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Business Demand and the Development of the Telegraph in the United States, 1844–1860*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 June 2012
Abstract
“The telegraph system in America is eminently characteristic of the national mind. At its very birth, it became the handmaiden of commerce.” So wrote the editor of a telegraph trade journal in 1853. Professor Du Boff describes an antebellum American business community that was as ready for a “revolution” in its size and structure as the dawning science of electricity was ready to make it happen. The result was the telegraph and its enthusiastic adoption in a few short years by a business system that quickly became national in scope and outlook. The railroad may ultimately have changed America even more than the telegraph but, as Du Boff shows, the railroad was originally conceived as a local and regional facility whereas the telegraph was interregional in its impact from its very beginnings.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Business History Review , Volume 54 , Issue 4: Business History and the History of Technology , Winter 1980 , pp. 459 - 479
- Copyright
- Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1980
References
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13 “In a country in which industry and the arts are progressive — in which business is spread over a vast area, and thousands of miles interpose between one commercial emporium and another — the telegraph answers to a use the complexion of which is unique, and of American origin;” “The Telegraph,” De Bow's Review, 16 (February 1854), 167.
14 This “revulsion” began just at the time the telegraph was born. See Goodrich, Carter, “The Revulsion Against Internal Improvements,” Journal of Economic History, 10 (November 1950).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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17 Thompson, Wiring a Continent, 275. In 1869 Western Union president William Orton well described the earlier problems of “unity and despatch in conducting the [telegraph] business … the public failed to secure everywhere the benefits of direct and reliable communication. Telegraphic correspondence between the Eastern, Western and Southern sections was not only burdened with several tariffs but with unnecessary delays [for] copying and retransmission at the termini of each local line …. Another serious evil which the system had to contend with was the existence of competing lines upon the more important routes. The effect … is to augment the expenses without increasing the business.” Orton's conclusion: “Practical men saw that there was but one remedy for these difficulties, and that was by a consolidation of all the rival interests into one organization.” Annual Report of the President of The Western Union Telegraph Company to the Stockholders, July 13, 1869, 6. Alice Critchley of the Western Union Corporation Information Center, Upper Saddle River, N.J., provided access to the Western Union annual reports cited in this article.
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25 The several telegraph company reports in the O'Rielly Collection and the Alfred Vail Telegraph Collection, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Washington indicate that no such information was regularly gathered. Dispatch copies normally had to be retained for one year only. Not until an Act of Congress on March 3, 1879 was the Superintendent of the Census required to collect and tabulate data from domestic telegraph companies.
26 Statement of the Directors of the Western Union Telegraph Company for the Stockholders. October 1, 1865, esp. 3. Annual reports, however, did not begin until 1873.
27 And the telegraph intensified competition among newspapers and press associations; Thompson, Wiring a Continent, 219–239. Well before 1844, however, the gathering and reporting of information was becoming an increasingly competitive business; see Pred, Allan R., Urban Growth and the Circulation of Information: The United States System of Cities, 1790–1840 (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), 35–77, 255–257.Google Scholar
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32 “By Telegraph,” Evening Bulletin (Philadelphia), January 5, 1848; “By the Magnetic Telegraph,” Louisville Courier, February 25, 1848; “Telegraphic Dispatches,” Louisville Courier, April 26, 1848; “Telegraphic Dispatches,” Daily Delta (New Orleans) April 17, 1848; all from O'Rielly Documents, Journalistic Series, III; also “Telegraphic,” New York Herald, August 21, 1847; O'Rielly Docs., Journ. Ser., I. These five columns carried fifty items, thirtyeight of which were commodity price, shipping, or other market condition items.
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37 Lefferts, Marshall, “The Electric Telegraph; its Influence and Geographical Distribution,” Bulletin of the American Geographical and Statistical Society, II (1856), 258–259.Google Scholar The remaining 644 were “messages for railroads.”
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40 Statement of the Accounts of the New York, Albany ir Buffalo Telegraph Company, from 1st January to 31st December 1854, Department of Manuscripts and Archives, Cornell University, Ezra Cornell Papers, box 17.
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50 Thompson, Wiring a Continent, 71–73.
