From Gutenberg to Google

by Tom Wheeler

  Over the years there has been much confusion about the punctuation of the first telegraph message. The message was commonly believed to be an interrogatory statement that closed with a question mark.56 That, however, is not how the phrase appears in scripture. In Numbers the phrase closes a passage of exultation about Jacob and Israel with an exclamation point. Morse transmitted the message without punctuation as “What hath God wrought.” After the message was transmitted it was transcribed, at which time a question mark was added, even though one was not transmitted.57

  The historic message also illustrated how Morse and Vail had yet to realize that the code could simply be translated by listening to the dots and dashes on the telegraph sounder. In the device used for the first message, the sounder made marks on a tape that was fed through it. The letter W, etched on the tape as a dot followed by two dashes, was followed by four dots for h, a dot and a dash for a, and a dash for t.

  Three days after the immortal message, Morse’s showmanship was again on display. Again, it was news from a political convention held in Baltimore. The Democratic convention was a hotly contested event. When delegates deadlocked between Martin Van Buren and Lewis Cass, the convention turned to James K. Polk on the ninth ballot. With the line now extended to Baltimore, Vail provided a play-by-play report to those gathered in the Capitol.

  The following day, May 28, the telegraph determined Polk’s running mate. In an effort to reach out to Van Buren supporters, the convention nominated New York senator Silas Wright. As was typical for the period, Wright was not present at the convention, preferring to stay in the capital. When Vail telegraphed Morse the news, Morse told Wright. The senator, however, did not want the nomination. He asked Morse to telegraph his refusal to accept the convention’s decision. When Vail delivered the news, the delegates were stunned. Not only had it only been a short time since the nomination, but the honor was being rebuffed from afar! The convention sent a telegram back asking Wright to reconsider. Wright replied that his decision was final.58

  Perhaps the greatest miracle, however, came from Representative Cave Johnson of Tennessee. It was Johnson who had authored the mocking mesmerism amendment to the telegraph appropriation bill in the House. After seeing the back-and-forth negotiations with Baltimore, the onetime nemesis approached Morse and volunteered, “Sir, I give in. It is an astonishing invention.”59

  Spreading Like a Virus

  Within a year, Cave Johnson was back in the middle of the telegraph debate. In March 1845 Congress transferred control of the Washington-Baltimore line from the Treasury Department to the Post Office Department. That same month President Polk installed Cave Johnson as postmaster general. Morse’s former bête noire was now in charge of his project.

  On April 1, 1845, Postmaster Johnson instituted a tariff for sending messages on the line he now controlled. Every four characters transmitted would cost one cent. The fees, however, were insufficient to cover the line’s operating costs. At the end of its first six months the tariff had generated $413.44 in revenue while running the line had cost $3,284.17 in expenses.60

  The technological success of the telegraph failed to drive revenue simply because Americans could not imagine how they could benefit from the breakthrough. Relying on his showmanship, Morse demonstrated the telegraph’s capability to enable instantaneous communication over distance by staging chess matches between players at opposite ends of the line.

  Cave Johnson, the recent convert, did not suffer from such myopia. While he was not convinced the telegraph would ever be a profitable enterprise, the postmaster nevertheless wanted the government to control it. “The use of an instrument so powerful for good or evil,” he wrote in his first annual report to Congress, “cannot with safety to the people be left in the hands of private individuals uncontrolled by law.”61 It was an amazing conversion by the man who had once mocked the idea of instantaneous messages on the floor of the House of Representatives.

  Understanding Johnson’s vision, however, was a stretch for other policymakers. President Polk was generally opposed to such governmental expenditures on internal improvements. Even more telling were the remarks of Senator George McDuffie of South Carolina. The national leadership simply could not conceptualize what Morse and Johnson were promoting. “What was the telegraph to do?” McDuffie asked. “Would it transmit letters and newspapers? … And besides, the telegraph might be made very mischievous, and secret information … communicated to the prejudice of merchants.”62

  Where the government feared to tread, however, investors and entrepreneurs saw opportunity. One of Cave Johnson’s rationales for government ownership was that private telegraph lines were already being built and the opportunity for the government would soon be lost. As Morse sold territorial licenses to his patent, the new licensees formed companies, raised capital, and built and operated telegraph networks. By 1851, more than fifty separate telegraph companies were operating in the United States.63

  In a pattern similar to printing (and followed by the internet a century and a half later), early adoption of the telegraph was slow, only to subsequently grow rapidly and abruptly. The forty miles of the 1844 Washington-Baltimore test line had gradually expanded to 2,000 miles of telegraph wire by 1848. The next two years saw that mileage increase sixfold to more than 12,000 miles. Two more years (1852) and the mileage had almost doubled again. By 1860, the estimated telegraph mileage in the United States exceeded 50,000 miles.64

  Amid this rollout of commercial telegraph service, the worm of doubt infested the public’s understanding and acceptance of the new network. As he had with the railroad, Henry David Thoreau bemoaned the change. “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas,” he wrote in Walden, “but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing to communicate.”65

