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John Murray

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A Story

OF THE

TELEGRAPH

A Story of
the
Telegraph

By JOHN MURRAY
Montreal

MONTREAL:
PRINTED BY JOHN LOVELL & SON, Ltd.
1905

Entered according to Act of Parliament, in the year one thousand nine hundred and five, by John Murray, in the office of the Minister of Agriculture and Statistics, at Ottawa.

PREFACE.

The compiler of this little compendium of Telegraph History places it in the hands of the public in the hope that it may be received with favor.

The historical data is taken from leading standard authorities.

The biographical sketches of eminent scientists and inventors will enable the reader to form his own conclusions as to the merits of each.

The sketches of prominent pioneer telegraph men in Canada should be especially interesting to Canadians.

Many names worthy of mention have been reluctantly omitted, as it was thought desirable to confine this initial work into as narrow a compass as possible. A more extended edition may be forthcoming later should this venture prove successful.

The few reminiscent incidents in the Canadian section will lend a spice of variety to the narrative.

INTRODUCTION.

The Electric Telegraph is unquestionably one of our most valuable public utilities.

In commercial life the telegraph has revolutionized business methods. Transactions are now effected between New York, London and other financial centres in minutes, which formerly occupied weeks, and even months, to accomplish. In social life the advantages of telegraph communication are equally apparent; travel where we may, we are always within reach of friends or kindred at a distance by means of the telegraph wires.

The daily Press is now enabled to record the moving accidents on flood and field in all parts of the world, a few hours or even minutes after their occurrence.

The dreadful catastrophe at Martinique, with the loss of thousands of human lives; the fire in a Chicago theatre, and the loss of hundreds of women and children through culpable negligence; the shocking loss of life on the excursion steamer “General Slocum” through lack of life-saving appliances is gruesome reading, but the public demand it; the more pleasing event of King Edward’s visit to President Loubet, on his mission of Peace, and the return visit of the latter to London are a few examples of news carried over the wires, all within the purview of the humblest reader. There are few who cannot afford the price of a daily paper, and thus keep in touch with current events, but no very long time ago a daily newspaper was beyond the reach of all but the comparatively wealthy. The advent of the telegraph with its multifarious budget of news from every quarter of the Globe caused a large increase in circulation, and a decrease in price naturally followed.

During the Crimean war, when telegraph communication had been established with the army headquarters, the working men of a manufacturing concern near Glasgow, in which the writer was employed, clubbed together to defray the cost of a daily newspaper, the price then being four pence halfpenny, much beyond the means of a single individual. During the dinner hour he read to an interested and attentive audience the latest despatches from the seat of war, many of whom would forego dinner rather than miss the daily pabulum of war news. Now all this is changed, the poorest laboring man can afford the price of a daily paper, formerly only enjoyed by his more opulent countrymen.

Still earlier, Macaulay, in his History of England, tells us of the news letter, the predecessor of the modern newspaper, wherein he says: “The news letter within a week after its arrival had been thumbed over by twenty families, and furnished the neighboring squires with matter for talk over their October, and the Rector with topics for sharp sermons.”

The news letters were collated in London, for the benefit of provincial readers. The price was no doubt high, and the contents probably consisted of gossip or scandal in high life, details of a cocking main, an affair between my Lord Tomnoddy and a Captain of the Blues, or affairs of Church and State. Now the four quarters of the earth is ransacked daily and news collected at immense labor and enormous cost by the associated press, and retransmitted to all points of the compass.

Wireless telegraphy, the latest marvel in applied science, is surely and steadily forging ahead, and will cover areas of land and sea, where the land and cable wires do not operate.

The writer feels that no apology is necessary in publishing the following brief outline of telegraph history, a subject which he believes will interest both the old as well as younger readers.

The data of English telegraph history is largely derived from an early edition of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica, while that of the American is taken from a voluminous work published about a quarter of a century ago, by James D. Reid, a friend and associate of Professor Morse. The facts relating to Canadian history are taken from original records, while that of submarine and wireless telegraphy is from numerous sources of contemporary literature and personal knowledge.

While admitting there is nothing strikingly original in the work, the writer ventures to hope that the style will commend itself to those who prefer brevity to wearisome detail.

The Telegraph in England.

CONTENTS OF SECTION ONE.

 

PAGE

Explanatory 10 Telegraph, Electric 11 The Needle Telegraph 22 British Government acquires Telegraphs 29 Telegraph Development 36 Sir William Fothergill Cooke 37 Sir Charles Wheatstone 39

The Telegraph in the United States.

CONTENTS OF SECTION TWO.

Origin of the Telegraph 44 The Magnetic Telegraph Co. 60 The Western Union Telegraph Co. 61 The Postal Telegraph & Cable Co. 74 The Associated Press of America 81 Prof. S. F. B. Morse 89

The Telegraph in Canada.

CONTENTS OF SECTION THREE.

The Origin of the Montreal Telegraph Company 108 The Great North-Western Telegraph Company 116 The Canadian Pacific Telegraphs 120 Canadian Government Telegraphs 123 Remarks 125 Reminiscent Stories 126 Some Prominent Telegraphists 165

Submarine Telegraphy.

CONTENTS OF SECTION FOUR.

Origin Deep Sea Telegraphy 198 First Cable Company 207 First Atlantic Cable 210 Cable Repairs 213 Cable Instruments 218 Cyrus W. Field 223 Michael Faraday 228 Lord Kelvin 229 John W. Brett 232

Wireless Telegraphy.

CONTENTS OF SECTION FIVE.

Sketch of Signor Guiglielmo Marconi 233 Genesis of Wireless Telegraphy 235 Evolution of Wireless Telegraphy 237 The Marconi Telegraph Company 239 Wireless Telegraph Apparatus 243 Opinion of Thos. A. Edison 245 A Cable Manager’s Views 246 An Interview with Marconi 248 Trip of SS. “Minneapolis” 252 The Disabled SS. “Kroonland” 253 Uses of Wireless Telegraphy 255 A Newspaper Opinion 256 Wireless Telegraphy on the SS. “Parisian” 260 Future of Wireless Telegraphy 264 Dominion Wireless Telegraph Company 267

ILLUSTRATIONS.

 

PAGE

Frontispiece 1 Prof S. F. B. Morse 89 O. S. Wood 165 Sir Hugh Allan 167 James Dakers 169 H. P. Dwight 172 Wm. Cassils 174 James Poustie 176 Charles R. Hosmer 178 Hon. Geo. A. Cox 180 Sir W. C. Van Horne 182 Andrew Carnegie 184 Sir Sandford Fleming 186 F. N. Gisborne 190 Thos. A. Edison 192 Isaac D. Purkis 195 Cyrus W. Field 223 Michael Faraday 226 Lord Kelvin 229 Signor Marconi 233 SS. Parisian 260

A Story of
The Telegraph

Telegraph History

Telegraph, a machine for communicating intelligence to a distance, usually by means of preconcerted signals to which some convenient meaning is attached.

The name Semiphore was also applied to some of the machines used for effecting telegraphic communication, which in an extended sense may be considered to embrace every means of conveying intelligence by gestures and visible signs, as flags, lanterns, rockets, blue lights, beacon fires, etc., or by audible signals as the firing of guns, the blowing of trumpets, the beating of drums or gongs, as well as by the machine specially provided for the purpose.

Although telegraph communication as a means of conveying any required intelligence is an invention of recent date, the use of signals for the speedy transmission of messages as might be previously arranged between persons is a practice derived from the most remote antiquity. The use of beacon fires for example, as a means of giving warning of the approach of an enemy, is alluded to by the Prophet Jeremiah, who wrote about six centuries before the Christian era, and who warns the Benjamites to set up a sign of fire in Beth-Haccerem, for evil appeareth out of the north and great destruction (Jeremiah VI., 1).

The fine description given by Acchylus in his Agamemnon, of the application of a line of fire signals to communicate the intelligence of the fall of Troy is often referred to as an early instance of this kind of telegraphic dispatch.

This simple means of spreading an alarm, or communicating intelligence, is described by Scott in the “Lay of the Last Minstrel,” and in a note he refers to an act of the Scottish Parliament in 1455, c. 48, which directs that one bale or faggot shall be the warning of the approach of the English in any manner, two bales, that they are coming indeed, and four bales blazing beside each other that the enemy are in great force.

Such signals though best adapted to give information by night, were also available in day time, when they appeared as dense columns of smoke.

Torches held in the hand and moved in any particular manner, or alternately displayed and hidden behind a screen, were also used in ancient times as signals.

A night telegraph contrived by the Rev. James Bremner, of the Shetland Islands, and rewarded by the Society of Arts in 1816.

A single light constitutes the whole apparatus and the whole operation consists in its alternate exhibition and concealment. This plan had been found suitable for distances of twenty miles and upwards, and had been successfully put in operation between the light-house on Copeland Island and Port Patrick, on the opposite side of the Irish Channel.

Telegraph Electric

The attempts to render one or other of the phenomena of electricity subservient to the purposes of telegraphy have been numerous. From the earliest date, which we can assign to the existence of an electric telegraph, its essential parts have been the same. There are: 1st, the source of electrical power; 2nd, the conducting material by which this power is enabled to travel to the required locality; and, 3rd, the apparatus by which at the distant end of the line the existence of this power, its amount or the direction of its action is made known to the observer.

In the earlier stages of the invention, the investigations of its promoters were confined to the last of these three essentials, and, so long as the illustration of the idea was confined to the lecture table, this part claimed pre-eminence, but with the proposed application to purposes of general utility there arose the necessity for an equal degree of attention to the two former requisites.

The experiments of Dr. Watson, in England, in 1747, and of Franklin, in 1748, on the banks of the Schuylkill river may have suggested the conveyance of information by means of electricity.

The earliest authenticated instance of any attempt to reduce this to practice appears to have been that of Lesage, of Geneva, in 1774, and of Lomond, in France, in 1787, they employed as an indicator a pair of pith balls suspended from one end of an insulated wire, and at the other end of which was the operator provided with an electric machine, on charging the wire with electricity, the pith balls would exercise mutual repulsion and divergence from one another, but on removing the electrical charge from the wire by the contact of some conductor the balls would collapse.

It is evident that certain numbers of successive divergences might be made to denote particular preconcerted signals.

Subsequently to this the phenomena of the spark, as seen on the passage of electricity through an uninterrupted conductor, was used for the transmission of signals, were the various letters of the alphabet formed in this manner upon a table and connected with each one with a distinct and insulated wire and a particular letter might be rendered visible in a darkened room by passing an electric charge through the appropriate wire, this in fact constituted the telegraph of Reusser or Reiser invented in 1794.

Retancourt and Dr. Salva, in 1798, appear to have made experiments on the transmission of the charge through wires of great length.

A somewhat similar form of apparatus involving the same principle was constructed by arranging the several wires in succession with a single break in each. The various wires bore the names of the different letters or figures, and any required signal was indicated by passing the charge through the proper wire, when the spark visible at the interruption of the circuit would denote the letter to the observer at the farther end. This was the point to which invention had advanced at the commencement of the nineteenth century.

The discovery of Volta in 1800, of the Pile, which bears his name forms the commencement of a new era in electric telegraphs. Although there was no immediate application of the phenomena of the galvanic current to the purpose, indeed several important discoveries had to be made before an electric telegraph of any value was possible.

In 1807 Sommering, at Munich, proposed to construct an electric telegraph on the principle of the decomposition of water, by the Voltaic current discovered in 1800, by Nicholson and Carlisle. The form of apparatus was the following:

In a glass trough containing water, thirty-five gold pegs or pins were arranged vertically, this number of pegs corresponding to the letters of the alphabet together with the nine digits; each of those pins was connected by a wire which extended to the place whence the signal was to be transmitted; at this point they terminated in brass strips arranged in a frame side by side, but like the wires and pins insulated from each other, each brass strip bore the name of the letter or figure which belonged to the pin to which it was connected. The operator, when wishing to send any communication, connected the two poles of the battery with the brass strips bearing the names of the two first letters required—decomposition of the water in the trough at the distant end was instantly indicated by the evolution of bubbles of gas from the two gold pins which thus became the two electrodes or poles of the battery. The letters forming any communication were to be in this manner denoted in pairs, the inventor ingeniously availing himself of the different quantities of the two gases, evolved to point out the relative position of the letters in each pair, the hydrogen being employed to indicate the first letter.

Schweigger proposed to add to this system a plan for calling the attention of the correspondent at the distant station by the discharge by the current of a pistol charged with the mixed gases.

In 1816 Mr. Ronalds, of Hammersmith, invented an electric telegraph in which the use of frictional electricity was recurred to.

This telegraph, which was shown to several scientific men at the date above given, was fully described by the inventor by a work published by him in 1823.

Mr. Ronalds employed the divergence and collapse of a pair of pith balls as the telegraphic indication in which respect the principle was the same as that adopted by Mr. Lomond, but to this simple apparatus a distinct contrivance was appended in order to render the communication more rapid and easy.

A single wire, perfectly insulated by being suspended by silken strings, or buried in glass tubes, surrounded by pitch and protected by wooden troughs, was extended between the stations; from the end of this wire was suspended in front of the dial of a clock, a pair of pith balls so that whilst the wire was charged the balls would remain divergent, but would instantly collapse when the wire by contact with the earth, or with the hand of the operator was discharged.

A person at one end having, therefore, an electrical machine, by which he could maintain the wire in an electrified state and the pith balls at the other extremity, consequently, in a state of divergence, had it, of course, in his power to give an instantaneous indication to the observer at that farther extremity by touching the wire with the hand, which, discharging the electricity, would allow the balls to collapse for an instant; but instead of merely employing the successive movements of the pith balls to denote the various signals, Mr. Ronalds added another apparatus for the purpose.

Two clocks, very accurately adjusted to the same rate of going, carried, instead of the ordinary seconds hands, light discs, on which the various letters of the alphabet, the figures and other required signals were engraved. These discs turned with a regular step-by-step movement behind a screen of metal in which was made a small opening, sufficient to allow one letter at a time being seen. As the discs turned round each letter in succession would be visible through this space, and it is evident that if the clocks started with the same signal visible, the movement of the discs would bring similar signals into view at the same time.

One of these instruments was situated at each end of the communicating wire.

The operator who was about to transmit any communication watched the dial of his clock until the letter he required was visible and at that instant discharged the wire; the momentary collapse of the balls at the distant end would then warn the observer to note the letter visible on his instrument which would form a part of the intelligence to be received, the successive letters or signals constituting any messages were denoted in this manner, as the clock dials continued to turn round.

In order to avoid the constant attention on the part of the observer an arrangement was adopted by which a pistol could be fired by the spark of the further end to summon the attendant to his instrument.

Various signals were also concerted before hand, by the use of which the time necessary for the transmission of any intelligence was lessened.

These experiments of Mr. Ronalds were made with the intervention of several miles of wire carried backward and forward across his grounds.

In 1819 Professor Oersted, of Copenhagen, made his great discovery of the action of the galvanic current upon a magnetic needle; he observed that when a current is passed along a wire placed parallel and near a magnetic needle free to turn on its centre, the needle is deflected to one side or the other according to the direction in which the current is transmitted.

He further noticed that the position of the wire, whether above or below the needle, had an equal influence with the direction of the current in determining the side to which the deflection took place. The power of a single wire in causing this deviation of a needle is but small, but this was remedied by the invention of the multiplier or galvanometer by Prof. Schweigger, in which the needle being surrounded with many successive coils of insulated wire, is acted upon by the joint force of all. Under a somewhat different form this discovery now forms the basis of the needle electric telegraph.

Very shortly after this important discovery had been made, Arago and Ampère, in France, and Seebeck, in Berlin, succeeded in rendering iron magnetic by the passage of a galvanic current through a wire coiled around the iron, and Sturgeon, in England, produced the first electro-magnet. It was found that provided the iron to be magnetized were perfectly soft and pure, the magnetic property remained only during the actual transmission of the electricity, and was lost immediately on the interruption of the electric current.

If the iron which was exposed to the influence of the galvanic current were combined with sulphur, carbon or phosphorus, the magnetic power became to a greater or less extent permanent in it.

The invention of the Voltaic battery, of the deflection of the needle, and of the magnetization of soft iron, formed the three great steps in the history of the electric telegraph.

M. Ampère suggested the employment of the discovery of Oersted as early as 1830, and this suggestion was acted upon by Prof. Ritchie, in a model telegraph exhibited by him at the Royal Institution.

Ampère’s plan, however, was far from possessing the simplicity so essential to an instrument designed for practical use; not less than thirty pairs of conducting wires were necessary according to his scheme for maintaining a telegraph communication.

Baron Schilling in 1832 and 1833, following the idea originated by Ampère, proposed a similar form of telegraph in which there were as many of these galvanometers, each with its appropriate circuit, as there were letters or signs to be used in the various communications, in fact, there were 30 needles and 72 wires.

In 1833 Gauss and Weber proposed to employ the separate movements of a suspended bar as signals, but its indication must have been feeble as they had to be observed through a telescope placed at some distance from the oscillating bar.

In 1837 M. Alexander exhibited a model of a proposed form of telegraph containing twenty-five needles to be acted upon as in Ampère’s arrangement.

In this instrument a distinct needle was employed for the indication of each letter, these needles bearing at one end light screens of paper which concealed from view a letter or figure until by the deflection of the needle the screen was removed, and the letter brought into sight.

M. Alexander, however, effected one great improvement in substituting a single wire to which one end of all the coils was joined for the several return wires existing in the previous invention of M. Schilling.

At a later period this gentleman undertook a series of experiments with a view to the establishment of a communication by means of a single wire, but some mechanical difficulties appear to have arrested his progress.

In both of these telegraphs, all that was required in addition to the indicating apparatus and conducting wires, was a contrivance by which the connection of the Voltaic batteries could be made with any pair of wires, in the former, and with any single wire and the return conductor in the latter of the two inventions. One pole of the battery being connected to the return or common wire, the other pole of the battery was joined to a plate of metal, or to a trough of mercury, extending beneath all the keys. On depressing any key the wire belonging to it, which was continued to the end over the battery connection, was brought into contact with this bar or trough. The current would then flow along the conducting wire, around the multiplier coil in the distant instrument, and return by the common wire to the Voltaic battery. The keys bore the same letters as the needles to which they were connected, so that the operator communicated any letter by pressing down the corresponding key.

