The Telegraph

Sources

Invention. Samuel F.B. Morse was not the only contender for the title of inventor of the telegraph. By the late 1830s many other inventors had come up with similar devices, but it was Morse who managed to outlast the other sixty-two claimants. One reason the telegraph attracted so many inventors was that the technology of sending communications through a wire was not particularly complex. An operator tapped out a message by opening and closing an electric circuit in a coded pattern while at the receiving end the current flowed through an electromagnet which moved a long arm (much like a doorbell works), typing out the message as a series of dots and spaces on a strip of paper. Morse, however, was the first to prove the idea practicable, with the use of his flexible “Morse code” of dots and dashes to represent letters. In 1840 Morse managed to patent his telegraph, but investors balked at the invention, and it took three more years of mechanical tinkering and political lobbying before Morse could convince Congress to fund an experimental line from Washington to Baltimore, at a cost of $30, 000.

“The Great Highway of Thought.” Finished on schedule, Morse officially opened the first intercity electromagnetic telegraph in the world on 24 May 1844 by sending from Washington to Baltimore the massage “What Hath God Wrought.” Five days later came the most publicized use of the early telegraph. Morse’s agent in Baltimore had been covering the Democratic Party’s convention in that city, and on 29 May he transmitted to Morse at the capital the surprising news that James K. Polk, the nation’s first “dark horse” candidate, had just been nominated for president. Democrats still in Washington sent back their congratulations to Polk, which were promptly read aloud on the convention floor. For the politicians crowding around Morse in the capital, and the newspapermen at the Baltimore end of the line, this event showed the revolutionary potential of the telegraph. For the first time in human history, in the words of historian Menahem Blondheim, “persons at great distances from each other could interact in virtually real time,” using a communications medium that was not dependent on the speed of a messenger. As one wondering commentator put it, “time and space” had been “overcome.”

Business Applications. Morse proved the telegraph would work, but at first no one seemed to know what to do with the new gadget. The government only used the line from Washington to Baltimore three times in first year. Traffic was so slow that a few people proposed using the line for a long-distance chess game. The only high-volume users were the newspapers and commercial shippers of Baltimore and Washington. Such light use convinced Congress that a federally owned system could never pay for itself, and they refused to fund the telegraph’s development. Consequently, Morse and his partners transferred their rights to private development corporations. By the mid 1850s six regional companies had constructed twenty-three thousand miles of telegraph lines. Once lines extended between major commercial and news centers, the traffic became enormous. The telegraph virtually created the agricultural commodities markets, making possible not only the rapid transmission of crop prices around the nation but also better integration of supply and demand. Railroads used the lines to ensure the safety of their trains and to serve their freight customers better by tracking shipments.

Newspapers. Telegraphs eventually became indispensable to the transportation industry, but the heaviest initial users were the highly competitive daily newspapers, who lived and died by the “scoop.” At first some newspapers tried to monopolize the new medium by buying up all the time on a telegraph line between major cities such as New York and Washington. If no breaking news arrived at either end of the line, agents of the papers would simply transmit sections of the Bible to keep the line open. On slow days operators might get all the way from Genesis to Deuteronomy. Telegraph companies quickly changed the first-come-first-served policy that made these practices possible, opting instead for a fifteen-minute maximum-use rule. Unable to monopolize the lines, newspapers cooperated to form the Associated Press in 1848, an organization in which the big dailies formed “press pools” to share nonlocal news coming in over the wires. Another effect of the fifteen-minute rule was to make time available for individuals, resulting in an exponential increase in private transmissions between distant friends and relatives, one of Morse’s original goals for the telegraph.

Sources

Menahem Blondheim, News over the Wires: The Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information in America , 1844–1897 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994);

Carleton Mabee, The American Leonardo: A Life of Samuel F.B. Morse (New York: Knopf, 1944);

Robert L. Thompson, Wiring a Continent: The History of the Telegraph Industry in the United States, 1832–1866 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1947).