U.S. Embassy in the UK.  Bell at fist refused to believe the note was genuine but then became enraged upon changing his mind.

Admiral Hall.

Hall would informally present the contents of the telegram to American Ambassador Walter Hines Page the following day.  Arthur Balfour would formally give the deciphered and translated text to Hines on February 23, who reported the same to Woodrow Wilson.

Ironically the first news of the telegram was provided to the United States, albeit informally, on the same day that it arrived in Mexico City. Given the nature of wire communications at the time, it didn't arrive in Mexico City until February 19.

The Company Office.

Recently some interesting items have popped up due to the posting of 1916 newspaper front pages.  Here's one:

Lex Anteinternet: The Casper Weekly Tribune for December 29, 1916: ...:

The news about the Ohio Oil Company, at one time part of the Standard family but a stand alone entity after Standard was busted up in 1911, was not small news.  Ohio Oil was a major player in the Natrona County oilfields at the time and would be for decades.  It would contribute a major office building to Casper in later years which is still in use. At one time it was the largest oil company in the United States.  In the 1960s it changed its name to Marathon and in the 1980s moved its headquarters from Casper to Cody Wyoming.  At some point it began to have a major presence in the Houston area and in recent years it sold its Wyoming assets, including the Cody headquarters, and it now no
longer has a presence of the same type in the state.

We've touched on this before, but seeing the name of the Ohio Oil Company featured so prominently on the front page really reminds of the extent to which the oil industry has become concentrated in large cities over the past few decades.

The Ohio Oil Company was part of Standard Oil.  It had major assets in Wyoming so it came to be headquartered in Casper and remained here all the way into the 1980s, by which time it was Marathon.  It is an eccentric example in that it moved its headquarters to Cody Wyoming at that time where it had major assets.  Now, however, its in Houston, which is the hub of the oil industry.

Today oil companies tend to have their headquarters in places where they've always been.  Houston, Dallas, Tulsa and Oklahoma City.  Not Casper, except for regional companies. This makes sense and I'm offering no criticism whatsoever.  Indeed, it's odd to think now, that a major company like the Ohio Oil Company once had its headquarters here.

This has been driven by the market, but it's also been driven by the advance of technology and transportation.  In earlier eras, especially early on, getting to the fields from the company office could be pretty difficult. Not now, however, or at least to the same extent.  Today flying from Houston or Oklahoma City to Casper, and then out to nearby fields, is easily accomplished within a single day. This would not have been true, to say the least, in 1916.  The net effect is that a lot of headquarters have moved, some to Denver, but some all the way to Texas and Oklahoma.

That may seem like a minor item, but if you are seeking employment it isn't.  When my mother came to Wyoming from Alberta in the late 1950s she found a job right away with the Pan American Petroleum Company. I don't know that Pan American Petroleum was headquartered here but they had a big building here. They were incorporated in 1916, so they fit well into the story of the year we've been looking at fairly intensively, and I've discussed them a bit here before. They had production all over North America, including Mexico (so they likely were impacted by what's about to occur south of the border, the Mexican nationalization of oil).  Their large office building is still here, and was recently remodeled, but of course they are not.  They don't exist at all, as they were merged with Amoco in 1954 which was purchased by British Petroleum in 1998.

BP had a late presence here as well, thanks to buying out Amoco. That gave them the Standard Oil Refinery which is no longer as well.

We often think of the oil industry around here.  But when we think of it, we don't think much of how at one time the companies had substantial office presence here.  That's been quite a long term change driven, I suspect, by improvements in transportation and technology.  If that's correct its somewhat ironic in that what some claim, that technology and transportation are allowing for greater decentralization are not providing to be correct, at least in so far as that pertains to the energy industry, and by my observation, many others.

Monday at the Bar: Trouble in the legal profession hits the CST.

 Depiction of trial by combat, with combatants properly aligned to give each smiling combatant the advantage of the sun, unbekannter mittelalterlicher Künstler - Dresdener Bilderhandschrift des Sachselspiegels, hrsg. v. Karl v. Amira, Leipzig 1902, Neudruck hrsg. v. Heinrich Lück, Graz 2002.  From Wikipedia Commons.  This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 70 years or less.

I've written more than once about the reports of distress amongst legal practitioners here on this site.  Most recently I did that in an item on Alcohol and the Law.  In some of those I've been a little skeptical about what I was reading, but I've reached the point where the evidence seems sufficiently overwhelming (although there are a few doubters) that I'll concede its correct.