In these two instruments, no use was made of the power which exists of determining the deflection of the needle to either side by merely reversing the connections of the battery.

We have thus traced the history of the telegraph up to the point at which it first assumed the practical form of Cooke and Wheatstone’s inventions, but what had been accomplished remained either unknown, or was known only to a few leading men of science, until the unexpected development of the electric telegraph in the hands of these gentlemen led each one who was in possession of any title to the merit of having believed in and experimented upon the possibility to produce his title, or to have it eagerly put forward by his friends and fellow countrymen.

Although the principal facts necessary to the construction of an electric telegraph had been known ever since 1821, yet it was not until the general establishment of railways that telegraph wires could be safely carried to any great distance.

Moreover, the importance of the invention was by no means understood.

In 1837 the experiments of Cooke and Wheatstone, which had been progressing for more than a twelvemonth, appeared so far successful as to induce them to apply for a patent for their inventions.

The instrument which was brought into use on the Great Western Railway shortly after the date of the patent, contained five needles, arranged with their axis in a horizontal line. The needles when at rest hung vertically, by reason of a slight preponderence given to the lower ends, each coil was connected with one of the long conducting wires at one end, and was united at the other, with a rod of metal, which joined together the similar ends of all the coils.

The current was transmitted from the opposite end of the wires where a set of five pair of finger keys for making the connections with the battery was placed through two of the wires at once, that is to say, of the wire of which one key was pressed down, served to convey the current from one pole of the battery to the distant instrument, while the key of a second wire being brought into contact with the other pole, the current returned by the rod of metal connecting the coils, and the second wire to the battery again.

Two needles were in this manner deflected at once, and it will be obvious, that the current would pass in opposite directions around their coils, and, consequently, that the deflection must be in contrary directions. The needles would, therefore, converge either above or below their line of centre as one or other of the pair of keys belonging to each wire was depressed, fixed stops were so placed on each side of the needles, as to limit their motion and when resting against them the needles were parallel to two converging lines, at the point of intersection of movement of the needles.

In a similar manner as lines were drawn diverging from the centre of each axis mutually crossing one another, a number of points of intersection were formed at each of which was a letter or signal. Any of these letters could be indicated by the simultaneous movement of two needles, so that a communication could be carried on with certainty and tolerable rapidity, at the same time a plan was recognized by which the number of wires requisite for maintaining a communication might be reduced by using one of them at times as a return wire only, there being no needle in connection with this one.

One needle could, by the use of this wire, be deflected by itself, either to the right, or to the left, and thus, of course, each would furnish two signals in addition to those formed by its simultaneous deflection by any other. The instruments at the two stations were always rendered reciprocating; that is, at each end of the line were placed at each instrument a set of finger keys and a Voltaic battery, so that either station could transmit, or receive a signal by an ingenious arrangement. The keys on being released after depression, were made to resume by themselves the position necessary to enable that which had been the signalling station to become the recipient; by this means messages and answers or words and their acknowledgment could follow one another without the necessity for any intervening adjustment of the instruments.

The bell or alarum which was to be rung, when the attention of the clerk at the distant end was required, was either direct or indirect in its action.

In the first case, the attraction exercised by a horseshoe-shaped piece of soft iron, rendered temporarily magnetic by the galvanic current, was made to draw an armature likewise of soft iron towards it, and by this action impel a small hammer against a bell.

In the second form of alarum the movement of the armature merely released a detent or catch from a train of clock work driven by a spring or weight. This clock work by the intervention of a scape wheel and pallets rang the bell as in a common alarum.

In April, 1838, Mr. Cooke obtained a patent for some further improvements in this apparatus.

The electric telegraph invented by Prof. Morse, of the United States, has led to a large amount of controversy, a claim having been put in for him as the first actual invention of a practical electric telegraph in 1832, while on board the packetship “Sully.”

The Abbe Moigne states that a Mr. Jackson wrote to the Academie Française, affirming that he had in 1832 communicated the plan to Mr. Morse while returning together from Europe to America on board the “Sully.”

Even admitting, however, the claim of either party, it would only show that they did not think sufficiently well of their scheme to enter upon it until nearly three months after the first English patent for an electric telegraph had been sealed and the practicability of such an apparatus had been demonstrated in England.

The first really official letter on the subject from Prof. Morse is dated September 27, 1837.

Cooke and Wheatstone’s first patent for an electric telegraph was sealed three months before this, namely, on June 12, 1837.

The difference between this telegraph and the preceding, in suggestions and contrivances, was very great. The experiments of these gentlemen had been proceeding for a long time previously, so that when in June, 1837, their patent was obtained, it was not for an arrangement of doubtful practicability, or of a form to be perfected only after repeated trial; on the contrary, it was within a few months after the date of the patent put up and brought into actual and daily use.

Some of its details have since been simplified, and the modes in which the electric needles are made to give the required indications have been greatly varied, but the great features and principles of their first invention remain unchanged, and not only so, but they form an essential part of nearly, if not quite all, the later telegraphs of other inventors.

The invention of an electric telegraph should have attracted the immediate attention of railway managers, one would naturally suppose; on the contrary, railway directors looked upon it as a new-fangled invention, and the public was not yet alive to its innumerable advantages. One fact, however, must be insisted on and is now a matter of history—that to England belongs the honor of this great invention; that in the year 1837, a needle telegraph had been invented so complete, and at the same time so simple in its operations, that it could be worked by any one who knew how to read; that in June of that year the patent for this telegraph had been sealed, and a month later the wires were laid down between Euston Square and Camdentown Stations of the North Western Railway, a distance of a mile and a quarter, and that on the 25th of July messages were actually sent between these two stations, Prof. Wheatstone being in the Euston Square Station, and Mr. Cooke being in that at Camdentown, the witnesses being the engineers, Messrs. Fox and Stephenson.

Now, it is quite true that Arago claimed before the French Academy of Sciences for Mr. Steinheil the precedence in this matter, inasmuch as he had his telegraph in operation on the 19th of July, 1837; but it must be remembered that Wheatstone’s patent was taken out in June of that year, and was publicly shown on numerous previous experiments, all of which were successful, whereas Mr. Steinheil published no description of his instrument until August, 1838, and it is admitted that in the interval he had altered and amended his instrument and soon after abandoned it for a modification of one by Morse.

In September, 1837, he exhibited an imperfect instrument, although he afterwards succeeded in producing one of first rate excellence, which is still largely used in the United States.

Cooke and Wheatstone received notice to quit the London and Birmingham line, but Mr. Brunel gave them permission, in 1839, to lay it down on the Great Western Railway. This was first done as far as West Drayton, 13 miles, and afterwards extended to Slough, 18 miles, the wires in both of these preliminary trials being enclosed in iron tubes laid on the ground.

On proposing to extend this line to Bristol much opposition was offered by the directors, and the telegraph again had notice to quit, but on the proposal of Mr. Cooke to retain the wires at his own expense, he was permitted to do so on condition of transmitting the Railway signals free of charge, and of extending the line to Slough. In return for this favor, he was allowed to transmit messages for the public, which was accordingly done, one shilling being charged for a message, but the public did not avail themselves of the new instrument, and its value was scarcely appreciated until the 3rd of January, 1845, when it was used to convey a message to London police, directing them to arrest one Towell, on a charge of murder. The message flashed past the criminal while he was travelling express to escape the consequence of his crime.

By the end of 1845 upwards of 500 miles of line were in operation in England.

In 1846 the Electric Telegraph Company commenced its operations with a considerable capital, a large portion of which was expended in the purchase of Wheatstone and Cooke’s patents, and the system which they had introduced became rapidly extended.

In due time other telegraph companies were competing with the original company, namely, the Electric & International Telegraph Company, and the London & Provincial Telegraph Co. The system spread over Europe and soon no railway was deemed complete without its telegraph wires.

On the 5th of February, 1870, the Monopoly conferred upon the postmaster general, by the telegraph act of the previous year, took effect when the Post-Office assumed control of telegraph communication within the United Kingdom, and it then became possible to send telegrams throughout the country at a uniform charge irrespective of locality or distance.

The purchase money paid to the telegraph companies, compensation to railway companies for their interest in the telegraph business and the expense of new lines amounted to upwards of ten millions sterling.

On the day of the transfer a thousand post-offices and nineteen hundred railway stations were opened as telegraph offices. The public at once showed their appreciation of the change.

In the year 1869 but seven millions of telegrams passed on the companies wires; in 1870 the postmaster general transmitted ten millions.

In 1885 the sixpenny telegrams were introduced. The charge for a written telegram, which came into force in 1870, was one shilling for the first twenty words, and threepence for every additional five words, the addresses of sender and receiver being sent free.

In 1885 the charge was reduced to a half-penny a word throughout including addresses (a system of abbreviated addresses, which could be registered on payment of a guinea a year, was introduced), with a minimum charge of sixpence; the effect of this reduction was to run the number of telegrams in two years from thirty-three to fifty millions.

During the first six months the number of telegrams increased by 48 per cent., while the gross telegraph revenue fell off to the extent of £40,233 though £18,124 had been received in respect to abbreviated addresses.

In April, 1886, the telegrams in excess of 1885 amounted to 40 per cent., but the revenue was £11,800 less. In May the increase in telegrams was 51 per cent. and the revenue £4,100 less than the previous May.

In June the increase was 61 per cent. and the revenue £2,800 less. The working expenses were thus increased, while the receipts were diminished. In London alone the receipts fell off by as much as 74 per cent. The principal reasons for the unfavorable financial results of the working of the telegraph are: the large price £10,130,000 expended as purchase money, an argument of little weight so long as working expenses are not paid; the right accorded to railway companies at the time of the transfer of sending postal telegrams free of all charge. The number of these telegrams, at first insignificant, reached a total of 1,600,000 in 1891, with an average length of 25 words, representing a value of £80,000 a year. Arrangements were afterwards made under which the companies would surrender this privilege in return for permission to send a fixed number of free telegrams in the course of the year.

The loss on press telegrams, to quote the forty-first report of the postmaster general: “A still more serious burden is caused by the loss on press telegrams.”

The charge specified in the Telegraph Act of 1868 for press telegrams is one shilling for 75 words during the day, or one hundred words at night, but a proviso was added that for copies only 2d per 75 words in the day or 100 at night, and no condition was laid down as to the copy being for the same town as the original; the newspaper, accordingly, combined to receive from the news associations messages in identical terms, and by dividing the cost they are enabled to get the benefit of a rate which comes nearer 2d than a shilling, the average charge being in fact about four pence half-penny per 100 words.

Notwithstanding the economical arrangements which have been made for the transmission of press telegrams, 5,400,000 in number containing 650,000,000 words, the loss incurred by the Post-Office in dealing with them is estimated to amount to £300,000 per annum.

The reductions in the tariff, especially in 1885 and 1897, and the competition of the telephone (upwards of 450,000,000 messages a year, transmitted by the National Telephone Company alone), though it must be remembered that the Royalties of the companies exceeded £100,000 per annum, which figure among the receipts of the Post-Office telegraph service. The increased wages paid to telegraphists in 1880 and 1881, the wages and salaries represented 44 per cent. of the total revenue; they now exceed 66 per cent. The real success of the state administration of the telegraph lies not in any contribution to the revenue, but in cheap telegrams and a large use of the service.

The average price of the ordinary inland telegram is sevenpence, three farthings, and there are more telegrams sent in the United Kingdom, both positively and relatively than in any other country, with the possible exception of the United States.

For every 100 persons there are sent in the United Kingdom 184 telegrams, while in France there are but 108 and in Germany 66.

In 1901 the gross revenue was £3,380,589. The pay of a telegraphist in London rises to £160 a year, with the prospect of promotion to higher positions.

The number of telegrams transmitted in 1900–1 was 89,576,000.

In small towns and villages where the traffic is light, and a skilled telegraphist is unnecessary, the Wheatstone A. B. C. instrument is used; in this apparatus electric currents are generated by turning a handle (placed in front of the instrument) which is geared to a Siemens shuttle armature placed between the two arms of a powerful horseshoe magnet; when one of a series of keys (each corresponding to a letter), arranged around a pointer, is depressed, motion of the pointer which is geared to the shuttle armature is arrested on coming opposite that particular key and the transmission of the currents to line is stopped, though the armature itself can continue to rotate. The depression of a second key causes the first key to be raised, the currents actuate a ratchet wheel mechanism at the receiving station, whereby the hand on a small dial is moved on letter by letter.

At offices where the work is heavier than can be dealt with by the A.B.C. apparatus, the single needle instrument is very largely used.

It has the advantage of slight liability to derangement and of requiring very little adjustment. A fairly skilled operator can signal with it at the rate of twenty words a minute.

The needle (in the modern pattern) is of soft iron and is kept magnetized inductively by the action of two permanent steel magnets. The coils are wound with copper wire (covered with silk) to a total resistance of 200 ohms. The actual current required to work the instrument is 3-3 milliampères equivalent approximately to the current given by one Daniel cell through 3,300 ohms, but in practice a current of 10 milliampères is allowed.

A single but important addition to enable the reading from the instrument to be effected by sound, in this arrangement the needle strikes against small tubes formed of tin plate and by this means the movement of the needle to the right or left is quite audible.

The Wheatstone automatic apparatus is largely used, especially for press matter; through it a speed of 600 letters per minute can be obtained.

In the Rowland multiple method, the transmitter consists of a mechanical key board, provided with a series of levers which effect certain combinations of positive and negative currents for each letter: these currents are furnished by an alternator, which transmits sine currents over the line, both machines running in synchronism.

At the receiving end of the circuit a shaft is coupled to the motor; this is provided with gearing which rotates four combining commutators and four type wheels, which print the letters on the band of paper. There are four transmitters and four receivers, which are operated independently by means of an adaptation of the multiplex system of working, and each circuit is provided with a number of segments set apart for its own use. Each transmitter is, therefore, able to transmit a separate series of positive and negative currents in different combinations; these are distributed by suitably arranged distributors and relays at the receiving end of the line into their respective receivers. The function of the “combiner” in each receiving instrument is to group the received combinations of positive and negative currents that they operate polarized relays in such a manner that the position of the tongues corresponds with the operation of the levers in the transmitter, since each letter is represented by a specific combination of positive and negative currents.

It is possible by means of the combinations to close a local circuit at any given interval and so cause the paper to be pressed against the periphery of the type wheel at the time when the letter required is opposite.

The paper is also caused to advance automatically for each letter, start a first line, and also to commence a fresh form at the completion of each message.

The Delaney Multiples System, which has been adopted to a limited extent in Great Britain, enables a large amount of work to be done on one wire.

Between London and Manchester four sets of the apparatus can be worked, but between London and Birmingham, a shorter distance, six sets (the maximum for which the system is adopted) may be used.

Sir William Fothergill Cooke,
1806–1879.

Son of William Cooke, M.D., Durham, was born at Ealing, Middlesex, and having received his education at Durham, was appointed in 1826 to the East Indian army, in which he held various staff appointments till 1831.

On his return home he devoted his time to the study of anatomy and physiology at Paris and Heidleberg and to modelling anatomical dissections for the illustration of his father’s lectures at Durham University.

In March, 1836, he began to direct his attention to the electric telegraph, with which he occupied himself exclusively for many years.

He entered into partnership with Prof. Wheatstone, and formed in conjunction with Mr. Ricardo, M.P., the first telegraph company of which he became a director.

The first telegraph line in England was constructed by Mr. Cooke, from Paddington to West Drayton, on the Great Western Railway in 1837.

In 1840 he established the telegraph on the Blackwall Railway, and in 1841 a short line from the Queen Street station, at Glasgow, through the tunnel to the engine house at Cowlairs on the railway to Edinburgh.

In 1842 the line from West Drayton was continued to Slough, and in 1843 two short lines were made in Ireland and in England, one of considerable length from London to Portsmouth for Government.

In 1867 he received the fourth Royal Albert medal, his name being preceded by Faraday’s, for the first introduction of a practical electric telegraph.

Her Majesty conferred on him the honor of Knighthood, November 11, 1869, as a recognition of his great and special services in connection with the electric telegraph, and on July 25, 1871, conferred on him a civil pension of £100.

Sir Charles Wheatstone, F.R.S., D.C.L., LL.D.
1802–1875

Who, together with Sir W. F. Cooke, introduced and carried out practical electric telegraphy, was the son of Mr. Wheatstone, of Gloucester, at which place he was born.

He was educated at a private school and brought up to the business of making musical instruments, which turned his attention to acoustics.

He published his first work in 1823, “New Experiments in Sound,” and having studied Young’s theory of light, the results of his investigations were communicated to the Royal Society through Faraday, in 1833.

In the following year he was appointed Professor of Experimental Philosophy, at King’s College, London.

He was made F. R. S. in 1836, and two years later described the stereoscope, which he had invented, in a paper which he read before the Society.

Mr. Cooke (later Sir W. F. Cooke), was introduced to Professor Wheatstone, and they decided to unite their efforts to introduce the use of the telegraph on a large scale in England.

They took out their first patent for the electric telegraph laid on the Blackwall Railway in 1837.

Wheatstone received the Royal Medal in 1840, the Copley Medal in 1843, was one of the Jurors at the Paris Exhibition (1855), when he received the decoration of the Legion of Honor, and was knighted in 1868.

He was corresponding member of the principal academies of science in Europe.

It was by his skill in turning knowledge to practical account that Wheatstone gave the electric telegraph the character which it now possesses. Though his inventions in other branches of science are as numerous as they are various, yet it is in connection with the electric telegraph that the name of Wheatstone will live.

He was the inventor of the telegraph, indeed. No one else can lay claim to that title.

Stephen Gray, in 1827, suspended a wire, seven hundred feet long, on silk threads, and on applying an excited glass tube to one end, electrification was observed at the other, but he did not send messages. Advances were made from that time by many men of science, who saw more or less clearly the great possibilities before them.