  Thoreau and the masses were being thrust into a world they neither sought nor understood. The mid-nineteenth century was the most intense period of network-driven change the world had ever experienced. First, the growth of railroads demolished distance, prompting one writer to observe, “Space is killed by the railways and we are left with time alone.”66 Then the telegraph abolished time by somehow harnessing lightning. The comfortable patterns of centuries eroded seemingly overnight. “Try to imagine,” one commentator observed, “the ambivalent anxieties of a freewheeling people with one foot in manure and the other in the telegraph office.”67

  As with earlier (and later) technological innovations, those anxieties were expressed in many surprising ways, including concern about the telegraph’s impact on personal safety. If lightning was dangerous, then wasn’t captured lightning more so? When a trial line was proposed in New York City in 1844, it was opposed on the grounds that moving lightning through wires across rooftops could itself attract lightning.68

  What could not be understood had to be explained in terms of its otherworldliness. In a situation reminiscent of Johannes Fust’s trip to Paris with the new printed Bible, clergy at the Baltimore end of the trial line determined its instantaneous messages could only be black magic. Morse’s operator used the telegraph to tell his colleagues in Washington of the growth of this sentiment and warn about continuing the test. “If we continue we will be injured more than helped,” he telegraphed.69

  Confirming the predisposition to otherworldliness, one newspaper described the telegraph as “an almost supernatural agency.”70 As people tried to comprehend the phenomenon of disembodied electronic messages, other “telegraphic” interpretations took hold. Mesmerism, electrophysiology, and reformist Christianity blended to create a new popular spiritualism. Since the telegraph had leapt the boundaries of space, the spiritualists argued, it must also be possible to traverse the void of death. The belief caught on that a “spiritual telegraph” could be accessed through séances to connect the living with the dead.71

  The End of Time

  American society may have had “one foot in manure and the other in the telegraph office,” but it was inexorably moving
from the former to the latter.

  Until the telegraph, “it took so long to obtain information that people lived their lives and made their decisions more in its absence than its presence.”72 The separation of information from its physical delivery was the first step in the information age. While the railroad had accelerated the delivery of information, the telegraph had separated information from its physical package.

  The second message over the Washington-Baltimore line heralded what was to come. “Have you any news?” Alfred Vail tapped out to Samuel Morse.73 The nature and uses of perishable information—events, financial news, or the coordination of business activities—would be forever altered by the telegraph. “The telegraph may not affect magazine literature,” New York Herald editor James Gordon Bennett observed, “but the mere newspapers must submit to destiny and go out of existence.”74

  Instead of submitting to such a fate, however, newspaper editors like Bennett recast the nature of their offering. In the decade prior to the telegraph, Bennett and his ilk had transformed the newspaper from a partisan political rag directed at the moneyed class into the so-called “penny press,” affordable to the working person. The penny press carried local news (much of it sensational) and was supported by advertising. The telegraph expanded the scope of these newspapers, enabling the delivery of information long before it arrived in the mail. In a world where timely information from afar was the most precious of luxuries, the telegraph made timely information both commonplace and essential.

  Only four years after Morse’s trial line, in 1848 six New York City newspapers, including Bennett’s, set aside their fierce competition in order not to “submit to destiny and go out of business” but rather harness the new technology to shape a new destiny. Together they would share in the cost of distant correspondents and the delivery of their stories by telegraph. They called their enterprise the New York Associated Press. The most compelling content of each of the individual newspapers became the columns headed “News by Magnetic Telegraph” or a variation thereof. Within a few years the cooperative was providing telegraph-delivered news feeds for a fee to newspapers across the nation and had shortened its moniker to the Associated Press.

  News by telegraph even changed journalistic style. Prior to the wire, newspaper stories were written in a narrative literary style. The telegraph instituted a more modern style in which important content is presented in the lead paragraphs, with less important color information following. This new style, which remains in use today, allowed the recipient newspaper to trim the story to fit the available space without losing the headline content.

  The news that was of the greatest value, of course, was that with the potential to move markets. Among the first business institutions specifically created by the telegraph were the seven commodity exchanges that sprung up between 1845 and 1854. In Buffalo, Chicago, Toledo, New York, St. Louis, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee, interconnected traders created markets for wheat, corn, oats, and cotton.75

  It wasn’t just financial markets the telegraph enabled. As the railroad reduced the cost of transporting products, the telegraph allowed the coordination of the allocation of those products. An economy previously characterized by small firms operating in a local market was suddenly knit together. The ability to coordinate supply and demand at the regional and even national level enabled national-scale production and distribution.