Indeed recently I've had a couple of odd instances in which this topic has come up in one fashion or another.  For one, I was sitting waiting for a deposition to commence when an out of state lawyer, a super friendly fellow, started talking about it (the topic came sort of out of the blue and I really don't know how it came up).  He went on a long litany of the statistics, it was like reading a journal article on it, about the topic, going into addictions lawyers have to alcohol, drugs, women, etc. and how destructive it was.  And this from opposing counsel.  I hard knew what to make of it, frankly. 

Anyhow, this past weekend Casper Star Tribune columnist Joan Barron, who is a CST columnist whom I really like, had an article on the Wyoming state program.  I was truly surprised, but I'll give credit to her and to the state bar for trying to publicize what they're doing.  Her article had this interesting set of observations in it:

Some people regards lawyers as rich fat cats in suits who don’t deserve sympathy. Some lawyers are well-off, but the average salary isn’t that stunning.

And they are the professionals people turn to when they are in trouble. They also are the men and women assigned to defend indigents, who have no other options.

Think Atticus Finch of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” admittedly a romantic and idealist portrait of a small-town lawyer. Or the more realistic case of the late Gov. Ed Herschler of Kemmerer, who neglected his solo practice to appeal successfully to the U.S Supreme Court the death sentence of a transient he had been assigned to defend, a man he disliked.

She goes on to detail that there were apparently four lawyer suicides in recent years, of which only one was openly that and the others disguised.  I know the guy who had the open one, and indeed, I was in a hearing against him the day prior in which he asked for an extension in his case, which I agreed to.  I've felt horrible about it ever since as it makes me feel like I opened the door up a bit as it gave that case a window for a replacement lawyer it wouldn't have otherwise.

Anyhow,  the article details the new Wyoming State Bar program, which apparently all state bars or at least nearly all of them now have.  It's good that the state bar has one, but I have to wonder how effective these things are.

That's for a variety of reasons, but I'll be frankly that I have come to view a lot of psychological problems as a combination of environmental and organic.  I'll fully conceded that our DNA's in our fallen state set us up for a lot of problems.  But I also think we've created a world which we're not really very well suited to live in, and that includes, I fear, our legal system.  We have an adversarial system, which is not only well known, but celebrated in the law.  The thesis is that the courtroom substitution for trial by combat of old serves to bring out the truth to the jury.  Maybe it does, although I truly have my doubts about that, but what it also does is to put a premium on combat, and all combat takes it toll on the combatants.

 Wounded British soldiers, World War One.  Note the stare of the man on the bottom left of photo.

I suspect that's in part what happens to some of the lawyers who end up in needing the help referenced above.  Years of judicial combat, financial strains, and simply the everyday pleas for help get to them.  I've known a few that seem to have run into such trouble and did indeed take refuge in the wrong places, booze, women, or whatever.  And I've also known a few who seemed to have developed very harsh personalities.

I won't claim to know what the solution to these things is.  Some people end up seeking help in medicine, and they likely should.  But this all takes me back to something I've mused about here before.  I have to wonder about our having built a world that we don't seem fit to live in, and about also creating, as part of that world, a legal system that seems to be going after the well being of some of those employed in it.  Why are we doing that?

 New York lawyers, 1916.

Addressing the legal system alone, what we should note is that technology and advances in communication, while the law believes that it has improved it, hasn't improved the life of lawyers one bit but, if anything, its made it infinitely worse.  If we go back to the year we've been focusing on so much here recently, 1916, most lawyers would have been either solo practitioners or small firm lawyers practicing locally and relying on the mail for communication. Some would have had phones by 1916, but many would not have. Local affairs would principally have been the ones they were involved with, although as we know from very old entries here even in the early 20th Century some Wyoming trial lawyers had state wide practices.  But in those state wide practices they still had to rely on the mail and they traveled principally by train, and occasionally by horse.  

That's quite a bit different from what I see now all the time, which is lawyers flying across country to attend one thing, and checking on others from their Iphone while they are there.  

Technology can't be put back in the box.  But things can be done.  And one of those things is to recognize that law, like politics, is all local. And that would mean discouraging or even preventing the erasure of the the state borders in the practice of law.  But the trend is going the other way.  Our Supreme Court has been complicit in flooding the state courts with out of state lawyers who are sometimes hyper aggressive while also not understanding the local rules and customs.  It's dragging the practice down a level or two and not aiding the practice here a bit.  A partial fix to this problem would be to restore the old rules that you can only practice where you have actually passed a real state bar, not something like the UBE, and that you must actually have some business connection with the state where you are practicing.

Additionally, maybe something should be done to take a page out  of European systems that are more inquiry based than ours.  If litigation is a search for the truth, maybe it ought to actually be a search for the truth.