Omitting the pioneer claims of Sommering, Lomond and others of the last century, the names connected with the early development of the practical telegraph are Froment in France, Gauss, Weber and Steinheil, in Germany, Sir Francis Ronalds and Edward Davy, in England, Morse and Vail, in America. But to Wheatstone and his co-adjutor Sir William Fothergill Cooke is due the merit of having been the first to render it available for the public transmission of messages.

In 1834, shortly after being appointed Professor of Experimental Physics at King’s College, London, Wheatstone began experimenting on rate of transmission electricity along wires. For this purpose about half a mile of copper wire was insulated by suspension in the vaults under the college, and three interruptions of this circuit was made by three parts of brass knobs with a small interval between them, one of these interruptions was in the middle point of the conductor and the other two near the ends.

A leyden jar was discharged through the wire and the interval of time between the occurrence of the sparks at the ends and occurrence of the spark at the middle was measured by noting the displacement of the image of the middle spark in a mirror revolving at a known speed. It was calculated from results of this experiment that the velocity of an electric disturbance along a wire was about two hundred and fifty thousand miles per second, a result differing from the true speed of one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second; not very widely, considering the difficulties of observation in an experiment of this kind. From this research he passed on to the transmission of messages by electricity, and in conjunction with Cooke he elaborated the five needle telegraph, the first that came into general use.

Wheatstone’s fertility of scientific resource led the partners on to many new developments.

The letter showing dial telegraph in 1841 and the magneto-electro dial telegraph, a subsequent extension of the same to type embossing, and lastly the automatic transmitting and receiving instruments by which messages are sent with such great rapidity.

He was the first to appreciate the importance of reducing to a minimum the amount of work to be done by the current at the receiving station by diminishing as far as practicable the mass and therefore the inertia of the moving parts.

This was beautifully exemplified in that marvel of ingenuity, the magneto-electro letter showing telegraph, which was particularly applicable for private telegraph uses.

From 1837 Wheatstone appears to have devoted a good deal of time to submarine telegraphy, and in 1844 experiments were made in Swansea bay with the assistance of Mr. J. D. Llewellyn.

Wheatstone also had a share in the perfecting of the magneto-electric machines which have culminated in the modern dynamo.

In 1837 he devised a method of combining several armatures on one shaft so as to generate currents which were continuous instead of intermittent, and in 1867 he described to the Royal Society a method of making such machines self-exciting as to their magnetism by the use of a shunt circuit.

The use of a main circuit for the purpose had been described by Werner Siemens one month earlier, but the machine described by Wheatstone had been constructed for him by Mr. Stroh in the preceding summer.

Wheatstone was also the inventor of electro-magnetic clocks for indicating time at any number of different places united on a circuit.

It was he who called attention to Christy’s combination of wires, now commonly known as Wheatstone’s bridge—in which an electric balancing of the currents is obtained and worked out in its applications to electrical measurements.

He was one of the first in Great Britain to appreciate the importance of ohms simple law of the relation between electro-motive force resistance of conductors and resulting current—the law which is to-day the foundation of all electrical engineering.

Wheatstone contributed to numerous scientific journals and publications.

All his published papers were collected in 1879 by the Physical Society of London.

The Telegraph in America

Mr. Morse, the inventor of the telegraph system which bears his name, first conceived the idea on board the packet ship “Sully” on which he was a passenger. He sailed from Havre for New York on the first day of October, 1832. He was accompanied by a number of others, the whole company being unusually intelligent and agreeable. There was a long voyage before them, and each amiably undertook to relieve the tedium of the journey by the many pleasant devices indulged in by companionable travellers.

At an early period of the voyage, the conversation around the evening table turned upon the subject of electricity and magnetism which was then a popular topic of discussion and general interest.

One of the passengers (a Doctor Jackson) introduced the subject by reference to lectures to which he had recently attended while in Paris, in which interesting illustrations of the more recent discoveries in electro-magnetism had been given.

He also referred to the experiments of Ampère with the electro magnet; the subject excited very general interest into which Morse entered with great spirit. Hitherto he had felt no other concern in electrical matters than that of a lively and attentive curiosity.

Dr. Jackson had in his trunk an electro-magnet, which he described, and during the conversation alluded to the length of the wire in the coils. This led one of the company to enquire “if the velocity of the current was retarded by the length of the wire?”

Dr. Jackson replied that electricity passed instantaneously over any known length of wire. This aroused the interest of Morse who was struck with the idea that electricity might be made the medium of conveying intelligence.

The conversation went on but he left them. As he paced the deck the idea rapidly took form in his mind that, either by electro-chemical or electro-magnetic effects of a current, marks might be made at distances so great and in such variety as to render possible the easy communication of and record of an intelligible language.

This was, so far as he knew at the time, a new thought. Gradually the conception took shape and system until at last it had assumed such a form that next morning, at the breakfast table, he communicated the plan by which he believed a recording telegraph could be serviceable.

Later on as the voyage was nearing its end, Mr. Morse, addressing the Captain, said “Well, Captain, should you hear of the telegraph one of these days as the wonder of the world, remember the discovery was made on board the good ship “Sully.”

He would now have devoted himself entirely to the elaboration of this new thought, but he had to betake himself to his work as an artist. He was poor and for three or four years following his return he had to travel much of the time to meet engagements in connection with his profession. Meanwhile, he devoted every spare moment to the perfecting of his apparatus.

In a letter to a friend Mr. Morse wrote: “Up to the autumn of 1837, my telegraphic apparatus existed in so crude a form that I felt reluctant to have it seen. My means were very limited—so limited as to preclude the possibility of constructing an apparatus of such mechanical finish as to warrant my success in venturing upon its public exhibition. I had no wish to expose to ridicule the representative of so many hours of laborious thought. Prior to the summer of 1837, at which time Mr. Alfred Vail’s attention became attracted to my telegraph, I depended upon my pencil for my subsistence. Indeed, so straightened were my circumstances, that in order to save time to carry out my invention, and to economize my scanty means, I had for months lodged and eaten in my studio, procuring my food in small quantities from some grocery, and preparing it myself to conceal from my friends the stinted manner in which I lived. I was in the habit of bringing my food to my room in the evenings, and this was my mode of life for many years.”

Under these distressing circumstances, Mr. Morse labored in perfecting his apparatus in which he finally succeeded. His caveat was filed in the patent office in Washington on October 6, 1837, but a patent was not obtained until 1840.

On the 8th of February, 1838, in response to an invitation from the Franklin Institute of Philadelphia, Prof. Morse exhibited the new telegraph before the Committee of Science and Arts of that institution, who reported their gratification and expressed their desire that government would give the means of testing it on an extensive scale.

Mr. Morse, shortly after this, exhibited his apparatus before the President and his cabinet, and which gave great satisfaction, in reference to which he wrote his friend and partner Mr. Alfred Vail, as follows: “Everything looks encouraging, but I need not say to you that in this world a continued course of prosperity is not a rational expectation. We shall doubtless find troubles and difficulties in store for us, and it is part of true wisdom to be prepared for whatever may await us. If our hearts are right, we shall not be taken by surprise. I see nothing now but an unclouded prospect, for which let us pay to Him who shows it to us, the homage of grateful and obedient hearts, with most earnest prayers for grace to use prosperity aright.”

Morse now determined to ask Congress for aid to make a thorough test of his apparatus on an actual line to show its capacity and practicability; in this he was encouraged by his friends. On December 6, 1842, he wrote an exhaustive letter to the Hon. C. G. Ferris, an influential member of the House Committee on Commerce, in which he gave a minute history of the invention, stated fully the basis of his claims as the inventor, and asked that through his committee an appeal might be made to Congress for the means to erect an experimental line to prove its value. In response to this the Hon. John P. Kennedy, February 23, 1843, offered a resolution “That the Bill appropriating thirty thousand dollars to be expended under the direction of the Secretary of the Treasury, in a series of experiments to test the expediency of the telegraph projected by Professor Morse should be passed.”

Mr. Morse sat in the gallery during the discussion which followed, a quiet but intensively anxious observer. For a time the project was made the subject of ridicule.

Irritated perhaps because the committee passed him in the control of the experiment, the Postmaster proposed to give half the sum appropriated by the bill to mesmeric experiments.

Another proposed that millerism have a share. The bill seemed doomed to failure by their ridicule. The debate became sharp and vigorous when, at length, the vote was taken with the result that the Bill passed by a majority of eight.

The bill, however, had yet to pass the Senate, and its temper respecting it was unknown. It had much unfinished business. Day after day passed, but the bill had not been reached. Finally the last hours of the session arrived.

Morse watched them as they passed with an anxious solicitude. It was getting late, ten o’clock had already struck, two hours only remained before the final adjournment. Just then the Hon. Fernando Wood, one of the Senators, came to Mr. Morse and advised him to go home. “The Senate is not in sympathy with your project. I advise you to give it up. Return home and think no more of it.” Morse, feeling it useless to remain longer, with a heavy heart went to his hotel, paid his bill, procured a ticket for New York and retired to his room for the night. He there knelt down, opened his heart to God and committed his affairs to Him. He had done all that he could and could do more.

He counted his money and found after paying his bill and ticket he had thirty-seven and a half cents left.

In the morning, refreshed by rest yet grave and thoughtful, he came down to breakfast. While seated at the table a visitor was announced. The early visitant proved to be a young lady friend, Miss Ellsworth, the daughter of the Commissioner of Patents, who taking him warmly by the hand, exclaimed with a voice of unconcealed joy, “Professor, I have come on purpose to congratulate you.” “Congratulate me! For what, my dear friend, can you offer me congratulations?” “Why,” she said gaily (as she enjoyed the Professor’s wondering surprise, and who was at the time not in the fittest mood for pleasantry), “on the passage of your bill. The Senate, last night, voted you your money, $30,000.”

She then informed him that her father remained in the Senate until the close of the session, and that in the very closing moments the telegraph bill was passed without division or debate. On reaching home, Ellsworth had communicated the news to his family, all of whom were much attached to the Professor, and his daughter begged the favor of being allowed to go to the hotel to communicate the good news.

It was the desire of a good warm-hearted woman. So she had hastened on her pleasant errand, and now, having told her story, she asked, “Am I really the first to communicate this to you?”

The tidings were so unexpected that for some moments he could make no reply. At length he said, “Yes, Annie, you are the first to inform me. I was until now utterly unconscious of the fact, and now I am going to make you a promise. When the line is completed, the first despatch sent upon it from Washington to Baltimore shall be yours.” “Well,” she replied, “I will hold you to your promise.”

All details having been arranged between the Government and Mr. Morse, the construction of the line was proceeded with. He was allowed a salary of $2,500 per annum during the test. Mr. Alfred Vail took charge of the machinery while Mr. Ezra Cornell was made Superintendent of construction.

It was most unfortunate for Mr. Morse that his mind from the very first seemed prepossessed in favor of underground lines which had been adopted in England. They gave to him the general impression of safety and permanence, and he selected the plan without experiment.

He had ordered to be made in New York forty miles of a five wire cable enclosed in lead, and Mr. Cornell invented a plow to make the trench for its reception.

This cable was laid from Baltimore to the Relay House, seven miles away, but on testing it the escape was found so great that the necessity of abandoning it became evident. More than half the appropriation had been expended. After much anxious thought, it was decided to place the wires on poles, and the line was finished in this way with two copper wires of size number 14, covered with cotton saturated with gum shellac.

The first insulation of the government line shows how crude and rudimentary was the conception held at that period. It was simply two plates of glass, between which the wire, after wrapping well with cloth saturated with gum shellac, was placed and over which a wooden cover to protect from rain and press the glass upon the wire and keep it in place was nailed.

These were afterwards removed and the Bureau Knob pattern substituted.

In about one year after the appropriation had been made, the line was completed.

The first telegraph office in Washington was in a small room on the east front of the Capitol, and afterwards in a room over the city post-office. The relays were of number 16 cotton covered copper wire saturated in gum shellac, each weighing about 510 pounds, and so coarsely constructed that Mr. Vail kept the ones in use in a back room where the operator had to run when it needed adjustment.

The battery consisted of 100 cells of Grove, which was renewed three times a week. The circuits were left open when the line was not in use, and the instruments were so connected that each operator started and stopped the instrument at the distant station by the dropping of a break upon the fly wheel when the manipulations of the keys were suspended.

The magnets were soon after greatly improved, reduced in size, and increased in power.

True to the promise he had made to his friend, Miss Ellsworth, Prof. Morse now sent for her and to which she at once responded.

She was invited to indicate a message for transmission. It was promptly done in language now historic and in consonance with the inventor’s own often expressed thoughts respecting the origin of his invention, indeed, he may have suggested the words “What hath God wrought.” This message was passed over the wires, and the strip of paper on which it was imprinted was given to Governor Seymour of Connecticut, as a souvenir in honor of the young woman who was a native of his State, and of the inventor who received therein his collegiate training.

An incident now brought the usefulness of the telegraph into public recognition.

The National Convention to nominate a President was in session at Baltimore. James K. Polk had been nominated President, and Silas Wright, then in the Senate, and in Washington at the time, as Vice-President. This was communicated over the wires. In a few minutes the convention was astonished to receive a message from Mr. Wright respectfully declining the nomination. The presiding officer read the despatch, but the convention could not or would not believe its authenticity, and adjourned to await the report of a committee sent to Washington to confer with that gentleman. The committee confirmed the telegraphic message. This fact soon became known when the fame of the telegraph at once took wing.

It is related that about this time that a prominent functionary asked an assistant “how large a bundle could be sent over the wires, and if the United States mails could not be sent in the same way!”

Some wag did straddle a pair of dirty boots over the wires and very seriously told an astonished citizen that they got dirty by coming so rapidly from Baltimore!

On the opening of the government line, Mr. O. E. Wood, at that time connected with the engineering department of the State of New York, was induced by his brother-in-law, Ezra Cornell, to give up his profession and join Mr. Morse at Washington. He then became Mr. Morse’s first pupil.

In November, 1844, he received over the wires from Baltimore the result of the Presidential elections in Northern and Eastern States, and with Mr. Vail spent the winter of 1844–45 in exhibiting the working of the telegraph to members of Congress, diplomatic representatives and to visitors attracted thither from all parts of the globe. He also transmitted to the Baltimore press a report of the proceedings of Congress for publication.

On April 1, 1845, the line, which had been worked as a curiosity, was thrown open for public business.

The operators appointed were Mr. Vail at Washington and Mr. Henry J. Rogers at Baltimore.

During the first four days the receipts amounted to one cent. This was obtained from an office seeker who said he had nothing less than a twenty dollar bill and one cent, and with the modesty of his class, wanted to witness the operations of the telegraph free, this was refused because against orders. He was told he could have a cent’s worth of telegraphy, to which he agreed, and he was gratified in the following manner:

Washington asked Baltimore “4” which meant in the list of signals “what time is it?” Baltimore replied “1,” which meant “one o’clock.” This was one character each way which would amount to half a cent. The man paid his one cent, magnanimously declined the change, and went his way satisfied.

This was the total revenue of four days.

On the 5th, twelve and a half cents; the sixth was the Sabbath; on the seventh the receipts ran up to sixty cents; on the eighth, to a dollar and thirty-two cents, and on the ninth, to a dollar and four cents. Not a very dazzling prospect certainly, yet watchful eyes saw its future value.

It is recorded that about this time a certain good dame, whose ideas of discipline were somewhat stern and fundamental, after surveying a pole recently planted near her door, placing her hands on her haunches, and looking critically at the pole, exclaimed, “Now I s’pose no one can spank their brats without bein’ known to the hull cree-a-tion!”

The telegraph was fairly under weigh. Prof. Morse offered to sell his rights to the Government for one hundred thousand dollars, but the Postmaster General was not satisfied. The operations of the telegraph between Washington and Baltimore had not shown him that, under any rate of postage that could be devised, its revenue could be made equal to its expenditure. The offer was therefore declined. This refusal was fortunate both for the inventor and the country.

The next move was to enlist private capital, and this was soon accomplished.

The first telegraph company in the United States, the “Magnetic Telegraph Company,” was formed, but this was not attained without difficulty.

Early in 1845 Mr. Kendall, formerly Postmaster General in President Jackson’s administration, was induced, after much deliberation and consultation, to take a leading part in organizing the Company.

It was thought expedient to make the first attempt to construct a line between New York and Philadelphia, and to limit the capital to the probable cost of that section, the traffic between these large cities being extensive, and likely to prove remunerative.

To aid in securing capital. Mr. Ezra Cornell and Mr. O. S. Wood went to New York to exhibit the telegraphic apparatus upon a short experimental line strung on the tops of buildings.

Offices were opened, one at 112 Broadway, and the other in a building near where the Metropolitan Hotel now stands. Permission to allow the connecting wires to be erected on the tops of houses was obtained with much trouble, and only after paying Prof. Silliman, Jr., a fee of fifty dollars for an expert opinion respecting its safety before the property owners would consent to the wires being erected.

The price of admission to witness the operation of the telegraph was twenty-five cents. This seemed a novel way to secure capital in a great city like New York.

With this embargo, notwithstanding the wonderful character of the invention, there was not visitors enough to pay expenses; everything indicated poverty. The exhibitors were so poor that one of them was glad to use a couple of common chairs for his nightly rest.

It was certainly a strange experience for the future princely founder of Cornell University, making his breakfast out of the proceeds of a shilling picked up, as it were, from the sidewalks of Broadway, and which, he said, were the best meals he had ever enjoyed.

The estimated cost of a line from Fort Lee on the Hudson to Philadelphia was $15,000—a modest sum to ask of the great city of New York, but the men of capital looked over their immaculate collars at the ticking machinery, and into the faces of the hungry exhibitors, and up at the wire straggling among the chimney pots, and then down at the meagre furniture, and said “No;” each man feared to be the first fool. But what capitalists would not do, humbler men did.

One of the first men in New York to invest his money in the new device was the keeper of an eating-house on Nassau Street, and who afterward became one of the directors.

The money needed was finally raised, but chiefly outside of New York. It was provided in this original subscription that the payment of fifty dollars should entitle the subscribers to two shares of fifty dollars each.

A payment of fifteen thousand dollars, therefore, required an issue of $30,000 stock. To the patentees was issued an additional $30,000 stock, or half of the capital, as a consideration of the patent; the capital was, therefore, $60,000 for the first link.

