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>Morse Day sends message about lost art of telegraphy



Let me call your attention to a book on the telegraph and it impact on America, that both fans of the telegraph and those interested in railroad history in general may find of interest.

Cheers,
Jim Guthrie

------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW ------
Title: The Telegraph in America, 1832-1920

Published by EH.Net (April 2013)

David Hochfelder, /The Telegraph in America, 1832-1920/. Baltimore: Johns  
Hopkins University Press, 2012. viii + 250 pp. $55 (hardcover), ISBN:  
978-1-4124-0747-0.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Alex Nalbach, Department of History, Baldwin-Wallace  
University.

Sensitive readers of David Hochfelder’s brief history of nineteenth-century  
American telegraphy may cringe at the title of his introduction, “Why the  
Telegraph Was Revolutionary,” fearing sweeping generalizations and a crude  
technological determinism. In fact, however, the author, a historian of  
technology at the State University of New York, Albany, develops nuanced  
analyses of the impact of telegraphy upon American life, noting that many of  
the changes it wrought were modest, or partial, or moderated by an array of  
factors. As Hochfelder writes in his conclusion, “a technology does not  
effect change by itself but requires mediation through existing  
institutions.” (p. 179)

To be sure, by eliminating the need for a physical courier of messages,  
telegraphy “liberated communication from transportation,” a “revolution  
in technical practice” (p. 3) And it did inspire some users to change their  
habits, organizations, and expectations in order to maximize its potential.  
But the high costs of telegraphy in the late nineteenth century restricted  
its use to only about one in sixty Americans, and many of these users refused  
to adjust their social preferences and political goals to suit the new  
technology.

Hochfelder’s first chapter presents the Civil War as a key accelerant of  
the advance of American telegraphy. This was the first conflict in which  
military leaders relied on electrical communication, which facilitated  
conversations between grand strategists and field officers, relayed  
information about supply needs, and improved tactical control on the  
battlefield. But the full military potential of telegraphy was limited by the  
fact that the U.S. Military Telegraph Corps remained a civilian organization,  
as well as the failure to integrate telegraphy with other forms of signaling.

The war led to a dramatic expansion of the nation’s telegraph network as  
the government strung up military lines. Many firms, especially Western  
Union, hoped these would be handed over to them after the war. But Hochfelder  
notes that the ascendance of Western Union in the 1860s owed more to other  
factors: the failure of the Atlantic cable strung by the American Telegraph  
Company in 1858, the completion of a line to the Pacific coast in 1861, and  
the expiration of Samuel Morse’s patent in the same year. Hochfelder also  
points out that while there was a high demand for military telegraphers –  
so much so that they were exempted from military service – such men  
nevertheless complained of a lack of respect and low pay, problems  
exacerbated by postwar industrial consolidation.

In his second chapter, Hochfelder challenges the common notion that  
telegraphy tended toward a “natural monopoly.” Rather, Western Union  
developed several active strategies to ensure its monopoly, including  
exclusive contracts with railroads and press associations, ruinous rate wars  
with rivals, “franks” (free telegraph passes) for important officials,  
and exclusive control of key technologies. Many of the latter were acquired  
but never deployed by the firm: it hired Thomas Edison to invent and patent  
as many variations as possible merely to keep them out of the hands of the  
competition.

In response to the rise of this monopoly, between 1865 and 1914, a “postal  
telegraph movement” urged the United States Post Office to assume control  
of the telegraph system, hoping that the eschewing of profits, particularly  
on capitalizations as inflated as those of Western Union, would bring down  
rates and transform telegraphy from an exclusive “business medium” to a  
“social medium.” Such activism peaked in the 1880s, following the  
acquisition of Western Union by the unpopular financier Jay Gould in 1881,  
and a bitter telegraphers strike in 1883. But the mounting losses of the  
British telegraph system (nationalized in 1871) served as a discouraging  
counter-example, and the experiment with nationalization during the First  
World War, under the autocratic and overreaching Postmaster General Albert S.  
Burleson, proved a costly disaster.