Finally, maybe something has to be done about he process of legal education.  Indeed, this gets us to the topic of education in general, but again and again I'm struck by how we have a system that's largely designed to recruit the ignorant and burden them with expenses while being educated by individuals who know very little about actual practice. That has to mean that there are people recruited who are not suited for the endeavor.  Once a person is out of law school they're qualified to do exactly one thing, and one thing only, practice law.  Maybe they ought to have a taste of that practice simply as a qualifier to even enter law school, before they do.

So, on the day thousands lost their lives violently at sea, what did the local news look like? May 31, 1916

Well, given that the Battle of Jutland was a naval battle, we can't expect it to show up in the day's news, even the late editions, at all.

Indeed, something that's easy to forget about the battle, as we tend to think of the later battles of World War Two a bit more (which also features some large surface engagements, contrary to the myth to the contrary) is that World War One naval battles were exclusively visual in nature.

That's not to say that radio wasn't used, it most certainly was. But targeting was all visual.  And as the battle took place in the North Sea, dense fog and hanging smoke played a prominent role in the battle.

Now, we note that, as while the British and German fleets were using radio communications, they weren't broadcasting the news, and they wouldn't have done that even if it were the 1940s.  And the radio communications were there, but exclusively military.  News of the battle had to wait until the fleets returned home, which is interesting in that the Germans were closer to their ports, so closer to press outlets.  Indeed, the point of the battle was to keep the Germans in port, or at the bottom of the sea.

So, on this day of a major battle, maybe in some ways the major battle of World War One, what news did local residents see?

The death of Mr. Hill, and the draft Roosevelt movement were receiving headline treatment in Sheridan.

I'm surprised that there was a University of Wyoming student newspaper for this day, as I would have thought that the university would have been out of school by then.  Maybe not.  However.  Interesting to note that this was published the day after Memorial Day, so it was a contemporary paper.  Now, the current paper, The Branding Iron, is weekly, I think.  The crises of the times show up in the form of UWs early ROTC making an appearance on Memorial Day.

Wyoming Fact and Fiction: Speed and Communication

Interesting observations:

Wyoming Fact and Fiction: Speed and Communication: It All Started with the Pony Express Everything got started in April of 1860, at least that’s the way I see it. What am I talking about...

We've posted on similar topics quite a bit.  And as I note in my comments to this post above, I'm frankly not that certain that increased speed in everything is really a good thing.

The Best Posts of the Week of April 3, 2016

The Telegraph

 

Broadcast Radio (for the second time).

Quite awhile back, in 2012, I posted this item on Wyoming's first commercial radio station:

Today In Wyoming's History: January 2. It must have been quiet, or at least different, before that.

Today In Wyoming's History: January 2: 1930 First commercial radio station in Wyoming begins operation. KDFN later became KTWO and is still in operation.

Hard to imagine an era with no radio. But Wyoming lacked a commercial radio station until 1930. This was a Central Wyoming station (or is, rather, it still exists). I'd guess Cheyenne could have picked up Denver stations by then, but in Central Wyoming, having an AM radio prior to 1930 must have been pointless.

Since that time, I posted the item about the use of radio by the Army in 1916, and got to rethinking this topic, amongst other communication topics.

In doing that, I went back as I thought I'd posted before on broadcast radio.

And, indeed I did, but what I didn't do is label it, so it was hard to find.  Indeed, that's been a problem with my earlier blogging. By failing to label things correctly, old posts are easy to loose.  In this particular case, not only did I loose it, but I'd forgotten as a result, that I had done a particular post.  Usually I recall my older posts and I was very surprised that I hadn't posted on this topic. Turns out that I did.  I new I had posted on some single episodes of radio shows from the glory days of radio and when I couldn't find them I did a search on the raw data section of this site and found those posts, and my first one on broadcast radio as well.  So I've edited them all and now radio as a label has tripled in frequency here.  Anyhow, at that point, I thought about axing this post, but as it was mostly already done, and as it actually adds content, I have not.  My original post is here:

Radio

When I was young, my father listed to the radio a fair amount. What I really recall about that in particular is that he'd listen to Denver's KOA, which was an all talk radio station, but not like the ones we have now that are all right or left political talk.  It had a lot of different radio programs, and sports.  He particularly listened to the Denver Broncos and Denver Bears (their minor league baseball team at that time) broadcasts, and the radio shows that they had which discussed those teams. That certainly wasn't all they aired, however, and at one time, when I was fairly young, I used to listen to a fair amount of KOA myself.

The first radio tube, circa 1898.

KOA is still around, but those days are really gone, as are the days of all local radio.  We picked up KOA. . . .