Trustees were appointed to hold the patent rights and property until the organization was effected.

The incorporators were:—

S. F. B. Morse,
B. B. French,
Geo. C. Penniman,
Henry J. Rogers,
John S. McKim,
J. T. Trimble,
W. M. Swain,
John O. Sterns,
A. Sydney Doane.

“THE MAGNETIC TELEGRAPH COMPANY.”

Early in November, 1845, the line was first opened between Philadelphia and Norristown, Pa. distant 14 miles, so as to gratify public curiosity, while the building was going on beyond. This was completed to Fort Lee on January 20, 1846, and from Baltimore to Philadelphia, June 5, the same year.

No attempt was made for a long time to cross the Hudson.

In April, 1850, two gutta percha covered wires were submerged at Fort Lee, which for a time did good service. Shortly after the formation of the Magnetic Telegraph Company (the Pioneer Telegraph Company in America), numerous organizations followed. In 1859, the company amalgamated with the American Telegraph Company.

THE WESTERN UNION TELEGRAPH COMPANY AND ITS ORIGIN.

In April, 1854, a combination was agreed upon between the Erie and Michigan Telegraph Company and the New York and Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Company. The united capital being $500,000 under the name of the Western Union Telegraph Company, by an act of the legislature of Wisconsin, dated March 4, 1856, and of the State of New York, of April 4, 1856.

The following year the Michigan Southern Telegraph Company was added to this combination.

The headquarters of the Company were at Rochester, N.Y. Other companies joined the united companies and the Western Union found it necessary to transfer its headquarters to New York, but the most notable of these consolidations took place in 1866, when the United States Telegraph Company, as well as the American Telegraph Company, joined forces with the Western Union, thus virtually embracing the entire telegraph business of the country.

In this year the capital was readjusted and appointed to the various interests forming the Western Union combination.

Soon after the union of the many conflicting telegraph interests had been effected, and through fear of a burdensome monopoly, a move was made towards the nationalization of the telegraphs. As a matter of course, this was strenuously opposed by the telegraph company’s representatives, and public sentiment was with the company.

Although politicians as a rule were favourably inclined to such a step, the majority of the people were against it, or indifferent, with the result that the movement dropped out of view, and has so far as known never been revived up to this period.

In telegraph operations little attention had been given to electricity as a science in America. Any improvements which had been made in connection with telegraphic appliances, except in repeating appliances, were of a comparatively trifling and unscientific character.

Marshall Lefferts had done much to show the value of statistics, and had laid down important ground work for systematized and scientific methods; he had even introduced some of the electric tests by which the telegraph wires afterward became so potential, but no clearly defined system had been in practice.

The battery man still multiplied his cells, emptied his carboys of nitric or sulphuric acid, and bathed his zincs in mercury, to raise the telegraphic steam; the patient operator turned and returned during the long hours of the weary nights the spring of his relay, to catch the erratic movements of the armature as it vibrated before the changing currents on the line.

Cromwell Varley, a well-known electrician whose accomplishments as a gentleman of education as well as a scientist had preceded him in the frequent appearance of his name in the records of scientific investigation, had arrived in New York. Mr. Orton, at this time the President of the Western Union Company, invited Mr. Varley to make a thorough investigation into the condition of the lines and apparatus owned by the Company.

The report made by Mr. Varley, minute and exhaustive, revealed a startling condition of things—half of the wires were found to be practically unavailable.

The best wires in the service showed a resistance far above the proper standard.

A popular relay was found to have a resistance equal to one hundred miles of number 8 wire, the use of which was choking the most important circuits.

The chief value of Mr. Varley’s report, indeed was in giving a practical illustration of the immense value of a scientific electrical training.

The electrician now came to be an important factor in American telegraphic work.

To this report also may be fairly traced the beginning of a series of improvements and inventions which have made famous the American name.

By removing the obstructions to the electric current and reducing resistances in wires, magnets and batteries to a minimum, the great possibilities of the wires were discovered in accomplishments which were never dreamed of.

The duplex and quadruplex are great advances on the old condition, and would have been inoperative had they continued.

The visit of Mr. Varley had another result—the consolidation of so many important organizations under a single administration had unavoidably brought together more or less discordant elements; each company had its own peculiar methods, ideas of management, limitations of authority, rules of order, etc., as well as of tariffs and compensation. It was of the utmost importance that, in order to unity of management, distinct and clearly defined ideas of duty should be made to permeate the entire working force so as to make conflict impossible, and work quick, certain, harmonious.

It was scarcely less desirable also, now that the value of electric knowledge had been demonstrated, that by some means its attainment might be rendered easy and general, and a stimulus given to its acquisition. Under these circumstances Mr. Orton established the journal of the telegraph, and its usefulness soon became apparent; its clippings from the scientific journals of European and Home papers on electric art soon came to be the theme of almost universal interest.

A copy of this paper was mailed to every office of the Company as soon as issued. It became not only the vehicle for executive orders for the announcement of new offices and of changes in the tariff, but imperceptibly, yet markedly, the means of infusing an “esprit de corps” and sense of brotherhood throughout the telegraph service.

At the solicitation of Mr. Orton, Mr. James D. Reid accepted the management of the journal of the telegraph, by whom it was admirably conducted for a number of years, with the praiseworthy results previously noted.

In view of the recent boundary arbitration between the United States and Great Britain, it may be interesting to recall the circumstances which led the American Government to become interested in Alaska as a connecting link in a telegraph project, to connect Europe and America by land wires.

When, in 1858, the Atlantic Cable proved a failure, and was looked upon as an utter impossibility, a Mr. Collins, the American commercial agent resident at St. Petersburg, proposed to construct a line of telegraph overland from the United States (via) Behring Strait and Asiatic Russia to Europe.

Perceiving the importance of the project, Mr. J. Cochrane, a member of Congress and of the Committee on Commerce, reported to that body on Feb. 18, 1861, a bill appropriating $50,000 for “The Survey of the Northern Waters, Coasts and Islands of the Pacific Ocean and Behring Strait, having reference to telegraphic connection with Russia,” and expressing full faith in its possibility.

In the United States Senate, Feb. 17, 1862, Mr. Latham also made an elaborate report, revealing the vast progress of telegraphs in Europe and the enthusiastic and enlightened action of the Russian Government in the proposed extension of her telegraph system to the Pacific.

A line had already been mapped out from Kazan, through Circassia.

From Omsk a line was traced out with the design of reaching India through the Northern Central gate of Asia. Still another was projected from the Amoor line to Pekin, Shanghai, Amoy and Hong Kong—thus, to reach the trade of China, these projects showed the value of the telegraph to commerce.

Mr. Latham asked an appropriation of $100,000 for a survey of the route from California to the Amoor.

Russia offered her aid and a rebate of forty per cent. on American messages when communication was established.

Russia had already assured the construction of the line 7,000 miles from Moscow to the Pacific.

Secretary Seward took a deep interest in the enterprise, in a report to the Senate, May 4, 1864.

On the proposition of Mr. Collins, he said: “I think it may be regarded as settled that the United States cannot neglect to employ telegraphic communication with foreign countries, and yet expect to maintain a healthful commerce with them; that the United States cannot hope to inspire respect, confidence and good will abroad, and to secure peace with foreign States, without using the magnetic telegraph when it is possible. I do not know any one object lying within the scope of our foreign relations more directly important than the preservation of peace and friendship with Great Britain and Russia; nor can I conceive of any measure of nationality that would more effectually tend to secure that great object than the construction of this proposed international telegraph.”

The sentiments thus officially expressed by Mr. Seward were responded to by all intelligent men, and the Russian line was the most popular of the enterprises of the period.

The proposition to construct the Russian American line was first formally submitted by Mr. Collins to the Western Union Telegraph Company, Sept. 28, 1863, and again at a meeting of the board of that company in Rochester, N.Y., March 16, 1864.

It was in the form of a letter from Mr. Collins, requesting the acceptance of his project to connect Europe and America by way of the Behring Strait, and offering, if accepted within twenty days, to transfer his rights and privileges under certain conditions.

The terms offered by him were accepted by the board of directors.

Soon after this construction commenced, beginning at New Westminster, B.C., the terminus of the California State Telegraph Company. The line in a few months was carried to the Skeena river. Meanwhile Mr. Serge Abasa, a Russian gentleman who had entered the service of the Western Union Company, was despatched to the Asiatic coast between the mouth of the Amoor and Behring Strait.

Mr. Abasa reported, January 18, 1866:—“Inform the directors, the entire extent between Anadyr and Okhotsk district has been surveyed, but the route of the line has been determined by me in person, and notwithstanding the scarcity of laborers in the country, I have commenced preparatory works in Anudirsk, Jijiginsk, Yamsk, Taousk and Okhotsk.”

In the midst of all this enthusiasm, however, the Great Eastern, at the docks of an English harbor was having a cable coiled in her immense hold for another attempt to lay a submarine line between Europe and America.

When it was announced that at last victory had come, and that the continents were speaking to each other with easy garrulity, the overland line was abandoned.

It was a question of two thousand miles of cable against sixteen thousand miles of land line, half of which was along an uninhabited coast. The advantage of the cable was too palpable; orders were, therefore, issued recalling the men.

Already some eight hundred and fifty miles of line had been built, and was in operation between New Westminster, B.C., and the Skeena River.

The United States Government were duly notified of the stoppage of the work by the Western Union Telegraph Company, to which the Secretary of State wrote the following reply:—

I am not one of those who have been disappointed by the complete and magnificent success of the International Atlantic Telegraph.

I regard it as tributary to an expansion of our national commerce, and ultimately to our political institutions, both of which are important forces in the progress of civilization.

I would not have the Atlantic become dumb again if thereby I could immediately secure the success of the Inter-Continental Pacific enterprise which was committed into your hands. Nevertheless, I confess to a profound disappointment in the suspension of the latter enterprise.

I admit that the reasons you have assigned for the suspension seem to be irresistible. On the other hand, I abate no jot of my former estimate of the importance of the Inter-Continental Pacific Telegraph.

I do not believe that the United States and Russia have given their faith to each other and to the world for the prosecution of that great enterprise in vain.

W. H. Seward.

The loss was very great to the enterprising company who had undertaken the responsibility, but everything was paid up without a murmur. The sum expended amounted to $3,170,292.

That the Western Union was enabled to defray this enormous expenditure without in any way impairing its stock value or credit proved the solidity of the Company even at that period of its history.

The friendly intercourse between the American and Russian authorities in connection with their telegraph project was, no doubt, the direct cause of the subsequent negotiations between the two Governments for the sale and purchase of Alaska, the advantages of which the astute Secretary of State, Mr. Seward, became cognizant, and finally consummated the transfer of that territory from Russia to the great Republic.

In the early days of telegraph enterprise the necessity soon became evident that, in order to provide the requisite facilities for public convenience and for the economical employment of capital, the consolidation of the many struggling companies was self-evident. This policy has been carried out effectually by the Western Union Telegraph Company, which gradually absorbed by lease or purchase upwards of fifty concerns from the date of its organization at Rochester, N.Y., to the removal of its offices to New York. In 1866 this Company had virtually absorbed all rival and opposing companies of any importance.

The commanding position reached by the Western Union in 1866, with its growing ramifications covered by 75,000 miles of wire, has steadily advanced until the present. It embraces in its great system over 1,000,000 miles of wire, over 23,500 separate offices, two atlantic cables, a cable to Cuba with connections throughout the West Indies, and close direct connections with all parts of South America. In Canada the Great Northwestern Telegraph Company, which leased the Montreal and Dominion Telegraph Companies, is controlled by the Western Union Telegraph Company. So also is the Nova Scotia and New Brunswick Telegraph Companies.

In 1872, six years after its reorganization, the Western Union owned in

 

Pole mileage.

Wire mileage.

 

62,033

137,190

In 1882

 

131,060

374,368

” 1892

 

189,576

739,105

” 1902

 

196,115

1,029,984

In 1872

it had

 

5,237

offices

” 1882

”

 

12,068

”

” 1892

”

 

20,700

”

” 1902

”

 

23,567

”

In 1872

it transmitted

 

12,444,497

messages

” 1882

”     ”

 

38,842,247

”

” 1892

”     ”

 

62,387,298

”

” 1902

”     ”

 

69,373,095

”

In 1872

its receipts were

 

$ 8,457,095 77

” 1882

”     ”

 

17,114,165 92

” 1892

”     ”

 

23,706,404 72

” 1902

”     ”

 

28,073,095 10

In 1902, 2,506 miles of poles and 57,218 miles of wires (of which 28,767 miles were copper) and 329 offices have been added to its system.

The increase in the number of messages transmitted in 1902 over 1901 was 3,717,834.

This increase does not include messages sent by brokers, press association and others over wires they lease from the Company, nor railway messages under contracts.

The receipts for the transmission of regular commercial messages increased in 1902 over the previous year $1,348,531.34 and from leased wires $451,749.64.

The maintenance and reconstruction of this enormous system cost the Company in 1902 $3,591,069.17, and $2,188,101.03 were expended in the construction of new lines during the same year.

Through the re-arrangement of the operating forces and substitution of direct working circuits for repeating or relay offices a reduction of $388,746 has been effected and the service besides greatly improved.

In 1903 contracts were made early in that year with various railway companies for the building of 16,800 miles of line.

The capital stock of the Company is $100,000,000, on which a dividend of 5 per cent. per annum is paid, payable quarterly.

The Company has had the good fortune to have secured men of conspicuous ability to direct its affairs from its inception to the present time.

THE POSTAL TELEGRAPH CABLE COMPANY.

This Company was organized in 1881. Its original promoters expected by the use of compound steel and copper wire of large size and the use of the Leggo-automatic and Gray-harmonic apparatus to transmit a large volume of business by the use of so few wires and at such a speed that a uniform and low rate would produce a revenue sufficient to justify a capitalization largely in excess of the cost of the plant.

The name postal was chosen upon the theory that the new plan of construction and method of transmission would bring the property into extensive use in competition with or perhaps as an auxiliary of the Post-Office department.

How far the purpose of the founders was speculative need not now be considered. Probably some of them were sincere in their beliefs, but they were ignorant of the telegraph business, and the fallacy of their plan was soon demonstrated.

In order to help a friend, who had become largely involved in the bonds of the Company, Mr. John W. Mackay found himself in control of the property in 1884. He had in the meantime been induced to interest himself in the organization of a new cable service between Great Britain, France and the United States, of which, through the failure of some of those who were to join in the enterprise, he also came into control. Having “put his hand to the plow,” so to speak, although the business was wholly new to him, he was not the man to turn back, and the more he examined the merit of the business itself, the better satisfied he became that, if it could be properly conducted in its details and the complicated and chaotic condition of the numerous comparatively small, but ruinously competing land line companies could be brought into right form and order, a successful and in every way creditable business worthy of the employment of his ample resources could be built up.

When the Western Union Company, early in 1881, under the leadership of Mr. Jay Gould, acquired control of the Atlantic & Pacific, the American Union and the combined Canadian telegraphs, and formed an alliance with the cable companies, it then seemed as if competition in the telegraph business had come to an end, and many of its ablest men were of that opinion, but by the end of 1884 more extensive and more injurious competition had been built up in the United States than had ever existed before, and the possibility of bringing order out of such chaos seemed remote, but Mr. Mackay was not discouraged.

Early in 1884 he secured the services of Mr. George G. Ward, who had been brought up in the business of the telegraph in England, and had been in the service of the cable companies almost from their inception, and was Superintendent of the Direct United States Cable Company from 1875 to 1883. Under his direction the first of the Commercial Cable Company’s cables was completed in December, 1884.

Early in that month Mr. Albert B. Chandler entered Mr. Mackay’s personal service, having been assured of his purpose to permanently establish a telegraph system upon sound and just principles respecting which they were in full accord.

Mr. Chandler had served in almost every capacity known to the telegraph business, from operator in 1858 to President in 1879, and had won the confidence of proprietors of telegraph property, of their officials and employees, and the public as a practical, energetic and conservative manager. Under his guidance as receiver, the mortgage which had been placed upon the property of the Postal Telegraph Company under complete misapprehension of its earning power, was foreclosed.

The Postal Telegraph Cable Company, of which he became President and General Manager early in 1886, was organized. Extremely complicated and vexatious litigation, chiefly a legacy from the smaller companies, was gradually removed, and when, near the close of 1887, the various fragmentary companies had been acquired by either the Western Union or the Postal Companies, competition, based upon the cutting of rates, rebates and other wasteful practices which could only end in destruction, was promptly terminated by the competing companies.

Since then the telegraph business has been carried on in the United States in a more business-like and progressive manner than ever before.

There is so little friction between the two companies apparent to the public, that it is sometimes charged, or at least suspected, they are in actual alliance, but such is not the case. Competition for patronage was never so sharp as now, but it is based upon excellence of facilities and service and treatment of patrons, and not upon any form of buying patronage with money, which has proven the ruin of so many companies whose chief purpose seemed to be to do the most harm in the shortest time, in order to sell or lease their property for more than it was fairly worth.

Probably no two men ever had more complete control of large interests not their own during their formative period than has been the case of Mr. Chandler and Mr. Ward in their respective positions, and to Mr. Mackay’s implicit confidence in them may be attributed much of the success that has been attained by the Commercial Cable and Postal Telegraph Companies, which are now practically one property.

Most of the principal officers of these companies have been brought to their present positions by these gentlemen, and the business is conducted with singular harmony and efficiency.

Mr. Mackay, who was from its inception President of the Commercial Cable Company, assumed also the Presidency of the Postal Company early in 1901 at the earnest request of Mr. Chandler, who desired to be relieved, partly by reason of somewhat impaired health, and partly because of his preference to spend much of his time in his Vermont home. Upon his retirement from active charge, he was made Chairman of the Board of Directors, and in this capacity renders a variety of services and exercises as a useful influence. He is still, as he has been for many years, a Vice-President of the Commercial Cable Company, of which Mr. Ward continues as first Vice-President and General Manager.

