All about the telegraph–an interesting story from the past (and women were operators, too.)
When I was a kid in school, they told us about the telegraph. I think it came around the time of the end of the pony express and the building of the railroads. As I recalled, they would put telegraph poles along the tracks with wires strung between them, and men in grimy offices with cigars and green eyeshades tapped out messages. Stories about the Titanic speak of radio operators with telegraph keys sending messages in Morse code. The only code I know is SOS (dit dit dit-dah dah dah-dit dit dit). They actually used CQD, but that’s another story.
We all know that later on came telephones and much later cell phones, the internet and social media–but I wondered how did all this work. What’s the back story?
So at least we American kids were taught that a man with the imposing name of Samuel F. B. Morse invented the telegraph. His first message was “What hath God wrought?”, sent from Washington to Baltimore in 1844. People had used flags, lights, and drumbeats, but this was indeed a breakthrough in communication. The French had some sort of optical telegraph, which was highly developed in the late eighteenth century. When messages got to an international border, they had to be transcribed and resent. Apparently, they used a system of moving arms where various positions told what words they were saying. Morse himself didn’t really know much about electricity, which was a new technology in those days, so he consulted an engineer friend named Leonard Gale. The whole idea started with ringing a buzzer with a long wire connected between two points. They wanted to make different rings signify different words, but they didn’t get far with the idea. Morse was ahead of the time with his ideas. He built a contraption that would send sentences rather than just the dits and dahs that came later. His group got the job to run wires along the railroad in Baltimore, in the United States, and they were going to put the wire underground. However, the wire was poorly insulated, and this didn’t work out. To continue, they strung the wire across poles and trees, which was the start of the telegraph lines and later telephone lines that we now see every day. For the time being, they gave up on the automatic device, resorting to the little key switch that you might be familiar with from your childhood history classes.
The railroads at first saw telegraph wires, strung along their tracks, as a nuisance. However, they soon found the device invaluable for routing trains. Most railroads had one track at the time. In the absence of radio or other means of communication, the telegraph was an excellent way to control trains and keeping them from having head-on collisions.
Soon, other industries saw the value of instantaneous communication. In an early incarnation of today’s just-in-time supply chain model, meatpackers started using the telegraph to track live cattle transported to the gigantic Chicago stockyards. Stockbrokers also quickly jumped on the telegraph as a way to stay ahead of their competition.
When I was about ten or twelve years old, my father and I built a radio kit for shortwave listening. You could hear stations from all over the world on a good night, and many messages were in code that we could not understand. We looked at the idea of becoming licensed ham operators, where people send their messages over their own radio transmitters. The problem was that you had to learn Morse code, and this seemed very difficult, so I never got around to it. I recently looked at the idea again, but that hobby seems like a tiny niche these days. There are not so many people doing it, given we have so many alternatives.
All this takes us back to the telegraph. There had to have been a backstory–some social milieu with the operators and the people around the business. Besides, there had to be a business model. I wondered how they made money on these messages. Eventually, several systems developed, including one where words were transmitted and printed out on paper. In the end, Morse’s system predominated. Investors built redundant, competing lines between major cities such as New York, Washington, and Chicago. Messages were expensive for the time and mostly sent by businesses. The competition was mainly based on the speed and intelligibility of the text. Soon, companies and systems started to consolidate. This happened from the 1850s through the 1870s.
Transmissions at one point were charged at over one dollar each, not inflation-adjusted, per message, with the price later going down to just thirty cents. The business was highly profitable, yielding perhaps a thirty to forty percent margin on cost. Starting in the 1860s, Western Union became prominent. They achieved a ninety percent market share, and they weren’t the first monopoly. The familiar historical figures Jay Gould and Vanderbilt were in the competition at the time, but their business was challenged by government regulation and competition. Soon the telephone became available–Alexander Graham Bell’s instrument was patented in the 1870s. By the turn of the twentieth century, telephones were getting more common. Bell offered the patent to Western Union, but they didn’t buy it. At first, people could only make calls in their local area, but by the 1890s, long-distance calls were possible. In the early 1900s, the telegraph business had passed its peak. Bell’s telephone company, which by now was called AT&T, did buy out Western Union in 1909. As it turned out, federal regulators forced them to divest it a couple of years later due to monopolistic concerns.