Frankly, even when I posted the item above, I didn't really appreciate the rapid onset of radio, or how late it really came into being.  I knew that there weren't home radios in 1916 and that during the Great War people didn't get their news that way. But when did commercial broadcast begin?

Well, 1920. Sort of suddenly and in a lot of places at first.

I referenced Denver above. Denver had a commercial broadcast radio station in 1920. That's' really early if you consider that 1920 was the year that the first commercial broadcast station began operation in the United States.  And for that matter, it was that year for the United Kingdom as well. So that Wyoming wouldn't have a station until 1930 really isn't surprising.  So Colorado had a commercial station the very year that commercial radio started in the United States.

As for Colorado, I was correct in my supposition about it probably having stations prior to Wyoming, as noted, but I am amazed by how quickly radio came on there.  Colorado had 94 stations by 1922.  So, one in 1920, and then 94 in 1922. The first one, KLZ, is still in operation.  For that matter, KTWO is also still in operation.

Still, let's consider that.  Up until 1930, there was no radio in Wyoming, unless of course you could pick up a Denver channel from Cheyenne (and I don't know if you could, or not).  1930 is within the lives of our older citizens, although that's a decreasing number of them given the year.  My late father was born in 1929.  My mother in 1925.  One of the local high schools was built in 1923.  The building I work in was built in 1917.

So, prior to 1930 in Wyoming, as in much of the US, there was no radio.  Now, 1929 is hardly the ancient world.  And important things were happening in the teens and twenties to be sure. World War One, the stock market crash, etc.  People didn't get the news of those things by way of radio.  Newspapers, which often were published twice a day in that era, were the quickest means of news delivery for the average person where radio was not.

And, of course, prior to 1920, there was no commercial radio at all.

And not only is this significant as to news, but entertainment.  Popular music existed, but the knowledge of it came by way of friends and associates, not radio.  You could buy records, but you weren't hearing them on the radio.  There was even a top 100 for years in the teens, but those records didn't get on that list by way of radio play.  Sales, then as now, determined that, but the decision to purchase didn't come from hearing a song played on the radio.  You'd heard that song played on somebody's record player.

When radio came in, in the 1920s in many places, and starting in 1930 in Wyoming, as we've seen, it made a huge change.  People took to home radios really quickly and they became an institution.  It's odd to think, in that context, of how new they really were

Well, there's a lot more about all that on my post Radio.

Oddly, one thing I didn't cover in that first post, was car radios.  Radios have been, as odd as it may seem, a big part of a car my entire life.  Indeed, when I was a teenager and in my early twenties everyone wanted to have a really nice stereo in their cars.  Some pretty junky cars had some pretty nice radios, which of course were also tape player.  That hasn't really changed over the years, although car radios have gotten really good so that the need to change them is smaller than it once was.  The newest ones in a lot of vehicles also play CDs, Itunes libraries and, via Bluetooth, can act as telephone receivers.  It won't be long until every vehicle has, effectively, a car phone, something that was once quite a rarity.

So its odd to realize that early cars didn't have radios.  Indeed, I own one truck made in 1962 that didn't come equipped with a radio.  I added one, but I sort of regret doing that now.  But I was about 20 at t he time.  When I had a 1945 CJ2A I did not equip it with a radio, and it didn't have one.  Anyhow, the first car radios were an add on and were so expensive that they nearly rivaled a fair percentage of the value of a typical average American car itself.  Early Motorola car radios, first offered in 1930, cost $130.  Crossley Motors, a British manufacturer, offered the first car to have a regular factory installed radio in 1933, although Chevrolet offered a radio option in 1922. The Chevrolet radio however, was impractical due to its massive antenna and large speakers.  Contrary to some assertions, there were other cars manufactured in the 1920s with radio options, but they were unusual and not standard on any car.

Radios themselves didn't become suddenly standard in the 1930s for automobiles.  That wouldn't happen until after World War Two, and even then some things that are standard now remained options. The radio in my 1954 Chevrolet Deluxe Sedan, for example, had push buttons. The regular 54 had a radio, but no buttons.

Anyhow, I don't mean to divert this to a discussion about cars and radios, rather than just radio, but this serves to illustrate how new radio really was.  In the 1920s there were a lot of places in the US where having a radio would have been pointless, as there were no stations. By the 1930s, radio was everywhere and radios were coming into automobiles, in spite of the limitations of tube technology.  By the 1950s, when television was starting to come in, radios were a standard feature in cars, but not necessarily trucks.  Now, in an age when we listen to less radio thanks to other forms of audio information and entertainment, radios are still everywhere.

In the 1940s and 1950s one thing that established people had was a really nice home stereo, with radio and turn table.  Now, these big old pieces of furniture seem odd to us.  How things have changed.