Mr. Clarence H. Mackay has succeeded his father as President of the Commercial Cable and Postal Telegraph Companies, and entered with great pride and energy into the project of laying a cable to Hawaii and the Philippine Islands as projected by his father.

These very important links in the circuit round the globe adds further power and opportunity to the Postal Company, whose activity seems now to have fairly begun, and being laid upon sound foundations of finance, construction and methods of business is evidently destined to continue an increasing success.

The following figures show the pole and wire mileage, number of offices operated or reached, and number of messages handled in 1903 by the Postal Telegraph Cable Company, its subsidiary companies and direct connections in North America:

Pole mileage

48,801

Wire     ”

276,244

Points reached

19,977

A

Messages handled

21,600,577

Number of new offices added in 1903

3,729

A 1,782 of these are reached by no other company.

The properties in the United States owned and controlled by the Postal Company represent an investment in lines and equipment aggregating about $25,000,000.

In order to perpetuate the name of his father, the virtual founder of the Commercial Cable and Postal Telegraph Companies, Mr. Clarence H. Mackay, President of the United Companies, recently addressed a circular letter to the stockholders inviting the deposit of their stock for exchange for shares in a trusteeship created under the Massachusetts laws with the name of “The Mackay Companies.”

The capitalization of the Commercial Cable Company, which also owns the Postal Telegraph and Cable Company, is $15,000,000, upon which 8 per cent. dividends are paid.

“The Mackay Companies” has authorized for exchange for this stock $30,000,000 par value of its own 4 per cent. cumulative preferred shares and a like amount of common shares, so that each stockholder in the Cable Company will receive for his holdings 200 per cent. in the common shares of the new concern.

The Trustees are Clarence H. Mackay, John I. Waterbury, President of the Manhattan Trust Company of New York; T. Jefferson Coolidge, jun., President of the Old Colony Trust Company of Boston, both directors of the Commercial Cable Company, and Mr. W. Cook, Counsel to the Company.

The plan is practically consummated.

Mr. Mackay said in reply to an enquiry that this action on his part was the outcome of his desire to put on a permanent basis the properties created by his father, and to provide for all contingencies that might arise from death or changes in commercial conditions. He will continue to devote his entire time to the active management of the Company.

The Commercial Cable Company owns and operates four transatlantic cable lines and its connecting lines between Nova Scotia and New York, and Ireland and France, in all some fourteen thousand miles of cable, with also the cable from San Francisco to Honolulu and thence to the Philippines.

The Mackay system has an exclusive connection with the Canadian Pacific telegraphs and with the all red cable line to Australia and New Zealand.

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS OF AMERICA.
(London Daily Express.)

With the evolution of the United States into a world power there has grown up across the Atlantic the greatest news-gathering agency ever imagined or created, whose despatches are momentarily being read by nearly half a hundred million people, and upon which Europe itself is sometimes dependent for the first word or whisper of what has happened within her own gates. The name of the agency which supplies America with its news is the Associated Press.

Startling in its scope, romantic in its history, the Associated Press has now, probably, more influence upon daily international events than any other agent, except the will of the peoples, which it helps to form.

Sixty years ago, when America was in industrial and political childhood, its papers depended for news upon Associated Press post-boys, who, after meeting incoming schooners at New York, rode hot haste, or leisurely, according to the character of the rider and nature of the beast, to the various papers inland.

To-day the Associated Press sends over 31,000 miles of private telegraph lines, which form a network across the continent of America, thousands and thousands of columns, supplying about 3,000 American papers with news of what is happening from minute to minute in America and abroad.

NETWORK OF WIRES.

In addition, the Associated Press keeps Europe and the rest of the world informed of the news of the great Republic, gathered and distributed by over 2,000 employees, who are supported on an annual revenue of over half a million sterling.

The Associated Press was started about 1840, when seven of the New York daily papers combined to reduce the expense of news by post-boys.

The organization at present consists of over 700 of the leading American daily papers. Each paper has a vote whereby fifteen directors are elected. These in turn elect officers. Through contract relations 2,300 other papers are granted the Associated Press News service, making a total of 3,000 out of the 3,200 daily papers published in America.

These 3,000 papers have a daily issue of 15,000,000, and each paper is estimated by an impartial statistician to pass through the hands of three persons; hence it is estimated that every despatch sent by the Associated Press reaches 45,000 pairs of eyes.

The Associated Press is not in itself a profit-making concern, being purely co-operative, and has nothing whatever to do with any advertising. Its papers, which include those of all languages, creeds and politics, are assessed according to the expenditure involved in gathering and distributing the home and foreign news.

Over its own telegraph wires the Associated Press sends through its own telegraph operators, east, west, north and south, the news of the moment.

SOME QUICK WORK.

This is received in its branch offices in all the important towns throughout the United States, and transmitted to the papers. The result of last year’s Derby was in the New York office of the Associated Press, nearly 3,000 miles away, twenty-five seconds after “Rock Sand” had passed the winning post, and was published in San Francisco, about 7,000 miles from Epsom, two minutes afterwards.

Interesting as is this system whereby the news of America and the outside world is simultaneously distributed to the American papers—a system of mechanical ingenuity and organization that would require several columns to describe adequately—it must be almost of secondary importance to English readers compared with the influence wielded by this American news agency over matters British and European.

The Associated Press has treaty relations with the three great European news agencies, viz., Reuter’s, which supplies Great Britain, Greater Britain, all the British possessions, Egypt and the Far East, except Tonquin, with their news. Havas, which covers the newsfield of France, and through its subsidiary agencies all the Latin countries, including South America; and Wolff’s, which from Berlin controls and distributes the news of Germany and all the Teutonic countries, and, through allies, the news of Russia, Austria-Hungary, the Slav countries, Scandinavia and Danish territory.

These three European agencies in turn rely upon tributary agencies such as the Telbureau, in St. Petersburg; the Stefani, in Rome; the Fabrin, in Madrid, and the Corresponz, in Vienna—all official voices of Government opinion.

NO SALES IN ENGLAND.

These European agencies and their tributaries constitute one great clearing-house of news. Havas gathers the news of France primarily into Paris; thence it radiates throughout the world: to Reuter for England, to the Associated Press for America, to Stefani for Italy, and so on. In this way a budget comprising the news of the world appears day by day.

Not content with receiving for its papers the news of Europe through the agencies already mentioned, the Associated Press has established in practically all the European capitals, bureaus of its own. In London the Associated Press keeps a large staff, though no attempt is made to sell a single item of news to English papers. All their work is to gather news and send it to America.

In London the staff of the Associated Press, as it is familiarly called, is under the direct supervision of Mr. Walter Neef, who is in charge of the entire European service.

The correspondents resident on the continent are in close touch with the Chancelleries, and are welcomed at their respective Foreign Offices with a kindness that speaks eloquently for the friendship these European nations are willing to offer to America.

The first news of the arbitration treaty that sealed the Anglo-French “entente” was cabled to New York by the Associated Press from Paris, and re-cabled to London, where it was promptly denied by no less an authority than the Times. The first news of the recent Anglo-Spanish treaty came to England from the Associated Press in New York, having been cabled from its London office.

When Martinique was devastated by a volcanic eruption, which included among its victims the correspondent of the Associated Press at St. Pierre, the Fort de France representative called on Mr. Melville E. Stone, the General Manager, then in New York, for assistance.

Mr. Stone promptly placed a steamer at his service, and the other correspondents of the Associated Press in places of danger were rescued, and lived to tell to the world the story of that hideous visitation.

This cost the Associated Press about £5,000, and that is the sum it usually expends on the international yacht races for the America Cup, which are reported for England and America by correspondents and half a dozen special boats equipped with wireless telegraphic instruments.

When Pope Leo died, London, Paris, Berlin and other European capitals got the first intimation of his death from New York. The Associated Press correspondent in Rome had telegraphed the news on which all the world waited, and it had arrived in America exactly nine minutes after having been sent out from the Vatican, which is nearly two miles from the central telegraphic office in Rome.

This gave the Associated Press time to re-cable the news to Europe before it had arrived from another source. On that day the Associated Press published in its American papers over one page of closely printed description of the events centering round the Vatican, all of which was cabled from Rome after 4 o’clock on the preceding afternoon.

When Cardinal Sarto was elected Pope, the news again came to Europe in the same way—from the Associated Press office in New York. The decision of the Alaska Boundary Commission was cabled by the Associated Press to New York and Canada on a Saturday, and re-cabled back to England for the Sunday papers, though it was not officially announced in London until the following Tuesday.

To come to still more recent events, the news of the transmission of Russia’s final note to Japan was received in London from the St. Petersburg correspondent of the Associated Press via New York, while despatches from the same agency announced in America the rupture of diplomatic relations and the practical outbreak of war as early as Saturday afternoon on February 6.

A MANAGERIAL GENIUS.

Mr. Melville E. Stone, the General Manager and presiding genius of the Associated Press, whose indomitable “grit”—as they say in America—was the chief factor in the victory won when the Associated Press fought for five years for supremacy in America, has recently paid a flying visit to England, after being received by the Czar in St. Petersburg and by the Kaiser in Berlin.

Several other crowned heads have been pleased to consult with Mr. Stone, who naturally is one of the most prominent of Americans. He has been decorated by the King of Italy, the President of the French Republic, and the Kaiser.

As a result of Mr. Stone’s personal suggestion, the Czar has removed the censorship on all news that leaves Russia for abroad.

In a few hours the head of the American news agency was able to convince the Ruler of All the Russias that the censorship was not only useless, but absolutely harmful to the Empire. The tradition of centuries has been swept away, and, on the word of the Czar, all the world will be free to have the individual opinions of correspondents who may care to come into Russian domain.

No country is likely to benefit more by this decision of the Czar than Russia itself; no public is likely to be more slow to realize the genuineness of the change than that of Europe. The extent of the revolution effected can scarcely be gauged except by those who know Russia well.

When asked the other day to what principles this American news agency owed its ascendancy in the world, Mr. Stone laconically replied: “Accuracy of statement and speed in transmission.”

Of such is the Associated Press of America.

S. F. B. MORSE.

PROF. S. F. B. MORSE.

Born April 27, 1791, at Charleston, Mass. His father, the Rev. Jedediah Morse, author of the well-known book entitled “American Geography” and compiler of the “Universal Gazette.” His mother was Elizabeth Ann Breese.

At seven years of age young Morse entered the preparatory school at Andover, Mass., and at 14 the Freshman Class at Yale, graduating in 1810.

The faculty which first developed in him was the artistic. He provided himself with brush and paint and commenced taking on ivory the portraits of his more opulent companions. He found in painting an inspiration, and selected it as his chosen profession.

He placed himself under the tutelage of Washington Allston, one of America’s famous artists, who encouraged him in the choice he had made. He accompanied Allston to Europe in 1811, bearing introductions to some of England’s most distinguished men.

Benjamin West was then in the zenith of his fame. It was a proud day for Morse when he met West and was welcomed to his studio. A mutual attachment sprang up between them, and West became thereafter his friend and counsellor.

Meanwhile West’s friendship and the introductory letters he had brought with him introduced him to men of influence and reputation.

Some of their names are historic. It was something for a young man to meet such men as William Wilberforce and Henry Thornton, Zacharias MacCauley, father of the great historian, Lord Glenelg and many others, all of whom gave a warm and cordial welcome.

Mr. Morse’s instincts were refined and his companionships choice. He had for his room-mate in London the gifted Leslie, then, like himself, struggling for fame in a sublime art. For companions he had such men as Benjamin West, Copley, Allston, Coleridge, Rogers, Charles Lamb and others famous in art and literature.

He wrote thus to his mother in 1812:

“My passion for my art is firmly rooted, that I am confident; no human power could destroy it. The more I study the greater I think is its claim to the appellation of divine. I am going to begin a picture of the death of Hercules. The figure is to be large as life.”

The picture when finished was shown to West who warmly praised it, and in May, 1813, it was accepted for exhibition in the rooms of the Royal Academy, at Somerset House, then regarded as a very marked token of favor.

A new and unexpected triumph grew out of this painting. In executing it he pursued the plan of conscientious artists who first model in clay the figure to be painted in order to ensure strict anatomical proportions and accuracy.

This cast, to which he attached no special value, was seen by West, and was induced through his kind criticism to send this model to the Society of Arts in competition for a prize in sculpture.

This venture proved successful, and was publicly presented with the annual prize and a gold medal by the Duke of Norfolk.

In the British Art Reports the “Dying Hercules” is placed among the nine best paintings in a gallery of nearly one thousand, and among them the works of Turner, Northcote, Lawrence and Wilkie.

When young Morse went to Europe he was dependent to some extent upon his father for his resources. He was to be away three years. It was now 1815, one year longer than his limit, but he was ambitious and felt he had the power within him. He determined to compete for the chief prize offered by the Royal Academy for a subject he had chosen, “The Judgment of Jupiter in the case of Apollo, Marpessa and Idas.” The prize was a gold medal and fifty guineas.

The picture was completed, and hoping he would be allowed to compete in his absence, he offered it for that purpose to West, who, struck with its merits, advised him to stay, but this he could not do, and the rules cut him off. The premium had to be delivered to the successful artist in person.

A petition to make his case an exception was declined, and “Jupiter” went with its author to America.

He arrived in Boston, Oct. 18, and, without delay, rented a studio. He had his “Jupiter” on exhibition, and his own fame had preceded him. Many crowded the studio to see both the artist and the painting.

Society opened its doors, but this was all. No one offered to buy his picture or give him an order in the line of high art he had marked out for himself.

After various experiences Mr. Morse settled in New York, founding the National Academy of the Arts of Design, of which in 1827 he became President, and to which office he was annually elected until 1845. He delivered the first course of lectures on the fine arts ever delivered in America, and they were notable for suggestiveness and learning.

As an historical painter Morse stood next to Allston. Had the country demanded art of a very high order it is probable that Morse would have engaged his attention as an historical painter, but the nation was too young, knew little of art and cared less. Morse was honored, but his art kept him poor. He longed, however, too, for the opportunity to try his power on some national work.

He conceived the idea of painting the interior of Representatives Chamber in the Capital at Washington, and devoted eighteen months to this. The picture measured eight feet by nine, and contained a great variety of figures. Its exhibition, however, caused him serious loss. The painting is in the possession of the President of the Arts of Design in New York.

He painted a picture of General Lafayette, who was at the time in the United States, and with whom he by this means formed a warm friendship.

In 1829 he again visited Europe, spending three years among artists and collectors of art in England, Italy and France.

In Paris he painted the interior of the Louvre, copying in miniature the chief pictures hanging on its walls. In the fall of 1832 he returned to America and resumed the Presidency of the Academy of Design, to which he was regularly elected annually during his absence.

When an artist was employed to fill with a picture one of the vacant panels in the rotunda of the Capitol, American artists, without exception, considered Morse best entitled to the honor, but great disappointment was felt when another was selected.

It was on his return from Europe on board the packet-ship “Sully” the idea of the electric telegraph engaged his attention, but it occupied many years of his time to bring it to practical shape. He would have accomplished this much earlier had he not been hampered from lack of means.

When his invention was matured and its usefulness perceived and applied, he was fortunate enough at last to reap the reward of many years of struggle and anxiety he had undergone.

On June 5, 1856, with the telegraph established in America, he again left for Europe. In London he met with great joy his artist friends: West, Landsear, Leslie and many others distinguished in science and art, all of whom warmly congratulated him on the brilliant career which had been opened up to him. In their estimation he had honored in this new realm the old art which he loved and elevated.

Morse’s development from an artist into an inventor was to them no marvel. He was still giving utterance to natural forces as when a few years before he combined his colors on canvass and produced his “Hercules.”

After enjoying for a time this pleasant reunion with his old friends in London, he also met and consulted with the English electricians, Glass, Bright, Whitehouse and others in respect to the proposed Atlantic cable in which experiments were then being made as to its possibility.

He then left for the continent. On his arrival at Copenhagen, whither he first directed his course, he was introduced to Frederick VII. King of Denmark, who, with his Court, received him with every mark of honor. There he visited the study chamber of Oersted, whose discovery of the reflection of a needle by a galvanic current was the dawning fact which eventually made his invention possible.

Continuing his journey to Russia, he found on arriving at the quay at Peterhoff the Imperial carriages with their usual retinue of footmen wearing the Royal livery in waiting. By these he and his party were driven to the Imperial Palace, where, with every demonstration of respect, he was received by the Emperor Alexander II., by whom he was most kindly congratulated as one of the world’s benefactors.

He next proceeded to Berlin. Here he was received with great cordiality by Humboldt, who welcomed him to his house and treated him during his stay with every mark of respect.

At his departure the great author of Cosmos presented him with an Imperial photograph of himself, on the margin of which he wrote:

“To Mr. S. F. B. Morse, whose philosophic and useful labors have rendered his name illustrious in two worlds. The homage of the high and affectionate esteem of

Alexander Humboldt.”

This memorial of one so great and gifted he greatly valued and carefully preserved.

Prussia, about the same time, presented to him the Prussian golden medal for scientific merit.

After passing through many places of interest in Europe, in all of which he was received with distinguished honor, Professor Morse returned to London the latter part of September, 1856.

The public at that time were much interested in the subject of the proposed submarine telegraph connection with America.

A plateau extending across the bed of the ocean between the two continents had been discovered under a survey conducted by Lieutenant Maury for the United States Government, and which was regarded as extremely favorable for the projected enterprise.

Professor Morse, in concert with Mr. Whitehouse and Mr. Bright, the English electricians, conducted a series of experiments and sent signals through 2,000 miles of insulated wire.

These experiments removed any apprehension respecting the retardation of the electric current over this long length of wire.

It now became a question of capital and nautical engineering. The first was quickly pledged, the latter was not doubted.

While in London thus occupied, Professor Morse was tendered a banquet, which he promptly accepted.

The dinner was given Oct. 9, 1856. The Chairman was Mr. Fothergill Cooke, who, in presenting the guest of the evening, used the following language:—

“Gentlemen, I was consulted only a few months ago on the subject of a telegraph for a country in which no telegraph at present exists.