In the 1920s, the telegraph was still popular, yet business declined after the 1929 stock market crash. By the time the economy recovered, newer technologies were coming into play. After the typewriter was invented in the 19th century, inventors soon came up with the teletypewriter so that telegraph operators could type words instead of dots and dashes.
Though the heyday of Morse’s invention is long over, I still wonder what life was like around this technology; what was it like to work in the telegraph offices. I discovered Thomas Jepson’s book My Sister’s Telegraphic. In the book, Jepson talks about the many women who worked as telegraph operators. Contrary to my image of mostly men working at the key, many women worked in the sending stations, sorting out the trains so that everything ran smoothly and didn’t crash. This was seen as a good profession for women in a time when few women worked outside the home.
Life in the telegraph office
Operators described being cooped up in a small shopfront room or little cubbyhole at a railroad station. Telegraphy became essential for railroad operations, but the public could also send messages by telegram. You could order routine day letters or instant telegraphs called full-rate messages, which attracted a higher price. Accuracy was taken seriously. At first, operators used a Morse key like you might see in a school science project. Later they had automatic keys called “bugs.
For a while, the telegraphy business grew, even despite the emergence of the telephone. Train-side offices gave way to large commercial operations employing dozens of workers. Operators were either first-class, handling the most important messages such as news releases or second class operators who sent personal or routine business messages. One place in Chicago maintained a “Ladies Department,” which specialized in personal messages. After a while, being a telegraph operator became a more female profession, as opposed to a place where some women worked among the male operators. They even had their own handwriting style called telegraphers script. They used cursive writing and had a method where they did not have to take the pen off the paper. Later, they typed the messages.
How it worked
The customer would write his message on a form, and the operator would copy it and send it with the telegraph key, logging it into a file. Large offices had” check boys,” who would distribute the messages among the operators. There were also clerks, who would take the received messages and send them out to messengers to be delivered to homes and offices. The runners were usually young boys, but sometimes girls. They often did not receive a salary but got their only income from tips. Operators were said to have a good keying style if they avoided clipping, that is, keeping the dots and dashes the correct length. The best operators could transmit 30 to 40 words per minute without errors.
Male and female operators were separated to avoid accusations of improper behavior by the male operators. Some of them, according to contemporary accounts, were coarsely behaved, hard-drinking, hard-smoking characters. They worked ten hours a day, with shorter shifts possible, and sometimes they worked alternating weekends, much like nurses do today. Occupational hazards were electric shocks from lightning, tuberculosis from being confined in small rooms (something like we worry about with COVID-19 today), or typhoid fever from unsafe drinking water. They got carpal tunnel syndrome too, then called ‘glass armor telegraphers’ cramp.”
Long before today’s tendency to work at home, women telegraphers sometimes raised their children in the office or had lines run to their homes. Today’s work-at-home moms can’t have little kids wandering around making noise while they’re having a meeting on Zoom. For telegrapher moms, though, there was no audience to hear the children. Some even grew up in the telegraph office and became operators themselves. Whereas many employers a century ago made women quit if they got married or got pregnant, women telegraph operators were allowed to continue working.
There was even a literary genre Telegraph Literature that developed around the industry. And this brings to mind Mark Knopfler’s song Telegraph Road.
A long time ago came a man on a track
Walking thirty miles with a pack on his back
And he put down his load where he thought it was the best
Made a home in the wilderness
He built a cabin and a winter store
And he ploughed up the ground by the cold lake shore
And the other travelers came riding down the track
And they never went further, no, they never went back
Then came the churches then came the schools
Then came the lawyers then came the rules
Then came the trains and the trucks with their loads
And the dirty old track was the telegraph road
Then came the mines — then came the ore
Then there was the hard times then there was a war
Telegraph sang a song about the world outside
Telegraph road got so deep and so wide
Like a rolling river…
And my radio says tonight it’s gonna freeze
People driving home from the factories
There’s six lanes of traffic
Three lanes moving slow. ..
I used to like to go to work but they shut it down
I got a right to go to work but there’s no work here to be found
Yes and they say we’re gonna have to pay what’s owed
We’re gonna have to reap from some seed that’s been sowed
And the birds up on the wires and the telegraph poles
They can always fly away from this rain and this cold
You can hear them singing out their telegraph code
All the way down the telegraph road
You know I’d sooner forget but I remember those nights
When life was just a bet on a race between the lights
You had your head on my shoulder you had your hand in my hair
Now you act a little colder like you don’t seem to care
But believe in me baby and I’ll take you away
From out of this darkness and into the day
From these rivers of headlights these rivers of rain
From the anger that lives on the streets with these names
Cause I’ve run every red light on memory lane
I’ve seen desperation explode into flames
And I don’t want to see it again. ..