  Nowhere did this industrial coordination have a bigger impact than on the railroads along which the telegraph wires hung. As we saw with Charles Minot, most American railroads were single-tracked to preserve capital and cut construction time. As rail traffic grew, however, single-track lines created bottlenecks. The telegraph managed around those bottlenecks by coordinating activity along the entire line. By one estimate, the ability to maintain single-track lines in 1890 using the telegraph saved in track alone two and a half years of steel production. It has been calculated that the cash this saved was only half the total operational savings attributable to telegraphic coordination of rail activity. One historian described such savings as “perhaps the single largest unambiguous instance of the economic payoff of the telegraph.”76

  As the telegraph connected supply and demand to build regional and national markets, it also paved the way for the creation of antimarket monopoly forces. The telegraph became an economic Janus. At the same time that it was creating new markets through rapid communications, it was shrinking the competitive marketplace by allowing large firms to integrate and assume market-controlling activities for themselves.77 As the railroad hauled raw material to a central site for mass production into products that it then redistributed to an interconnected market, the telegraph was the management tool that coordinated activities throughout the process. By thus creating economies of scale, the integrated and interconnected corporations gained a market advantage over smaller firms that ultimately put those firms out of business.78

  Amid this economic upheaval, the technology that was knitting the nation together was also contributing to its dissolution. As new networks vaulted over geographic distances, they voided the physical separation that had shielded local idiosyncrasies. No group was more sensitive to this reality than the political representatives from southern states practicing the “peculiar institution” of human slavery. With the Mexican War under way in 1846, Congress considered legislation to fund a telegraph line from Washington to New Orleans to more rapidly communicate with those in the conflict. The proposal’s rejection illustrated the continuing southern animosity to such means of interconnection. States’ rights champion Senator John C. Calhoun, whose home state of South Carolina wouldn’t even be touched by the line, led those who blocked it by challenging the constitutionality of a federal right-of-way crossing the boundaries of sovereign southern states.

  Half a dozen years later, the Census Report of 1852 featured a dozen pages heralding the expansion of the telegraph, including a map of the existing telegraph lines. North of the Mason-Dixon Line the network looked like a spider’s web. South of that demarcation, however, were only two threads, one running down the East Coast and the other down the Mississippi Valley.

  Mr. Lincoln’s T-Mails

  When in 1860, as a part of his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, Abraham Lincoln journeyed to New York City, he was not only reaching out to eastern Republicans but also exploiting the advantage the telegraph had bestowed on New York as the nation’s news hub.

  Lincoln’s speech at Cooper Union, the institution endowed by Peter Cooper, builder of the Tom Thumb locomotive and an early investor in the expansion of the telegraph, sped over the wires to become national news. In a conscious effort to create what today is called a sound bite, Lincoln concluded his speech with “Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.” His strategy worked: the crisp, direct, and powerful formulation encapsulated his message and was sped by telegraph across the nation.

  Lincoln’s media strategy was successful. The telegraph-driven national media, which had first brought the lanky westerner to the country’s consciousness, began reporting that Abraham Lincoln of Illinois was a serious contender for his party’s presidential nomination. As news spread over the wires transmitting Lincoln’s thoughts about slavery, the South was its tinderbox. When electric sparks delivered the news of Lincoln’s election, the kindling ignited.

  The telegraph technology that had helped magnify the crisis became a tool President Lincoln used to win the struggle. As the first national leader in history to use electronic communications for day-to-day governance and management, Abraham Lincoln became the first “online” president.79

  When Lincoln arrived for his inauguration in 1861 there was not even a telegraph line in the War Department, much less the White House. When the U.S. Army wanted to send a telegram to a distant post they did as everyone else did and sent a clerk with the written message to stand in line at Washington’s central telegraph office. The n
ation’s leaders were, like their constituents, befuddled by electronic communications. Yes, newspapers, railroads, and financial and business institutions used the telegraph to move information rapidly, but just how the technology could aid the process of governing, much less in the midst of a war, was unknown.

  Fourteen months into his presidency, Abraham Lincoln had his electronic awakening. Eerily, the awakening occurred eighteen years to the day from Samuel Morse’s “What hath God wrought” message. When Confederate general Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson changed the nature of the war by marching to threaten Washington, Lincoln responded by changing the nature of his leadership. Embracing the telegraph to bypass the chain of command and put some spark in his recalcitrant generals, Lincoln wired explicit commands to his generals in the vicinity of Jackson’s advance. “You are instructed … to put twenty thousand men (20000) in motion at once for the Shenandoah,” Lincoln ordered General Irvin McDowell. “Your object will be to capture the forces of Jackson & Ewell.” Other orders to other generals followed.

  It was an action unprecedented in the history of warfare. Never before had a national leader, based in the political capital, asserted himself to command troops in the field in real time. The telegraph office recently established in the War Department next to the White House became the nation’s first Situation Room.

  In the middle of a civil war, Abraham Lincoln harnessed a new network to make it an agent of his will. Lincoln’s successful transformation of the mechanism of national leadership is even more remarkable because of its complete lack of precedent. No leader had ever used the technology as Lincoln did. Every leader thereafter would follow in his footsteps.

  Although not specifically in reference to the new network, Lincoln’s admonition in his 1862 message to Congress manifested the attitude that enabled him to see the opportunity in the telegraph and to seize it. “As our case is new, so must we think anew,” Lincoln explained. His admonition is timeless. Driven by new networks, our case will always be new.