“I recommended the system of Professor Morse. I believe that system to be one of the simplest in the world, and in that lies its permanence and certainty. (Cheers.) It is a great thing to say, and I do so after twenty years’ experience, that Professor Morse’s system is one of the simplest that has ever been, and I think ever will be, conceived. (Cheers.) He stands alone in America as the original and carrier-out of a grand conception.

“We know that America is an enormous country, but I think we have a right to quarrel with Mr. Morse for not being content with giving the benefit of it to his country, but that he extended it to Canada and Newfoundland, and even beyond there. His system has been adopted over all Europe.

“The nuisance is that we in England are obliged to communicate by means of his system, and he threatens to go further still, and promises, if we do not, he will carry out a communication between England and Newfoundland across the Atlantic.

“I almost envy Professor Morse for having forced from an unwilling rival a willing acknowledgment of his services.

“May he long live to enjoy the high reputation he has attained throughout the world.” (Long continued cheers.)

Other speeches equally complimentary followed.

It was on the day of this banquet Mr. Morse received from Paris the announcement that the Emperor Napoleon III. had made him a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor.

Martin Farquhar Tupper sent him a few days afterwards the following lines referring to the banquet:

“A good and generous spirit ruled the hour, Old jealousies were drowned in brotherhood, Philanthropy rejoiced that skill and power, Servants to science, compass all men’s good.

“And over all religions banner stood Upheld by thee, true patriarch of the plans Which in two hemispheres was chimed, to shower Mercies from God on universal man.

“Yes, the electric chain from East to West, More than mere metal, more than mammon, can Binds us together, kinsmen in the best As most affectionate and frankest bond, Brothers as one, and looking far beyond, The world in an electric union blest.”

Although the Morse telegraph had been generally adopted in continental Europe, no compensation had hitherto been paid to the inventor.

Professor Morse, therefore, was much gratified in receiving the following letter while in Paris:

“Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
“Paris, September 1, 1858.

“Sir,—It is with a lively satisfaction that I have the honor to announce to you that a sum of 400,000 francs will be remitted to you in four annuities in the name of France, of Austria, of Belgium, of the Netherlands, of Piedmont, of Russia, of the Holy See, of Sweden, of Tuscany and of Turkey, as an honorary gratuity, and as a reward altogether personal of your useful labors.

“Nothing can better mark, than this collective act of reward, the sentiment of public gratitude which your invention has justly excited.

“The Emperor has already given you a testimonial of his high esteem, when he conferred on you, more than a year ago, the decoration of a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor.

“You will find a new mark of it in the initiative, which His Majesty wished that his Government should take in conjunction, and the decision that I charge myself to bring to your knowledge, is a brilliant proof of the eager and sympathetic adhesion that his proposition has met with from the States I have just enumerated.

“I pray you to accept on this occasion, sir, my personal congratulations as well as the assurance of my sentiments of the most distinguished consideration.

S. Walewski.”

Professor Morse, in addition to this handsome gratuity, received tokens of honor from each of the contributing nationalities:—

From France, the Legion of Honor; Prussia, the Gold Medal of Scientific Merit; Austria, a gold medal; Spain, Knight Commander de Numero of the Order of Isabella the Catholic; Portugal, Knight of the Tower and Sword; Italy, Saints Lazaro and Mauritis; Denmark, Knight of the Danneborg; Turkey, decoration in diamonds of the “Nisham Iftichar,” or Order of Glory.

He was also the recipient of many other marks of honor of a more private character.

As early as 1835 Mr. Morse was elected a corresponding member of the Historical Institute of France.

In 1837 he was made a member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Belgium.

July 15, 1839, the Silver Medal of the Academy of Industry was voted to him for the invention of the telegraph.

The National Institute for the promotion of science, established at Washington, made him a corresponding member in 1841, and in 1842 the Gold Medal of the American Institute was awarded him for successful experiments in subaqueous telegraphy.

In 1845 he was made a corresponding member of the Archeological Society in Belgium, and in 1848 he became a member of the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia. The following year he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Boston.

Many other tokens of honor was accorded him from time to time.

While in Paris in 1867, the year of the International Exposition, Professor Morse served on the Committee of Telegraphic Appliances, and wrote an exhaustive report on the merits of telegraphic contrivances.

He also prepared with great minuteness a complete narrative of his own inventions.

Covered with honors, and having long overstepped the three score years and ten, Professor Morse returned to America and arrived at his rural home in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., where he was affectionately welcomed by friends and neighbors.

Shortly after his return a number of influential and representative gentlemen of New York felt that something should be done by his fellow countrymen to honor the distinguished inventor and welcome him home.

He was tendered a banquet, which was held at Delmonico’s on Dec. 30, 1868.

The banqueting room was beautifully decorated the chair being occupied by the Hon. Salmon P. Chase. After the dinner the toasts to the Queen of Great Britain and the Army and Navy had been responded to by Mr. Thornton, the British Minister, and General McDowell, the Chairman, said:

“Gentlemen, you will now allow me to invite your attention to the next regular toast. God has given understanding to man to be employed for His glory in promoting the happiness of His creatures and in nothing that belongs to earth can the human understanding be more worthily employed than in the researches of science and in the works of invention.

“Science and invention may be called, perhaps not unfitly, the creators and servants of civilization. Sometimes invention by a sort of intuition of principles has grasped results and seemed to anticipate science.

“More usually science by the patient investigation of truth and the discovery of principles has prepared the way for the triumph of invention. All invention is realized science, and this is especially true of the telegraph.

“I will not fatigue your attention with ancient and modern devices for communicating intelligence at a distance, but it seems proper to notice here how many men of science, and of what various nationalities have contributed to that wonderful art and instrument by which the world is now bound in electric chains.

“Many shining names will occur to any one familiar with the history of the telegraph. Among them I can pause to mention only those of Volta, the Italian, to whose discoveries the battery is due; Oersted, the Dane, who first discovered the magnetic properties of the electric current; Ampère and Arago, the Frenchmen who prosecuted still further and most successfully similar researches.

“Then Sturgeon, the Englishman, who may be said to have made the first electric magnet, next, and not least, illustrious. Among these illustrious men, our countryman, Henry, who first showed the practicability of producing electro-magnetic effects by means of the galvanic current at distances indefinitely great, and finally Steinheil, the German, who, after the invention of the telegraph in all material parts was complete, taught, in 1837, the use of the ground as part of the circuit.

“These are some of those searchers for truth whose names will be long held in grateful memory, and not among the least of their titles to gratitude and remembrance will be the discoveries which contributed to the possibility of the modern telegraph. But these discoveries only made the telegraph possible, they offered the brilliant opportunity. There was needed a man to bring into being the new art and the new interest to which they pointed. And it is the providential distinction and splendid honor of the eminent American who is our guest to-night, that happily prepared by previous acquirements and pursuits. He was quick to seize the opportunity and give to the world the first recording telegraph; fortunate man, thus to link his name forever with the greatest wonder and the greatest benefit of the age.

“But his work was not done when in 1832 he conceived the idea and devised the plan of the first telegraph.

“Long years of patient labor and constant perseverance were needed to bring the telegraph into use. Its first message was not transmitted until 1844. Even then, and indeed before that year with something like prophetic inspiration, he grasped the future and predicted that telegraphic connection between Europe and America, which it was reserved for another distinguished American, kindred in spirit and kindred in renown and illustrious, to accomplish. Here I must pause, not, however, without uniting all your aspirations in the fervent wish that our honored guest may live long and happily to enjoy the applause, the gratitude and the reverence of mankind, which he has so honorably won.

“Gentlemen, I now give you ‘Our Guest,’ Prof. S. F. B. Morse, the man of science who explored the laws of nature, wrested electricity from her embrace and made it a missionary in the cause of human progress.”

The venerable Professor then arose amid tumultuous applause. He was laboring under deep feeling, too strong to be concealed.

As he did so the whole company made cheer follow cheer in testimony of their admiration and respect. At last in a clear voice he addressed the company at considerable length, reciting the history of the telegraph, and concluding as follows:

“In casting my eyes around I am most agreeably greeted by faces that carry me back in memory to the days of my art struggles in this city, the early days of the National Academy of Design.

“Brothers (for you are yet brothers if I have left your ranks), you well know it cost me many a pang. I did not leave you until I saw you well established and entering on that career of prosperity due to your own just appreciation of the important duties belonging to your profession.

“You have an institution which now holds, and (if true to yourselves) will continue to hold, a high position in the estimation of this appreciative community.

“If I have stepped aside from art to tread what seems another path, there is a good precedent for it in the lives of artists. Science and art are not opposed.

“Leonardo da Vinci could find congenial relaxation in scientific researches and invention, and our own Fulton was a painter, whose scientific studies resulted in steam navigation.

“It may not be generally known that the important invention of the percussion cap is due to the scientific recreations of the English painter, Shaw; but I must not further detain you from more instructive speech. One word only in closing.

“I have claimed for America the origination of the modern telegraph system of the world; impartial history, I think, will support that claim.

“‘Not unto us, not unto us, But to God be the glory What hath God wrought.’”

Mr. Morse’s address was listened to with deep attention, and greeted at the close with great and continued applause.

Among the last, but not the least, of the honors paid Professor Morse, was the erection of his statue in Central Park, New York, by the telegraph operators of the United States and the British provinces. The ceremony of unveiling the monument took place on June 10, 1871.

Many delegates were present from all parts of the country to witness the function.

In the evening a reception was held in the Academy of Music, at which the aged inventor was present, when he bade farewell to “his children of the telegraph.”

He did not long survive this event. He passed away full of years and honors on April 2, 1872.

The Telegraph in Canada

Although the electric telegraph system of Cooke and Wheatstone had been established as early as 1837 in England, yet no move was made to adopt it in Canada.

After the Morse experimental line between Baltimore and Washington had proved a success and was thrown open for public business and wires were being carried to the leading business centres in the United States and a line of telegraph was projected connecting New York City with Buffalo, public interest was aroused in Canada, more especially in the Western section.

Mr. Morse had failed, or probably thought Canada at that time not important enough, to take out a patent for his invention, hence it was open to any or all who chose to use it.

In 1846 the first Canadian Telegraph Company was formed with a capital of $16,000; its object was to connect Toronto and Hamilton with the American lines at Buffalo. The corporate name of the Company was the “Toronto, Hamilton, Niagara & St. Catharines Electro-Magnetic Company.”

A line was speedily erected and the desired connection made.

At the end of this year action was taken at Montreal to organize a telegraph company.

The Origin of the Montreal Telegraph Company

At a meeting of the Council of the Montreal Board of Trade, held on Dec. 26, 1846, a Committee was appointed to enquire into the best means of extending the use of the electric telegraph system into Canada. The Committee reported favorably of the project.

After giving the subject full and earnest consideration, on December 29, three days afterwards, a general meeting was convened for the purpose of forming a company to connect Montreal and Toronto by a line of electro-magnetic telegraph, the capital to be £12,500 in 1,250 shares of £10 each.

Among those present were L. H. Holton, D. L. Macpherson, Fred A. Wilson, John Glass, T. W. Middleton, Thos. Tait, Henry Starnes, John Young, Henry Joseph, I. Taylor, William Murray, Andrew Shaw, George Elder, jun., and Henry Chapman.

On motion of L. H. Holton, seconded by D. L. Macpherson, Mr. Young took the chair.

The Chairman stated the object of the meeting to be the organization of a company by parties in favor of connecting Montreal and Toronto by electro-magnetic telegraph, and who had proposed to take stock in the company to be formed for that purpose in accordance with the recommendation of the Board of Trade.

It was moved by Mr. Elder and seconded by Mr. Starnes, that the meeting do organize itself into a company to be entitled the Montreal & Toronto Magnetic Telegraph Company. This was carried.

It was then moved by Mr. Chapman, seconded by Mr. Tait, that Messrs. Shaw, Glass, Elder and Young be a Provisional Committee to conduct the affairs of the Company.

Moved by Mr. Holton, seconded by Mr. Macpherson, that the Provisional Committee be empowered to enter into all necessary arrangements for the early construction of the proposed line of telegraph, the whole of the shares having been taken up.

At a meeting held on January 22, 1847, it was moved by Mr. Lindsay that Andrew Shaw, John Young, John Glass, George Elder, jun., and Henry Chapman be directors for the ensuing year—Carried.

On the 6th of March, 1847, Mr. O. S. Wood was appointed Superintendent of the Company, and immediately took charge of the Company’s operations.

The charter was obtained on July 28, 1847, under the amended title of the Montreal Telegraph Company.

Andrew Shaw was elected its first President, Mr. James Dakers, Secretary.

In securing the services of Mr. Wood the new Company was exceedingly fortunate. He had been associated with Professor Morse, was his first pupil, and undoubtedly the most experienced telegraph man of that day in America, a man of great ability and of the highest personal character.

Proceedings were immediately begun in construction work.

The construction of the line between Montreal and Toronto and Montreal and Quebec was awarded to Livingston & Wells, the well-known express forwarders, and by them pushed on with the utmost vigor under Mr. Wood’s supervision and direction. When the work was completed it was found to be satisfactory in every particular, both in material and workmanship, and became a model for future work of the kind.

At the close of 1847, 540 miles of line had been erected, 9 offices opened and 33,000 messages transmitted.

In 1851 Sir Hugh Allan, who had early interested himself in the fortunes of the Montreal Telegraph Company, became its President. This office he held uninterruptedly until his death in 1882.

Immediately on assuming office, Sir Hugh Allan, in concert with Mr. Wood, projected important extensions of the lines of the Company, and in a short time the most remote towns and villages were placed in telegraphic connection with the chief business centres of the country.

The Montreal Telegraph Company became one of the leading institutions in Canada. Many companies were started to compete in the same line of business, but in no long time were doomed to failure, as they neither had the skill, the men nor the money to enable them to succeed in opposing their more formidable rival. After placing the Company on a high pedestal of efficiency, and after 18 years of strenuous exertions on its behalf, Mr. O. S. Wood retired from the management in 1865, carrying with him the esteem and respect of the Company and the business community generally.

Mr. James Dakers was then placed in charge of the eastern, and Mr. Dwight of the western section of the Company’s territory.

The advance and prosperity of the Company continued, as the foundation had been well and truly laid by a capable workman.

In 1875 it had in operation 20,000 miles of wire, 1,400 offices and 2,000 employees.

During the preceding year some 2,000,000 messages were transmitted in addition to millions of words in press despatches, and the capital increased to $2,000,000, at which figure it still remains.

In 1881 this splendid old Company was forced by circumstances which confronted them to lease their business to another company.

The names of Sir Hugh Allan, O. S. Wood and James Dakers will always be inseparably associated with the history of the Montreal Telegraph Company.

The first company to compete against the Montreal Telegraph Company was the Grand Trunk Telegraph Company in 1852–3, lines were erected from Buffalo to Quebec, following the lines of the older Company.

After some years of an unprofitable business they sold out lock, stock and barrel to the Montreal Telegraph Company for $11,000.

The next venture was by the Provincial Telegraph Company, the Canadian ally of the United States Telegraph Company, which was then spreading its lines over the United States; but was in 1866 absorbed by the Western Union; this ended the career of the Provincial, and its plant was purchased and transferred to the Montreal Company for a nominal sum.

Some two years later the Dominion Telegraph Company took form with a capital of $700,000. This Company proved the most serious opponent of the Montreal Telegraph Company, but was never a financial success. In 1878 it was leased by the American Union Telegraph Company, an opponent of the Western Union. Both Companies were acquired by the latter Company, which was busily occupied in securing a monopoly of the telegraph business, and succeeded, in a great measure, in accomplishing its object.

The Dominion Telegraph Company was transferred to the Great North Western Telegraph Company of Canada, a subsidiary concern of the American Company in 1881.

In the lower provinces a move for telegraphic facilities were made almost concurrent with those of Western Canada.

During 1847–48 the Press Association ran a steamer between Digby, N.S., and Portland, Me., to carry news received by the steamships touching at Halifax, and from thence sent overland by express riders to Digby, 149 miles, and was sometimes accomplished in less than eight hours and a half, or at the rate of 17½ miles an hour, to be despatched from thence by steamer to Portland and telegraphed to New York from there in advance of the Cunard steamers at Boston.

This service was managed with great vigor. The express rider was the great event of the day as he flew past Annapolis, his horse white with foam and the whole population lining the road. A gun was fired to announce his arrival to the captain of the steamer immediately anchors were weighed. Steam raised, the pilot took his place at the wheel and the small boat manned by athletic seamen was sent ashore to receive the bag of the express rider, as at full speed he arrived at the dock.

This process, though full of éclat and splendidly performed, was expensive, and the Associated Express agents, offered to guarantee the payment of a liberal subsidy to any company who would construct a line of telegraph between Calais, Me., and Halifax, which could be available for press matter.

The Nova Scotia Government came to the rescue and erected a line of 125 miles in length from Halifax to Amherst to meet the American and New Brunswick lines. This line was completed on Nov. 9, 1849, and Halifax was for the first time connected telegraphically with New York.

On Oct. 4, 1847, a telegraph company was formed in New Brunswick with $40,000 capital. Lines connecting St. John and intervening points with Calais and Portland were completed Jan. 1, 1849, and connection with the Nova Scotian Government line at Amherst was made.

The lines in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia were acquired by the American Telegraph Company and later by the Western Union Telegraph Company, by whom they are now operated.

In 1847 the British North American Telegraph Company was organized for the purpose of connecting Quebec and the lower provinces by wire, but the wire got no further than River du Loup, where it terminated for a time.

A second company, bearing a similar name, erected a line between Montreal and Quebec; both properties were afterwards transferred to the Montreal Telegraph Company.

In 1849 the Montreal & Troy Company built a line from Montreal to the Canadian frontier, and thence to Whitehall, and Troy, after working independently for a couple years, were purchased by the Montreal Company.

In 1850 a line from Bytown (now Ottawa) by a company organized by Joseph Aumond; it also after a few years became the property of the Montreal Company.

In the West about the same period the Hon. Malcolm Cameron interested himself in a telegraph line to connect Hamilton and London, but, after some 18 months of unprofitable labor, was abandoned.

Coming down to a later date the People’s Telegraph Company was organized and a line erected between Montreal and Quebec, which proved a financial failure to the promoters, and served as a warning to others to avoid going into isolated telegraph ventures.

