The Telegraph

Source

Morse Code. Samuel F. B. Morse demonstrated a simple but stunning invention in 1837. It was a machine that could send a clicking signal across a wire. Using his code that related clicking patterns to letters of the alphabet, Morse could transmit messages wherever he could string his telegraph cable. The new technology was promising enough to encourage Congress to foot the bill for a test line between Baltimore and Washington in 1843, and within a year the experiment had proved successful. The challenge was to cover the country with telegraph cable.

Messages in Minutes. Before the telegraph, the only way people could communicate with others in distant places was to send them letters or to travel to meet them. The telegraph allowed a person to transmit a message over hundreds and, eventually, thousands of miles in the space of perhaps an hour. By the 1850s there were telegraph stations in major eastern and midwestern cities. Operators there sent and received messages, decoded them, and passed them to runners who hand-delivered the telegrams. The cost varied depending on the location of the station, but it was normally calculated at twenty-five cents per hundred miles for ten words or less in the early 1850s.

Connects with Cable. The problem with the telegraph was that communication was limited to stations linked by a cable. The investment cost was huge, and stringing the cable took time. It cost between $100 and $200 a mile to construct the lines, and workers had to overcome the difficulties posed by rough terrain. Nonetheless, in October 1861 the first transcontinental telegraph cable was completed, and in 1866 a cable was successfully

laid across the floor of the Atlantic, linking North America and England. By 1866 more than one hundred thousand miles of telegraph cable linked cities and towns all over the United States, and the telegraph industry employed thousands of workers.

Telegraphic Journalism. Among the most significant effects of the telegraph was its importance to newspapers. Timely national news coverage was made possible as newspaper editors from various regions of the country were able to share stories promptly. Before the telegraph, editors mailed their papers to one another and allowed stories to be reprinted liberally. The postal service was slow. The telegraph was quick, but it was also costly and the charge was by the word. Newspapers paid discounted rates, but they had so much to communicate that charges were still steep. So newsmen invented a form of abbreviated communication called telegraphic reporting to keep the words to a minimum. Sometimes they ran words together to trick the system; other times they left out nonessential words. Newspaper rewriters at the receiving end deciphered the reports and restored them to journalistic prose.

S. O. S. Western Union emerged after the war as the dominant company in the field. A merger in 1866 with the United States Telegraph Company and the American Telegraph Company gave Western Union a monopoly. The merger created a company with more than $40 million in capital. But the industry was soon threatened by a new advance in technology. In 1876 Alexander Graham Bell patented the first practical telephone, and within a decade telephone lines had been constructed, allowing people in large cities instant, direct access to one another.

Source

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

PONY EXPRESS AND OVERLAND MAIL

In the 1850s mail delivery to the West was problematic. The most efficient route was the ocean route from New York down the Eastern seaboard, into the Caribbean Sea to Panama, overland to the Pacific, and up the Western seaboard to San Francisco. U.S. postmaster Aaron Brown, who took office in 1857, decided there had to be a better way. He stipulated two overland routes from east to west (later replaced by a single route) and awarded a contract to the private Overland Mail Company to deliver mail by stagecoach. The trip from Saint Louis to San Francisco took twenty-five days; the coaches carried between five hundred and six hundred pounds of mail plus as many as four passengers, and horses had to be changed every ten or fifteen miles. Overland Mail operated successfully until the Civil War.

In 1860 a private carrier who also traveled the same route as the Overland Mail Company decided to introduce an express service. Early in 1860 entrepreneur William H. Russell advertised for “young, skinny, wiry fellows not over 18. Must be expert riders willing to risk death daily. Orphans preferred.” Ninety riders answered the ad and agreed to Russell’s requirement that they swear not to cuss, fight, or mistreat their horses. Russell provided them with a team of five hundred well-bred mounts and challenged his riders to complete a 1,966-mile route in ten and one-half days. Riders carrying an average of about 350 letters raced between about 120 relay stations normally set at ten-or-fifteen mile intervals, where they got fresh horses. They were allowed two minutes in station to change horses and pick up whatever sustenance they required. Each rider covered seventy-five to one hundred miles a day before he was relieved. The service was called the Pony Express. It operated for nineteen months, charging five dollars a half ounce at first and later two dollars to deliver mail in half the time of conventional postal service.

The Pony Express was legendary, and its riders were heroes. Among the most colorful riders was Cowboy Bob Haslam, who was chosen to ride the most dangerous stretch of the trail on the day President Lincoln’s first inaugural speech was being carried to Sacramento, where, it was hoped, the president’s words would help influence the debate raging in the California state legislature about whether to secede from the Union. Haslam was attacked by a Paiute Indian attack party riding horses they had stolen from other Pony Express riders. He emptied his pistol at them while racing toward his destination. They shot arrows at him, wounding him in the arm. When he arrived at the next relay station, he refused to give up to a substitute rider and continued on, completing his 120-mile portion of the route in eight hours and ten minutes.

The completion of the transcontinental telegraph cable in 1861 meant the end of the Pony Express. It had been a costly venture. William Russell estimated that he had lost a half a million dollars, but he provided a wealth of stories about his fearless, colorful riders.

Source: Peter T. Rohrbach and Lowell S. Newman, American Issue: The U.S. Postage Stamp, 1842–1869 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1984).