Telegraph

Telegraph. The United States telegraph industry began in the mid‐1840s, following several years of work by the painter Samuel F.B. Morse and the mechanic Alfred Vail to develop an electrical telegraph system conceived by Morse in 1832. Congress funded the first line, built between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, Maryland, in 1844 but refused to purchase the patent rights or establish a permanent postal telegraph system. As a consequence, private entrepreneurs acquired the rights from Morse and his partners and built lines between major American cities.

By the mid‐1850s the many small, regional telegraph companies had been consolidated into a few large ones led by American Telegraph Company and Western Union Telegraph Company. Western Union controlled the most important lines west of New York City, while American Telegraph, with crucial links to the planned Atlantic Cable between Great Britain and Nova Scotia, dominated the East Coast market. In 1857, they and four other companies signed a cartel agreement that carved the market into clearly defined territories. Western Union broke ranks in 1860 and won a government subsidy to construct the first transcontinental telegraph. The completion of this line, combined with other government subsidies acquired during the Civil War, gave Western Union considerable advantage over its rivals, and by 1866 it enjoyed a near monopoly of the industry.

Following the war, Western Union, led by William Orton, consolidated the lines of its main rivals into the first truly national telecommunications network. Orton also undertook an extensive program of line reconstruction and improvement and channeled profits into technical improvements, supporting the work of key telegraph inventors such as Thomas Edison. Under Orton's direction Western Union focused on meeting the needs of its primary markets, businessmen, whose dependence on the rapid communication of commercial information also led to the development of new telegraph systems such as stock tickers, and new newspapers, which relied on press reports sent by telegraph.

Because government dispatches played a small role in the United States, agitation for a national postal telegraph system failed to result in a government takeover, as occurred throughout Europe. However, new private competitors to Western Union did arise, notably the New York railroad speculator Jay Gould, who combined the telegraph lines of his railroad empire with those of smaller telegraph companies to mount serious challenges to Western Union; this enabled him to take over the company in 1881. Western Union continued to dominate the telecommunications industry until around 1900, when it faced a new challenge from the growing long‐distance telephone network of American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T), the long‐distance arm of the American Bell Telephone Company. By 1909 the telephone had become so important that AT&T briefly took over Western Union before government antitrust action forced their separation. Telegraphy played a declining role in the nation's telecommunications system as the century progressed, and after World War II it was supplanted by other technologies.
See also Antitrust Legislation; Business; Economic Development; Electricity and Electrification; Gilded Age; Industrialization; Journalism; Technology.

Bibliography

William Thompson , Wiring a Continent: The History of the Telegraph Industry in the United States, 1832–1866, 1947.
Paul Israel , From the Machine Shop to the Industrial Laboratory: Telegraphy and the Changing Context of American Invention, 1830–1920, 1992.

Paul Israel