In 1881 the Canada Mutual and the Union Mutual Telegraph Companies worked in conjunction for a short period in the States and Canada; both were eventually absorbed by the Western Union.

The Great North-Western Telegraph Company

This Company was incorporated on May 7, 1880, for the purpose of establishing and working telegraph lines in the Northwest Territory in the district of Keewatin, Manitoba, and to connect with lines in the Province of Ontario.

The capital stock, $400,000 in shares of $100 each, with power to increase the capital from time to time as necessity required, by a resolution of the Directors, with authority to establish, construct, purchase, lease or work lines in the Dominion of Canada by land or water, etc. The head office at the City of Winnipeg.

At a meeting of the Company held on June 10, 1881, Mr. Erastus Wiman was elected President.

At this meeting Mr. Wiman as President was empowered to enter into negotiation with the Montreal, Dominion and Western Union Telegraph Companies as shall harmonize the interest of the several named companies subject to confirmation of the Directors.

Mr. Wiman thus empowered lost no time in effecting his object.

The resolution quoted is amusing. The Western Union owned the Dominion Telegraph Company, or at least controlled it. There was no discord between the Western Union and the Montreal Telegraph Company.

A close and intimate business relationship had been maintained between these companies for years and nothing had arisen hitherto to disturb this good understanding. The Dominion Telegraph Company had been acquired as an asset of the American Union Telegraph Company which had been purchased by the Western Union and was a white elephant on its hands and of which they naturally enough were anxious to get rid of.

It was offered to the Montreal Company, but the offer was not entertained as the wires of the Dominion Company merely paralleled its own, and its own wires were sufficient for its own business at that time. Mr. Wiman, being familiar with the position of affairs, saw a chance for a deal and the future monopoly of the telegraph business of Canada.

He got the refusal of the lease of the Dominion Company and to some extent his plans were approved by the Western Union and of which they were more or less informed. He then made his purpose known to the Directorate of the Montreal Telegraph Company, that they should hand over their business to his company on a 99 years’ lease and a compensation of 8 per cent. per annum on the paid-up capital stock of $2,000,000 would be paid, guaranteed by the Western Union Telegraph Company.

The Directors, as a matter of course, were aghast with astonishment at the audacity of the proposal.

A company with a nominal capital, recently formed, with no one of standing in its make up to suggest the idea, was too preposterous. However, Mr. Wiman coolly told them they had better think it over, that unless his terms were accepted his Company, the Dominion and the Western Union, behind them, would go into competition with them for Canadian business. A meeting of shareholders decided, after a stormy and exciting discussion, to accept the terms offered.

The transfer was made on July 1, 1881.

The big fish swallow the smaller usually, but in this case it was the extraordinary feat of a small fish swallowing a bigger one.

When the agreement took effect Mr. James Dakers resigned and was succeeded as Secretary by Mr. D. Ross Ross.

Mr. Dwight was appointed General Manager of the Great North-Western Company and most of the officials and employees of the Montreal Telegraph Company were retained by him. Owing to his able management the Company has been successful in every way; all its obligations have been met with punctuality and regularity.

Mr. Wiman resigned the Presidency some ten years ago and Mr. Dwight succeeded him.

In 1902 it had 17,838 miles of line, 35,721 miles of wire, over 2,000 offices and transmitted 2,795,278 messages, not including press despatches.

Recently Mr. Dwight resigned the management and was succeeded by Mr. I. McMichael.

Canadian Pacific Railway Telegraph

In the charter of the Canadian Pacific Railway Company it had power to carry on a commercial telegraph business throughout the Dominion of Canada.

The telegraph lines of this company were constructed concurrently with the railway which was begun in 1880 and completed in 1885.

The following year the company inaugurated the commercial telegraph business and Mr. C. R. Hosmer was appointed General Manager of this branch of the company’s business; this selection was recognized as a fortunate one for the company; no better qualified man could have been found in Canada than he to properly fill this important position. It was no light task he had undertaken, to equip and man the numerous stations as they were opened up for business, covering such a vast extent of territory as well as to enter into competition with a long established telegraph system through the more populous sections in the East. About this time the Postal Telegraph Cable Company was reorganized in the United States, and the Commercial Cable established, and a working arrangement made between these companies and the Canadian Pacific Telegraph for interchange of traffic, which has proven mutually beneficial to each company concerned.

The lines of the Canadian Pacific System traverse from Halifax to Vancouver, including numerous branch lines.

The Postal Telegraph Cable Company cover nearly every state and territory in the United States. A direct connection is made with the Government Cable to Australia at Vancouver and with the Commercial Cable Company at Canso, N.S.

In 1902 the Canadian Pacific Telegraph System had in operation 9,736 miles of line and 41,354 miles of wire, 1,022 offices and transmitted during that year 2,053,000 messages, not including press matter or railway messages.

The Company has two number six copper wires extending from Montreal to Vancouver.

About four years ago Mr. Hosmer resigned; he was succeeded by Mr. James Kent, formerly Superintendent of the Eastern division. Under him there are five divisional Superintendents, namely:—

James Wilson,

Vancouver.

B. S. Jenkins,

Winnipeg.

A. W. Barber,

Toronto.

P. W. Snider,

St. John.

J. F. Richardson,

Montreal.

W. J. Camp is electrician and Joseph Townsley Construction Superintendent.

Recently the Company erected on the former site of its Head Offices in Montreal a handsome fire-proof structure of white brick with Ohio stone facings, seven stories in height, combining in its interior every comfort and convenience for the large staff of employees.

The operating room is spacious, well lighted from three sides, and furnished with the latest designs of office fittings and electrical appliances.

The telegraph service of the Company is admirably conducted and doubtless is not the least profitable of the many enterprises in which it has engaged in.

The Government Telegraphs.

It was through the continued and persistent urging of the late Capt. Fortin, member for Gaspé, that the Dominion Government was at length aroused to the necessity of providing efficient telegraph facilities in the Gulf and the lower St. Lawrence.

The splendid telegraph system, now in operation, forms a fitting monument to his memory and is alike creditable to the Government which created it and carried it out.

During the past twenty years since it was first initiated, there has been erected 5,481 miles of land wire lines, and 225 miles of submarine cables laid.

One line on the north shore from Murray Bay to Belle Isle is over 1,000 miles in length and there are over 200 miles on the Island of Anticosti connecting the various lighthouses. Extensions are constantly being made as necessity arises.

In the Northwest territory 607 miles of line connect Selkirk with Edmonton with intermediate stations and from Ashcroft to Dawson 1,826 miles, from Hazleton to Port Sampson, B.C., 200 miles.

At the end of 1902 there were 222 Government Telegraph Stations, 89,400 messages transmitted and a revenue of $114,266 derived. The expenditure was $208,968.

All signal and meteorological messages are sent without charge.

The Government Telegraph System is under the jurisdiction of the Department of Public Works.

Remarks.

The commercial telegraph business of the Dominion is carried on, and has been for many years, by the Great North-Western, the Canadian Pacific and the Western Union Telegraph Companies—the latter in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.

The Anglo-American Telegraph Company has the monopoly in Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland.

The Canadian Government Telegraphs operate in territory where it would not be profitable for commercial telegraph companies to enter. The competing companies each get a fair share of patronage by exercising care and promptitude in handling the business placed in their hands. The Canadian public have every reason to feel satisfied with the telegraphic facilities provided by these companies and can take pride in the fact that no better exists anywhere, or in any country.

The rates are reasonable when the great distances covered are taken into account.

It is gratifying to know that they are doing a thriving business, every year showing better results, all sharing in the universal prosperity felt throughout the country now and for years gone by.

The following sketches of prominent and well-known telegraph men, some of whom are living, and others who have passed away, will be of interest to many Canadian readers.

Preceding these brief portraitures are a few reminiscent tales recalled at random, chiefly Canadian incidents of “days that are gone.”

The Fall of Sebastopol.

I was in the service of the Montreal Telegraph Company at the head office in Montreal. One day the Superintendent summoned me to his presence. He directed me to proceed at once to Sherbrooke as the operator in charge there was very sick and unable to discharge his duties.

I left by the first train and reached my destination the same evening. On arrival I noticed a great crowd of people awaiting the train. Something unusual must have happened surely.

I immediately reported myself to the station master, and was considerably astonished when he seized me by the shoulder, rushed me across the passage to the telegraph office, ordered me to call up Montreal and enquire if the rumored fall of Sebastopol was true. This I did and found the report confirmed. This was on the 20th day of September, 1855. A Cunard steamer arrived at Halifax that afternoon bringing the news which was flashed over the wires by the Associated Press.

Montreal sent a full report, which came in on the old style recording instrument. A newspaper man came in and volunteered to write it down as I read it off the paper reel. Each sheet when finished was read aloud to the crowd outside. The despatch ended and the people dispersed.

Next evening the event was celebrated by illuminations, bonfires, feu de joies, etc. The local militia turned out en masse, headed by Captain Ibbotson, loyal and patriotic songs sung, and universal joy was manifested by all.

At that period the town was largely populated by English railway men and mechanics who had been brought here by the Grand Trunk Railway Company when the road opened up a short time before. There was also a considerable number of retired naval and military veterans in the town and neighborhood, some of whom had fought under Nelson and Wellington. All of these took a keen interest in the fate of the British army in the Crimea, and were naturally overjoyed at the defeat of the enemy and of the victory achieved.

Sebastopol fell on Sept. 8, 1855, and the war was virtually ended.

Montreal, Toronto and every town and village in Canada celebrated the event with the greatest delight, but it is safe to say that nowhere was there more hearty rejoicing than in the capital city of the Eastern Townships on the occasion referred to.

How a Duel was Prevented.

One day during the winter 1856 I received a telegram from Richmond, a station on the Grand Trunk Railway, about 25 miles distant, addressed to the High Constable at Sherbrooke to the effect that a party of gentlemen were on the southbound train with the object of fighting a duel when the American frontier was reached, the party consisting of the principals, seconds and surgeons, and to have the whole party arrested.

Seeing the importance of the message due measures were taken to have it delivered promptly. The minions of the law were duly on hand and secured their prey on the arrival of the train. The party were much surprised, as they had taken every precaution to keep the affair a profound secret and were ignorant as to how the matter had leaked out. All were placed under arrest and escorted to the Magog House. They had come from Quebec. The nature of the quarrel I am unable to say.

They were brought before a magistrate and admitted the object of their journey, when each and severally were released on their own recognances. All promised to abandon their evil intentions and return to the ancient capital forthwith.

Having nothing special to interest them for a time they adjourned to the bar-room of that famous hostlery, then carried on by Mr. Cheney, the flowing bowl passed round with the result that a reconcilation was effected, and the rest of the evening spent in harmony and good feeling.

The only one who refused to come to terms of amity was one of the sawbones of the party! He would have none of it.

They departed from Sherbrooke the following day, if not sadder, at least, wiser men.

Reading by Sound.

In the early days of telegraphy I was employed at an important station on the Grand Trunk Railway as commercial and railway operator. One night, after a busy day’s labor, I was preparing to leave when I overheard the office call sounded from the relay, the local battery having been disconnected, as was then the custom when leaving for the night, for economical reasons. I answered the call and ventured to receive the message from the sound of the relay, and in this found no difficulty whatever.

Whilst thus engaged the locomotive foreman stepped in. Singular enough, the communication was for him. He was rather astonished at my receiving a message in this fashion and expressed his surprise. He spoke to others about it, and the affair in time reached the ears of the Railway Telegraph Superintendent, who, thereupon, called me up on the wire and gave me a severe reprimand. A “23” or circular was sent immediately thereafter to the effect that it had come to his knowledge that certain operators were in the habit of reading by sound instead of from the register, with which all stations were provided, and warning all to desist from this dangerous practice.

The modern operator will be inclined to smile at this bit of ancient history.

In no very long time, after the custom became general in both railway and commercial telegraphy, the Recording instrument, upon the perfecting of which Professor Morse had spent so much time and labor, was abandoned, and the more convenient method of reading by sound substituted.

A Cheeky Operator.

My predecessor at a certain station on the Grand Trunk Railway vacated his position rather suddenly by reason of the following colloquy, and against whom many and frequent complaints had been made.

On one occasion the General Manager happened to step off the train to interview the station master. Amongst other subjects spoken of was the troublesome operator. He immediately stepped across the passage to have audience with the obnoxious telegrapher.

In a very impressive tone he said, “Young man, I hear a great many complaints against you. You had better be careful or I shall have you discharged.”

The operator not knowing the General Manager from Adam, never having seen him before, looked at him in surprise, and said, “Who in the blank are you, anyway?”

“I am Mr. Bidder. Be careful, sir.”

“I don’t care a blank whether you are Mr. Bidder or Mr. Auctioneer,” turned on his heel and walked away.

It may be explained that, although doing railway telegraph work, he was actually employed by the telegraph company, and believed the railway company had nothing to do with him, in this he was mistaken. This interview more than confirmed the numerous complaints, and the services of the youth were immediately dispensed with.

Mr. S. P. Bidder was the first General Manager of the Grand Trunk Railway of Canada.

All Fools’ Day Incident.

In the year 1855, when the Government of Canada was located at Quebec, a Militia Bill was passed, dividing the militia into active and sedentary, the first to consist of volunteer troops of various grades and classes. Provision was made for dividing the country into military districts, regimental divisions and battalion divisions, with officers for each. This was the first step towards the organization of a regular volunteer force in Canada.

At Sherbrooke there was considerable political wire-pulling on behalf of those who were ambitious of being appointed as officers of the company to be raised at that place. One individual claimed that he was certain of getting command of the new company and ridiculed the idea of any one else having the slightest chance of getting the appointment. This rather nettled one or two who were equally ambitious for the honor, and a conspiracy was entered into to perpetrate a practical joke at his expense.

A certain gentleman called at the telegraph office and requested the favor of a telegraph blank and envelope, explaining the purpose for which they were intended. I hesitated over the matter, but was assured he would be responsible should any trouble arise. I reluctantly consented. The result was a message was concocted as coming from the Militia Department at Quebec to the effect that the Department were pleased to inform the recipient that he had been appointed to the command of the company at Sherbrooke and that his commission for same would be duly forwarded by mail.

The victim was elated over the psuedo despatch and took special pains to show it to those who doubted his success.

One person, to whom he confided the contents to and who was one of the conspirators, doubted its being genuine, remarking, the Militia Department was not likely to inform appointees by telegraph. He thought it a joke, and come to think of it, this was April Fool Day. This led the irate individual to me, when he desired to be informed, when the message was received, handing to me the bogus telegram. I, of course, felt in a very awkward position. I scanned it over for a minute and told him the message had not come through my office. He thereupon went off like a shot in a very dangerous mood.

He wrote the Superintendent enclosing the alleged telegram and threatened an immediate action against the Company for allowing its property to be the medium of such a trick as was the one complained of.

I was in a rather bad fix. I explained the whole matter as it occurred. The instigator of the hoax came to my rescue and assumed all responsibility; the threatened action was not taken and the matter was soon forgotten, but a new rule was embodied in the Company’s instruction book to agents and operators forbidding inside blanks to be allowed to go out of the office under any pretense whatever, except on the business of the Company. This rule is still in force.

The one actually appointed to command the Company was the originator of the joke herein related.

An Angry Frenchman.

One day the hired man of the village curé handed me a sealed letter and twenty-five cents, upon receiving which I tore open the envelope in order to count the words in the message before transmission.

I had no sooner done this when an angry cry proceeded from the throat of Jean Baptiste, who held up his hands, and, with a look of terror in his face, told me in broken English that it was not for me, but for the priest at St. Hyacinthe. Had there not been a high counter between us, it might have gone hard with me.

I took in the situation, however, politely begged pardon, I had made a mistake, and put the contents in a fresh envelope, readdressed it and thrust the missive into a box under the counter, the receptacle for the paper from the recording instrument on which messages were received, and then gave the key a few taps, all this being within the purview of the anxious messenger.

I now told him it was all right, the message had gone. He then departed with a smile of satisfaction on his face and a courteous remerci monsieur.

Shortly after I resurrected the message and sent it over the wire in the orthodox fashion.

The little trick practiced and the ignorance shown may seem like romancing, but at that date even many well-informed persons on other subjects were quite as ignorant as this simple servant man of the modus operandi of electric telegraphy at that period.

Pirating a Press Despatch.

A certain well-known colonel of militia in Montreal, now deceased, who had been in the telegraph service in his boyhood and an expert operator, told me the story I am about to relate illustrative of primitive telegraph days.

We were swapping old-time telegraph stories when he exchanged the following: He was in the employ of the old British American Telegraph Company. One day, the wires down, which happened too often, unfortunately, Bob having nothing to occupy his time, sauntered over to the vicinity of the Montreal Telegraph Company, on St. Sacrament Street. It was with a feeling of envy he heard the busy ticking of the instruments there when those of his Company were dead as a door nail. He lingered for a moment or two beneath the office window, which was only a few feet above; it was in summer and the windows were all open and he could plainly deciper everything passing over the wire. One item of some importance attracted his attention when the idea struck him he had better take it down. He took his pencil and note-book, copied the item, went back to his office, had it manifolded and distributed to the press. Later on the same was sent out by the other Company, but in a more leisurely fashion; this was refused, on the ground that it was already received over the wires of the British American; this caused much mortification to the older Company to be beaten by their insignificant rival.

Reading by sound of the instrument was not a common occurrence then, and especially on the public highway.

The Montreal Company never became aware of the trick that was played upon them.

The Queen’s Message.

When in August, 1858, the Atlantic cable had been successfully laid, uniting two continents telegraphically, there was universal rejoicing. The Queen sent a congratulatory message to “Her Good Friend,” the President of the United States, to which a suitable reply was returned.

The brevity of the Queen’s message was somewhat disappointing compared with the more lengthy reply of the President, and many unfavorable comments were made in the press and in conversation.

However, it was afterwards learned that only a portion of the communication had been received owing to a temporary interruption of the cable. When at last the completed message came there was no reason for disappointment, and general satisfaction was evinced.

Small pieces of the unused cable of about an inch to two or three inches in length mounted with brass or silver ferrules were sold on the street by speculators from 25 cents to a dollar each. The event was celebrated with great éclat on both sides of the Atlantic.