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Related threads:

Radio

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.

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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The Punitive Expedition and technology. A 20th Century Expedition.

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The Punitive Expedition: The Casper Daily Press, March 13, 1916

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.

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

Airmail & Airway Beacons in Wyoming

Blog Mirror: Unplugging My Way to Recovery

Esther J. Cepeda writes on Unplugging as a way to recovery, and somewhat ironically she means unplugging electronic media.

There's a lot to be said for this, and not just from a health perspective, but also from a mental health and philosophic prospective.

If I could eliminate one thing from the planet for all time. . .

it would be the cell phone.

I hate them.

It's not that I don't use them, I do, a lot, but I really dislike them.

I dislike them for more than one reason, but my principal reason is that everyone under 25 years of age, and increasingly more people in older age brackets as time goes on, are glued to their little screens actually missing life.  It's amazing.

People can't avoid checking Facebook or Instagram at the drop of a hat, on their little screens. They sit in restaurants and meetings with other people, looking at artificial electronic life over real life.  They've grown unable to enjoy passing scenery from a car or airplane window.  It's a sickness.

I also hate the degree of connectivity they have caused, although I enjoy that too.  Now, people are tied to their apron stings to each other as never before, even while they also are able to preserve bonds that our highly mobile lifestyle would otherwise strain.  There's a balance of considerations there, and I don't know how it comes out, but which ever way it comes out, it doesn't save this technology, which "improves" darned near every day, from being an overall bad development.

Lex Anteinternet: Working around the clock

Recently I posted:

Lex Anteinternet: Working around the clock: We are told that, prior to the influence of labor unions, working hours were long (and conditions dangerous) and about the only day anyone go...

Examples:

Conducting business. . . at Bandalier National Monument.

Working around the clock

We are told that, prior to the influence of labor unions, working hours were long (and conditions dangers) and about the only day anyone got off was Sunday.  That day, of course, is the Christian day of rest, and people generally at least honored that, giving themselves, and their employees, the day off.

Labor unions came in, and the daily working day, at least in the United States, shrank to eight hours by law, and 40 hours per week, by law, save for employees who are not covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act, which are actually quite a new now, but not nearly so many when the FLSA came in.  Even so, when I was a boy, the working day was generally eight hours long for most people, and most people had Saturdays and Sundays off.  Some retail outlets were open on evenings, all of which were "department" stores, which were also open on Saturdays.  Nothing was open on Sundays, not even gas stations, except for grocery stores.

All a thing of the past now.

Now, as stores have become more and more national and international, more and more of them are open seven days a week, with employees who have to be there on Saturdays and Sundays, and quite a few are open late into the evening, or even twenty four hours a day.  Certainly "convenience stores" are.

All of that, of course, is well known.

But what is less well appreciated is that those people who were exempted from the FLSA in the first place, now never really leave work, unless they're very disciplined.

It's the cell phone, which isn't really a phone anymore so much as its a little computer with a telephonic feature, that has caused this. Cell phones can be set to receive email around the clock.  And they receive calls and text messages by default.  This means that the person with them is in contact with their occupations at all times, save for the discipline to sever the contact.  And that's not always possible.

Professionals and businesses rarely intrude on one another in this fashion with texts or calls, but they do innocently and inadvertently send emails to each other constantly.  I do myself, even though I generally keep the email function of my phone off. That is, I'll send weekend emails on occasion, and some people do a great deal.  They are not seeking to intrude, but a person with an Iphone set to pick them up, will pick them up.

Phone calls are another matter, interestingly.  As we carry our cell phones constantly anymore, and as we use them for work, some people (again not usually business clients or other professionals) will call them on weekend and off hours.  I received just such a call, for example, recently on a Saturday evening while I was at dinner.

Some such calls are true emergencies, but most are not.  It's just hard to resist the temptation.  I've noticed a younger generation has almost no ability to resist it.  But resist it we should.

The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath:

So we are informed at Mark 2:27. And very true it is.  Even for those who are non religious, people need a brake.  The expansion of work in an intrusive fashion is a feature of our evolving lives, and not a good one.

A century ago, in 1915, when a lawyer, for example, went home, his mail didn't go home with him, and his work probably didn't either.  He might get a telephone call, if he had a phone, at home, if it was a true emergency.   This would also have been true half a century later, in 1965.  Or in 1985.  Not now. This has been a revolutionary change, but it's one that we have to question if we're really benefiting from it?  My guess is that nobody does, and a condition in which fewer things are available after the business day and weekends, and in which people are harder to get in touch with while not at work, might be a better one.