Hochfelder’s third chapter analyzes the impact of telegraphy upon the  
American press and American prose. Rapid information flows led to new  
standards of timeliness and newsworthiness, while the costs of telegraphy  
likely mandated increasingly impersonal, “matter-of-fact” reporting, with  
the most important information presented first. The steady and voluminous  
stream of largely undifferentiated data offered by wire services like the  
Associated Press may also have shifted the responsibility for prioritizing  
and contextualizing information from newspaper editors to their readers. But  
the telegraphic news story probably did not inspire a “telegraphic” style  
in American writing, since most newspaper editors reworked telegraphed  
dispatches into longer and more detailed stories: indeed, most messages for  
the press were in some way enciphered to reduce sending costs.

Perhaps the most dramatic change wrought by the telegraph occurred in finance  
capitalism, as described in Chapter 4. Beginning with the introduction of the  
gold indicator in 1866, traders were able to follow real-time transactions on  
exchange floors, and price differentials in different markets shrank.  
Increasingly, brokers regarded markets less as places to trade goods than as  
places to monitor quotations, which could become more important than other  
factors in determining a transaction. (Indeed, the telegraph era witnessed  
the rise of “bucket shops” – gambling parlors in which participants bet  
on stock prices, but did not actually make investments.) Leased wires from  
brokerage offices to exchanges, in turn, allowed brokers to place orders in  
nearly real-time response to ticker quotations, though tickers and telegraphs  
never fully eliminated the lag time between a price quotation and a  
broker’s order. And until the First World War, relatively high costs and  
the opposition of exchange officials to broader public participation kept  
telegraphic trading the preserve of a small elite.

Hochfelder analyzes the decline of Western Union in Chapter 5. This was in  
part due to the rise of telephony, though not, as is often suggested, because  
of an indifference to the technology. Indeed, in the late 1870s, Western  
Union had a better apparatus and a better corps of sales agents than Bell,  
aiming, as usual, to force a consolidation. It only agreed to a flawed truce  
contract in 1879 in order to try (ultimately, unsuccessfully) to fend off a  
takeover bid by Jay Gould. Despite lawsuits that would cost both companies  
$10 million over thirty years, Bell steadily encroached on the telegraph  
market and in 1909, AT&T bought Gould’s shares of Western Union.

This might have spelled the end of Western Union, but in 1914, AT&T shed the  
firm for regulatory reasons, while retaining the telephone business and a  
lucrative leased-wire market for itself. AT&T maintained strong support for  
research and development, but Western Union did not: by the Depression, toll  
telephones, air mail, and Bell’s TWX system all offered better service at  
lower prices. The FCC hoped to sustain Western Union as a counterweight to  
AT&T, but by 1949, the former handled only 16% of the country’s  
long-distance communication, at losses of $1 million a month. Belated efforts  
to modernize into data transmission in the 1960s and 1970s proved  
disastrously expensive, and the firm dwindled into nonexistence by 1994.

Hochfelder concludes that “a company that succeeds through technological  
innovation and leadership must never lose that capacity” (p. 173) and he  
skillfully illuminates the political, economic, and cultural factors which  
can encourage or discourage those attributes.

Alex Nalbach is an independent scholar and adjunct faculty at Baldwin-Wallace  
University in Berea, Ohio. His scholarship concerns the history of global  
telegraphic newsgathering in the nineteenth century. He is currently  
completing a manuscript for a world history textbook, /Discovering the World:  
Inquiries into the Global Past/.

Copyright (c) 2013 by EH.Net. All rights reserved. This work may be copied  
for non-profit educational uses if proper credit is given to the author and  
the list. For other permission, please contact the EH.Net Administrator  
(administrator at eh.net). Published by EH.Net (April 2013). All EH.Net reviews  
are archived at http://www.eh.net/BookReview

Geographic Location: North America
Subject: Business History, History of Technology, including Technological  
Change
Time: 19th Century, 20th Century: Pre WWII
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