Banners were displayed with numerous devices and quotations from Scripture such as, “Their line is gone out through all the earth and their words to the end of the world,” and from Shakespeare, “I will put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes.”

There were torchlight processions, displays of fireworks, illuminations, etc., etc., together with addresses by distinguished men in honor of the event. I refer more particularly to Ogdensburg, N.Y., where I was then situated as operator and received the Queen’s message over the wire.

The rejoicing unfortunately was somewhat premature.

After working more or less imperfectly for three weeks, the cable gave out completely on the 1st of September after the transmission of 730 messages had been effected.

The cable operator at Heart’s Content, Newfoundland, named De Sauty, sent daily bulletins to the press holding out strong hopes for the restoration of the interrupted communication, but these hopes were not realized. The bulletins ceased and he disappeared and was never heard of again, at least by the public.

It is in allusion to this mysterious individual that Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the following humorous lines, and in fine satirical vein thought that with a Latin tutor and a professor of chemistry the educated classes would understand it.

De Sauty.

An Electro-Chemical Eclogue.

Professor. Blue Nose.

PROFESSOR.

“Tell me, O Provincial! speak ceruleo Nasal, Lives there one De Sauty, extant now among you Whispering Boanerges, son of silent thunder Holding talk with nations.

“Is there a De Sauty, ambulant on Tellus Bifed cleft-like mortals dormient in nightcap Having sight, smell, hearing, food receiving feature Three times daily patent.

“Breathes there such a being, O ceruleo Nasal Or is he a mythus, ancient name for humbug Such as Livy told about the wolf that wet-nursed Romulus and Remus.

“Was he born of woman, this alleged De Sauty, Or a living product of galvanic action Like the Acarus bred in Crosse’s flint solution Speak thou Cyano Rhynal.”

BLUE NOSE.

“Many things thou askest, Jacknife-bearing stranger, Much conjecturing mortal, pork and treacle waster Pretermit thy whitling wheel thine earflap towards me Thou shalt hear them answered.

“When the charge galvanic tingled through the cable At the polar focus of the wire electric, Suddenly appeared, a white faced man among us, Called himself De Sauty.

“As the small opossum held in pouch maternal Grasps the nutrient organ whence the term mammalia, So the unknown stranger held the wire electric Sucking in the current.

“When the current strengthened, bloomed the pale-faced stranger, Took no food or victual, yet grew fat and rosy, And, from time to time in sharp articulation Said, ‘All right,’ De Sauty.

“From the lonely station passed the utterance spreading Through the pines and hemlocks to the grove of steeples, Till the land was filled with loud reverberations Of ‘All right,’ De Sauty.

“When the current slackened drooped the mystic stranger, Faded, Faded, Faded as the stream grew weaker Wasted to a shadow with a hartshorn odor Of disintegration.

“Drops of deliquescence glistened from his forehead Whitened round his feet the dust of efflorescence, Till one Monday morning when the flow suspended There was no De Sauty.

“Nothing but a cloud of elements organic C. O. H. N. Ferrum, Chor, Flu. Sil. Potassa calc. Sod. Phosh mag. Sulphur Mang.? Alumin caprum Such as man is made of.

“Born of stream galvanic with it he had perished There is no De Sauty. Now there is no current Give us a new cable, then again we’ll hear his cry, ‘All right,’ De Sauty.”

After a lapse of eight years another cable was laid in 1866 and communication across the Atlantic permanently established, but the mysterious De Sauty never appeared.

Testing the Cable.

In the fall of 1856 the Montreal Telegraph Company laid a subaqueous cable across the St. Lawrence connecting Ogdensburg, N.Y., with its Canadian lines. Everything went well till the breaking up of the ice in the spring, when the American end of the cable was carried away from its moorings.

A man was sent from Montreal to effect the necessary repairs. When he arrived, I, then being in charge of the office there, decided to accompany him and render any assistance I could. A boat was hired to row over to the lighthouse where the cable terminated. The craft engaged was rather frail and shaky, with quite a heavy sea running. The Montreal man got safely seated, clutching the side of the boat with one hand and the testing instrument in the other. It was a cold day in March, a stiff north-wester was blowing. When all was ready the painter was untied, when I jumped, and in doing so lost my balance and went in headforemost. As I bobbed up the heels of my friend were just visible above the water. We succeeded in getting ashore safely, but the testing instrument had gone to the bottom, which we tried to recover, but failed, and the trip for the time was given up.

My companion in this adventure was the late Mr. Bowman, for many years the respected storekeeper for the Montreal Telegraph Company.

In meeting we often reverted to this episode in our telegraph experience and of our involuntary bath in the icy St. Lawrence.

Cutting Down the Liberty Pole.

In 1857 the following amusing incident occurred and will be remembered by some of the older inhabitants of the pretty American city on the south bank of the St. Lawrence where I was then the agent of the Montreal Telegraph Company.

The villagers (it was a village at that period) had made every preparation for the due celebration of Independence Day with more than ordinary care, and all were looking forward to the event with eagerness, especially the more youthful element of the population. The first ceremony observed at sunrise was to raise old glory to the apex of the liberty pole, which stood at the corner of Ford and Water Streets, but, to the amazement of the party to whom this duty was assigned, there was no pole to be seen. On a close examination they found nothing remaining but the stump of the flag-staff. The question was: Who were the ruffians that dared to perpetuate the outrage? None other surely that some scoundrels from the opposite side of the river. In this surmise they were not far from the truth. After indulging in language more forcible than elegant, like practical Americans, they set to work, erected a temporary flag-staff and the ceremonies of the day were carried out without further incident. It was discovered to be a case of lex talionis on the part of some young men from Prescott who rowed across the river during the night and performed this piece of vandalism in revenge for a foray made by some young fellows from Ogdensburg on the previous 24th of May (the Queen’s Birthday), when they removed the British flag flying on the old Windmill at Prescott, and substituted the Stars and Stripes. When this fact became known the Ogdensburg people had to acknowledge it was a case of tit for tat and served them right.

Fortunately these youthful pranks were condemned by all right thinking people on both sides of the border and were not repeated.

The Burns Centenary.

On the 25th day of January, 1859, the birthday centenary of Robert Burns, the Scottish poet, was enthusiastically commemorated by his admirers on both sides of the Atlantic, and, in fact, everywhere throughout the Globe where Scotchmen were to the fore.

It was generally observed in the form of a banquet at which eminent literary and public men were the speakers who paid glowing tributes to the merits and genius of the peasant poet. Many of these addresses are still preserved.

In the town of Brockville, where I was located, a musical and literary entertainment was held in the Metropolitan Hall, the chairman being the Hon. James Morris. It was well attended by the leading people of the town. During the progress of the entertainment telegraphic congratulatory messages were interchanged between the chairmen of the different meetings then being held in Canada, and the United States, generally couched in lines and phrases from the poet’s works. The chairman gave an eloquent address; other speakers also contributed and the musical programme was excellent, but one gentleman had prepared with much care a paper on the Life and Character of Burns, which was admitted to be the gem of the evening by all who heard it, but unfortunately very few did.

The person referred to was a well-known M.D. who was afflicted with deafness; he spoke in a very low tone of voice, like many who suffer from a similar infirmity. The paper was long, the night was getting late; before he was through, the audience showed signs of weariness, which the chairman noticed, when he rose and begged the Doctor to kindly curtail his paper as the night was advancing and he had several other items on the programme but the chairman’s request was unheard and unconsciously ignored. The audience had to patiently endure the martyrdom to the end, a few meanwhile retiring in disgust.

When the end did come the people were so delighted at being relieved of the infliction that he was generously applauded, when with an amiable smile, and bowing right and left in acknowledgment, resumed his seat in happy ignorance that he had been a very tiresome bore indeed.

The Prince of Wales at Brockville.

When in August, 1860, H. R. H. The Prince of Wales (now King Edward) and party had arranged to visit Brockville, the event was looked forward to with every manifestation of delight, and arrangements made to give them a hearty reception.

The route of the Royal party was from Ottawa, where a visit had been made, and recently named the capital city of Canada by Queen Victoria; there they embarked, sailing up the Ottawa River to Arnprior and thence by carriages to Almonte, and there entrained for Brockville. All the villages and hamlets passed were prettily decorated for the occasion, here and there evergreen arches were erected where the loyal denizens assembled and heartily cheered his Royal Highness in passing.

Brockville was reached about nine p.m. The Royal party was received by the Mayor, Warden of Leeds and Grenville and other officials. Addresses were presented and replied to by H.R.H. Carriages were in waiting to convey them to the steamer at the dock, by which they were to leave at daybreak for Kingston.

The Royal party were escorted from the railway station to the steamboat wharf by a guard of honour, followed by a procession of firemen and citizens carrying torches. All the buildings on the way were brightly illuminated, the church bells merrily ringing with a fine display of fireworks and the loud ovation of the people made it a memorable scene.

Instead of departing at daybreak, as had been arranged, it was about three in the afternoon before the steamer left. The detention was caused by difficulties which had arisen at Kingston. The Orange body there had erected an arch decorated with emblems of the order and which the Royal party would necessarily have to pass under. An address by the Orangemen was to be presented, to which the Duke of Newcastle was unable to assent. While the settlement of this was being arranged by telegraph wire, the Mayor, accompanied by many prominent citizens, waited on the Duke and invited the Royal party to a drive through the town, which was graciously accepted, thus giving the people an opportunity of seeing H. R. H. to better advantage. In appearance he was of medium height, pale complexion, modest in demeanor and dignified in manner.

He wore a tall white hat, a dark morning coat, light tweed trousers, patent leather boots and light tan coloured gloves. He bowed in acknowledgment to the cheers which greeted him and seemed to enjoy the drive.

It was said the Duke remarked he was not sorry at the detention as it had given the party the pleasure of seeing the pretty town by daylight.

There was a large entourage of pressmen reporting the Royal progress; one American correspondent when writing up his report asked me among other questions how many people were in the torchlight procession. I told him 500, that being the number of torches purchased by the town council. Oh! he said, I’ll make it 5,000, and sure enough he did and I sent this over the wire.

The whole population, men, women and children, at that period was a trifle over 4,000. This man afterwards became a famous correspondent during the American Civil War.

The fearful and wonderful reports received from the seat of war as to the extraordinary numbers of killed, wounded and captured, especially during the early stages of the trouble were something incredible; the experience narrated showed the need of a large discount being made.

The carriage the Prince of Wales drove through Brockville, and owned by a private gentlemen until his death, is now, or was until lately, doing duty as a public conveyance.

Should this meet the eye of some wealthy American, it might be a good thing for the cabby.

The Trent Affair.

It was on November 8, 1861, that Admiral Wilkes, in command of the United States frigate San Jacinto intercepted the British R. M. Steamer Trent on her way from the West Indies to England and forcibly removed therefrom the two confederate States Commissioners Mason and Slidell. When the outrage became known there was a universal burst of indignation felt at the affront in Great Britain and all the British possessions. Every one believed that unless the men were given up and the act disavowed war between the two countries was inevitable. A large military contingent was despatched from England on the Steamship Persia which arrived at Rimouski on Christmas day, Dec. 25, 1861. A Queen’s messenger was sent to Washington bearing an ultimatum from the British Government demanding that the men be at once released.

The American Government were in a dilemma. Several members of the Cabinet were in favor of resisting this demand, but President Lincoln, with his characteristic common sense said “One war at a time, gentlemen, one war at a time,” and the commissioners were surrendered and transferred to a British man-of-war at New York on January 1st, 1862, and amende honorable made.

While the negotiations between the American and British Governments were in progress, the government and people of Canada were watching the trend of events with the keenest interest, and preparations were made for possible eventualities, flank companies at the respective military districts were ordered to prepare for active service.

When this order came by telegraph to the colonel of Brockville District, I delivered it personally and took occasion to inform him that if he would give me a commission in the company going on active service I was prepared to join at a moment’s notice. This request pleased the veteran (he was out in the rebellion) giving me a hearty grip. “You’re the right sort. I accept your services and shall have a commission for you within a week.”

A few days after I was much gratified when I received a large envelope containing my promised commission, the same being initialled by the Hon. James Morris, the speaker of the Legislative Council and resident of Brockville; a short time thereafter while visiting his home he entered the telegraph office to send a message. I took this opportunity of thanking him for the commission he sent me. He glared at me for a second or two and said, “The commission is not for you; it is for John Murray the butcher.” “Oh! indeed, I beg pardon. I was under the impression it was for J. M.—— gentleman.” I did not get this off in a resentful mood; it was merely repeating the language of the document. Of course I handed it over to my namesake, the rightful owner, a very respectable man of the town, when my military ambitions came to an end.

The services of the flank companies were not required after the causes belle had been removed and Canada once more resumed her usual peace footing.

The Old Soldier and the Parson.

About forty odd years ago when I was acting in the capacity of telegraph, express and steamship agent at Brockville, the following incident happened, which may be worth recalling: One day an old gentleman entered the office and desired me to furnish a steamship ticket to Liverpool. He informed me he was on his way to revisit his native land which he had not seen for many years. He was in the army previous to settling in one of the back townships. Although well on in years he looked hale and hearty, straight as an arrow and a remarkably handsome old fellow.

After completing his purchase and about to depart, he observed a pair of Fairbanks scales and requested me to weigh him, as he would like to see whether he lost or gained on the voyage. Whilst occupied in this, another old gentleman walked in attentively watching the operation; he also requested me to do a similar favor for him. He proved very much lighter and somewhat disappointed, and remarked: “Well, you are heavier than I, but I think I can beat you in length of years.” “How old are you?” brusquely querried the old soldier. “I am 84,” looking triumphantly at his questioner. “My young friend I am 85. I am heavier than you, older than you and (whispering in his ear) can look at the girls yet!”

Singular enough, the name of the latter was Mr. Young, the former the Rev. Wm. Smart, a well-known and respected clergyman, whose chief weakness was a certain vanity in his length of years, coupled with activity and good health on which he greatly prided himself. He was therefore, considerably humiliated at being thus so badly taken down and his dignity ruffled by the above remark.

The Fenian Scare.

When in the summer of 1866 the Fenians invaded Canada and encountered the Canadian militia at Ridgeway, considerable alarm was felt all along the frontier. Cornwall, Prescott, Brockville and Kingston were strengthened with bodies of militia as being probable points of invasion.

For a time the Government took possession of the telegraph lines until all danger had passed.

Telegraph offices were kept open day and night by orders from Ottawa; this continued in force for several weeks. I was then at Brockville and found the long hours very irksome. No one believed in the likelihood of an attack here, but one night this belief was rather disturbed when a communication was received by the officer in command warning him to be on the alert as a body of Fenians had seized a steamer at Clayton, on the American side of the river, with the probability of attacking Brockville or Prescott.

Very soon the sound of the bugle was heard and the men formed in readiness to meet the enemy. They had been drilling for several weeks and were in splendid fighting trim, and under the command of an experienced officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Atcherley, D.A.G., who had seen service in the Crimea and India, in whom officers and men had the utmost confidence. A home guard was hastily organized to watch the river front and give timely notice should any suspicious craft appear. During the prevailing excitement some one rang the town alarm bell, when the citizens were aroused from their beds, and the streets were soon crowded with men, women and children eager to learn what was the cause of the alarm. Many amusing scenes were witnessed. A few timid souls procured teams, loaded them with household effects, and with their families started for safer quarters in the back country. Many old veterans of the Canadian rebellion were seen carrying weapons of defense, but appeared more likely to be offensive only to themselves.

One aged gentleman carried a sword with a rope in lieu of belt and minus the scabbard; he refused to waste time looking for such appendages at such a time; the naked sword was good enough for him. The night was dark and ominous; every one awaited coming events with anxiety and more or less nervousness, and dawn began to appear, but no signs of the enemy. Meanwhile some of the home guard got tired waiting for the Fenians, who declined to come, and they one by one segregated to enjoy the comforts of their own firesides or seek repose on their downy beds at home. In this action the officer commanding the home guard preceded his men and was the first to retire, but one of their number a sturdy Scot, having been placed on an eminence favorable to scan the movements of the craft on the river, he held on to his post, however. His family hunted him up and had much difficulty on prevailing upon him to come home.

The only fatality that occurred was the death of an old lady, who, nearing the end, collapsed suddenly when hearing the alarm bell and told the reason for its being rung.

Shortly after the Fenian fiasco became a thing of the past.

Professor Morse’s Valedictory Message.

In 1870, when Mr. Morse had entered his eightieth year, it was felt by many telegraph men that some fitting recognition should be paid to the illustrious inventor before the close of his valuable life, which was now nearing the end.

In accordance with this general feeling action was taken and a committee formed, when after much thought had been given to the subject, it was at last decided the most appropriate memorial in its opinion would be to erect a statue and place it in Central Park, New York. This suggestion had the general approval of the telegraph fraternity. To carry this out subscriptions were invited; one of the first to contribute to the fund was Mr. John Horn, of Montreal, then in New York, and to complete the sum required Sir Hugh Allan was appealed to and promptly sent the desired amount.

The ceremony of unveiling the statue took place on June 10, 1871. Representative telegraph men from every State and territory, as well as the Dominion of Canada, were present, including many civic and State officials, and addresses were delivered by Governor Hoffman, Mayor Hall, the venerable poet, William Cullen Bryant and others.

In the evening a public reception of the delegates was held at the Academy of Music, which was filled to overflowing, the Hon. William Orton, President of the Western Union, presiding, by whom the delegates were cordially welcomed. On the platform was a table and a set of telegraph instruments connected with the main office of the Western Union Company. Punctually at 9 p.m., as previously arranged, Professor Morse, who was present, indited the following valedictory:

“Greeting and thanks to the telegraph fraternity throughout the world. Glory to God in the highest, on earth peace and good-will to men.”

S. F. B. Morse.

The message was sent over the wires by a young lady operator and Mr. Morse transmitted the signature.

The writer was at Brockville, Ont., at the time and received this now historic message simultaneously with hundreds, perhaps thousands of others.

Mr. Morse did not long survive this dramatic event. It was his last public appearance but one previous to his death.