From all of these signs saying sorry but we’re closed
All the way down the telegraph road
Songwriter: MARK KNOPFLER
Telegraph Road lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group
Mattie Kuhn (“Ma Kiley”) was a woman telegraph operator famous in the business in the first half of the twentieth century. Learning the work from a guest at a hotel where she worked, she plied her trade for decades in the southwestern United States and northern Mexico. Married five times, she never found a satisfactory husband and largely supported herself and her children. At one point, she is said to have ejected an unruly customer from her office, “throwing him out by the nape of his neck.” She was active in the operators’ union, the Order of Railroad Telegraphers (ORT). She retired in 1942 and was featured in The Bug and I, published in Railroad Magazine. She passed away in California in 1970.
References
CQD. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CQD Accessed November 10, 2020.
Davidson, Janet F. “Ma Kiley: The Life of a Railroad Telegrapher.” (Excerpt) Technology and Culture 40, no. 3 (1999): 696–697. doi:10.1353/tech.1999.0123. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/33391 Viewed November 10, 2020
Digest of articles https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/electric-telegraph
Accessed November 10, 2020.
Dire Straits: Telegraph Road lyrics. https://www.lyricsfreak.com/d/dire+straits/telegraph+road_20040667.html
Accessed November 10, 2020.
Drawing of female telegraph operator with admiring men looking on https://i1.wp.com/petticoatsandpistols.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/female-Telegraph-Operator.jpg?ssl=1 Accessed November 10, 2020.
The Golden Age of Telegraph Literature: The 19th-century genre showcased technology anxieties and Catfish-esque storylines. https://slate.com/technology/2014/11/telegraph-literature-from-19th-century-was-surprisingly-modern.htmlAccessed November 10, 2020.
Green Eyeshade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_eyeshade#:~:text=Green%20eyeshades%20are%20a%20type,tended%20to%20be%20harsh%20Accessed November 10, 2020.
Image of “bug” telegraph key
http://www.telegraphkeys.com/pages/bugs/us_bugs.html
Accessed November 10, 2020.
Image of Ma Kiley book.
https://www.amazon.com/Ma-Kiley-Railroad-Telegrapher-SOUTHWESTERN/dp/0874042755
November 10, 2020.
Image of telegraph key. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Telegraph_key_and_sounder,_Western_Electric_Manufacturing_Co,_Chicago,_c._1876_-_Wisconsin_Historical_Museum_-_DSC02817.JPG Accessed November 10, 2020.
Image of telegraph operator.
https://www.amazon.com/Telegraphy-Century-American-Telegraph-Engraving/dp/B07C48H5VC/ref=sr_1_13?dchild=1&keywords=telegraph+key&qid=1604974285&sr=8-13 Accessed November 10, 2020.
Morse Code & the Telegraph. UPDATED:JUN 6, 2019. ORIGINAL:NOV 9, 2009
https://www.history.com/topics/inventions/telegraph#:~:text=Telegraph%20systems%20spread%20across%20the,across%20the%20Atlantic%20by%201940Accessed November 10, 2020.
Morse Code Communications. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Morse-Code
Accessed November 10, 2020.
Specimen of telgrapher’s script http://www.telegraphlore.com/telegraph_tales/drgw_web/part2/script.gif Accessed November 10, 2020.
Telegraph operator was the latest obsolete job in 1971. CBC Archives · Posted: Sep 19, 2019 8:30 AM ET Last Updated: September 19, 2019 https://www.cbc.ca/archives/telegraph-operator-was-the-latest-obsolete-job-in-1971-1.5264815 Accessed November 10, 2020.
Thomas C. Jepsen. My Sister’s Telegraphic-Women in the Telegraph Office 1846–1950. https://monoskop.org/images/f/f3/Jepsen_Thomas_My_Sisters_Telegraphic_Women_in_the_Telegraph_Office_1846-1950.pdf
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Video of Song Telegraph Road. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TTAXENxbM0
Accessed November 10, 2020.
Woman operator Harpers 1870s.gif (Image) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Woman_operator_Harpers_1870s.gif
Accessed November 10, 2020.