51 “The Magnetic Telegraph West,” Public Ledger and Daily Transcript (Philadelphia), August 24, 1846; O'Rielly Documents, Journalistic Series, I; and “The Telegraph,” The Republican (St. Louis), November 23, 1847; O'Rielly Docs., First Ser., I.
52 “St. Louis and the Telegraph,” Morning Courier (Louisville), February 9, 1848; O'Rielly Documents, First Series, I.
53 Prospectus, Telegraph Express Agency, 181 Broadway, New York (n.d., ca. July 1850); and O'Rielly's Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois Telegraph, August 1, 1849; both in O'Rielly Papers, vol. 36.
54 “The undersigned ASKS NOTHING FROM THAT GOVERNMENT which should not be shared in common with all citizens.” Memorial: O'Rielly's Atlantic and Pacific Telegraph, April 20, 1850; O'Rielly Papers, vol. 36. According to the Troy Whig, January 15, 1850, O'Rielly's subscription meeting in Troy “was attended by a large number of our most respectable and influential business citizens …;” O'Rielly Documents, First Ser., II.
55 Cotterill, R. S., “The Telegraph in the South, 1845–1850,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 16 (April 1917).Google Scholar
56 See Thompson, Wiring a Continent, 41–42, 48, 58–63, 69, 81–83.
57 See, for example, De Bow's, account, “The Magnetic Telegraph,” Commercial Review of the South and West, 8 (March 1850), 289–290Google Scholar, and Office of the New-York, Albany & Buffalo Telegraph Company, Utica, Jan. 1, 1851 (report by T. S. Faxton, president), Vail Telegraph Collection, box 4, vol. 2. Early lines in California were also profitable; see Bates, Alice, “The History of the Telegraph in California,” Historical Society of Southern California Annual Publications, IX (1914), 183.Google Scholar On the consistent profitability of major telegraph companies through 1857–1858 (a recession), see Thompson, Wiring a Continent, 65–67, 135–137, 195–198, 369–371, 398–399, and Reid, James D., The Telegraph in America: Its Founders Promoters and Noted Men (New York, 1879), 140Google Scholar, 165, 196, 208, 236–241, 258, 321, 391–392, 484.
58 Thompson, Wiring a Continent, 41–51, 81–83.
59 “Mismanagement of the Telegraph,” New York Sun, November 18, 1846, and “The Foreign News — The Price of Flour and Wheat,” Albany Argus, November 9, 1846; O'Rielly Documents, Journalistic Series, I.
60 “The Telegraph,” Daily American (Rochester), November 20, 1846, and “The Magnetic Telegraph,” Evening Mirror (New York), December 15, 1846; O'Rielly Documents, Journalistic Series, I.
61 O'Rielly Documents., Journalistic Series, I is laden with alleged examples of “speculation” and “flagrant abuses” designed to “gouge the public.” The period covered is July 1846 through August 1847. Journ. Ser. VI contains as many examples for 1850.
62 “Atlantic and Pacific Telegraph,” St. Louis Reveille, December 23, 1847; O'Rielly Documents, First Series, II.
63 A good example is “Condemnation of ‘Discreditable Tricks’ Played Off Upon the Telegraph,” American Telegraph Magazine, I (February–March 1853).
64 Cochran, Thomas C., Railroad Leaders 1845–1890: The Business Mind in Action (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), 61.Google Scholar
65 These possibilities were perceived from the very start of the telegraph age. Cipher systems and codes, replete with common commercial phrases, were worked out in 1844 and 1845. See Vail, Alfred, The American Electro Magnetic Telegraph with the Reports of Congress, and a Description of All Telegraphs Known (Philadelphia, 1845), 47–49Google Scholar, and Smith, F. O. J., The Secret Corresponding Vocabulary; Adapted for Use to Morse's Electro-Magnetic Telegraph (Portland, Maine, 1845).Google Scholar
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68 This is the theme of Alfred Chandler's major writings since 1959, as summed up in The Visible Hand.
69 Thomas Cochran suggests, in effect, that without technological progress the cost obstacles noted above might have blocked growth in an economy hindered by “the disadvantages of space.” Cochran's thesis, in these terms, is that the added transactions, information, and transport costs of commercializing vast geographic expanses, and widely dispersed agricultural areas and natural resources, might have exceeded the marginal benefits of regional specialization. “The Paradox of American Economic Growth,” Journal of American History, 61 (March 1975).
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