TELEGRAPH
With the advent of the telegraph, the contours of modern
communication became visible. The telegraph—the first
commercially practical application of electricity—separated communication from transportation and transformed
nearly all aspects of American journalism.
From Invention to the Civil War (1840s–1860s)
Samuel F. B. Morse publicly inaugurated his invention
by transmitting a Biblical passage — “What hath God
wrought!”—from Washington to Baltimore on May 24,
1844. Over the next few days, Morse quietly inaugurated a
new era in American journalism by repeatedly exchanging
another message— “What’s the news?”—with his assistant
forty miles away. As telegraphy matured as an industry
during the next twenty years, it fostered new routines and
institutions, as well as a new ethos, in the gathering and
distribution of news.
Before the telegraph, newspapers obtained out-of-town
news through the mails. From 1792 to 1873, postal law
allowed editors to exchange newspapers with one another
postage free. Editors scanned exchanges from around the
country for stories of interest to their local readers and
simply reprinted them. For vital commercial and political
news, editors looked to special expresses—relays of horseback riders—sporadically arranged by the Post Office in
the 1820s and 1830s and sometimes organized by the newspapers themselves in the 1830s and 1840s. Correspondents
also submitted stories by mail. In short, pre-telegraphic
news moved at the speed of one or more transports—horses,
stagecoaches, railroads, and boats.
The telegraph promised much faster news delivery, if
the wires worked and editors were willing to bear the cost.
Early telegraph lines, able to handle only one message at a
time, were notoriously unreliable and expensive, especially
compared to the nearly free news gathering by mail. In
1849, most customers paid about fifty cents to telegraph ten
words from New York to Washington, though newspapers
typically lowered their costs by using the wires during offpeak evening hours and by negotiating volume discounts.
The costly and complex task of arranging telegraphic news
gathering prompted newspapers to cooperate in the effort,
organizing early versions of the Associated Press in upstate
New York and New York City between 1846 and 1848.
After a slow start, the nation’s telegraph network grew
rapidly. The principal cities of the Ohio and Mississippi
River valleys were tied into the national grid before 1850
and the transcontinental telegraph reached San Francisco in
1861. Newspaper readers who had once found the most upto-date intelligence under columns headed “Latest Mail”
or “By Express” now looked for it under “By Telegraph.”
Telegraphy also revolutionized foreign reporting. The 1866
completion of the Atlantic cable, an undersea telegraph,
enabled American newspapers to publish European news
less than a day old.
Western Union, a regional firm in the 1850s, emerged
from the Civil War poised to absorb competitors. It became
the first American company to dominate an economic
sector—telecommunication—from coast to coast. As the
technical and cost constraints of early telegraphy eased in
the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the press dramatically increased its routine use of the wires to the point
where the heading “By Telegraph” faded as a meaningless
distinction.
The Telegraph and the Modern
Newspaper (1860s–1920s)
At the end of the Civil War, news was delivered over eightyfour thousand miles of telegraph lines in the United States.
Telegraph companies continued to add new lines and discovered in the 1870s how to multiplex—operate multiple
circuits—on a single wire. Newspapers could now afford
to have their own reporters supplement the dry, nationally standardized wire service stories with accounts that
included interpretation or opinion tailored for their readers. In 1880, Western Union transmitted 611-million words
of wire service copy and special dispatches; one paper that
year paid more than $70,000 for its telegraph news.
The telegraph altered the dynamics of publishing daily
newspapers in several ways. Urban newspapers issued multiple daily editions to accommodate the constant flow of dispatches. In their competition to attract subscribers, editors
boasted about the volume of telegraph news they carried
and about their spending to obtain special dispatches and
expensive overseas cable reports. Newspapers also showcased their telegraph news by posting it on bulletin boards
outside their buildings and, by the early 1900s, displaying it
on electric screens. Telegraph news became one of the chief
expenses in publishing a daily newspaper and one reason
for consolidation in the industry.
Telegraph news became such a pervasive presence that it
transformed journalism beyond the big cities. Many smalltown papers increased their frequency to daily publication
once they received a steady diet of telegraphic news. The
distribution of news by telegraph also gave rural newspapers an edge in competing with city publications; they
obtained news by wire and published it for local readers
before city papers with similar reports could circulate in the
countryside. Small newspapers without direct wire service
managed to feature a few columns of telegraph news, albeit
dated, in materials provided by newspaper syndicates.
The constraints of sending stories by wire contributed to
the emergence of the modern news report—short accounts
with brief factual sentences stripped of unnecessary verbiage and free of the reporter’s opinions. To minimize costs
and transmission time (operators could send about thirty
words a minute in Morse code), reporters condensed their
accounts by pruning articles, prepositions, and modifiers,
plus they summarized sources’ remarks rather than simply
transcribing them. Many also devised codes for commonly
used phrases and sentences. Cost-conscious editors admonished reporters that the telegraph was for facts while interpretation and analysis could be sent by the much slower
but cheaper mails. Historians have long considered these
telegraph-induced changes in news reports as steps toward
the rise of journalistic objectivity and the inverted-pyramid story form (information arrayed in descending order
of importance). Recent scholarship, however, suggests that
the telegraph’s effects were mainly indirect; instead, the
business dynamics of the wire services, the press’s growing reliance on institutional news sources, and cultural
changes arguably played a larger role than technological
constraints.
Reporters distinguished themselves through their ingenious use of the telegraph. In covering breaking news,
reporters sometimes “held the wires” by paying the telegraph operator to send a long text, customarily the Bible,
until the story was ready for transmission. This stratagem
kept rival reporters from sending their accounts. Also,
reporters who knew Morse code could eavesdrop as operators transmitted competitors’ messages. Foreign correspondents who outsmarted censors in overseas telegraph offices
by sneaking sensitive information into cable dispatches
especially won plaudits from their editors and peers.
The telegraph partly divorced news reporting from news
writing. Reporters who wired their skeletonized observations to the home offices relied on telegraph editors to flesh
out the story. Skilled telegraph editors became remarkably
adept at producing a well-rounded story from a bare-bones
dispatch, but they always risked introducing serious errors
in the process of reconstituting a story.
Separating telegraph reporting from writing also enabled
newspapers to synthesize coverage of complex breaking
stories from multiple wire reports and locations. When
news of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the ensuing fires reached the New York Sun, for instance, the paper supplemented fragmentary reports from the city with news
from telegraph offices surrounding the city, from individuals who contacted the Sun, and from government reports
issued in Washington, D.C. Sitting in the Sun’s office on
the other side of the continent, a reporter familiar with San
Francisco constructed stories from the bits and pieces of
news that came over the wires.
Unlike earthquakes, however, most telegraph news was
predictable, and gathering it became institutionalized in
the decades after the Civil War. News-savvy government
officials and institutions synchronized their practices and
rhythms to accord with electrified journalism. Most such
efforts involved subtle controls, such as giving telegraph
reporters preferred access to news sources. More dramatically, as in times of national crisis such as the Civil War and
the Spanish-American War, the authorities recognized that
the telegraph provided a convenient choke point to censor
news as it flowed to the public.
Arranging telegraphic coverage for the biggest events
required elaborate planning. Four months before the 1888
Republican convention in Chicago, the party’s press committee began working with Western Union and the press to
install circuits that would allow special correspondents to
send dispatches directly to newspapers in thirty cities. Convention planners even allowed the Associated Press to place
a telegrapher directly in front of the speaker’s stand. News of
the nomination reached London, via the Atlantic cable, two
minutes after the votes were tallied—and before delegates
in the convention hall heard the official announcement. By
one estimate, telegraph companies transmitted about 14.5
million words in connection with the convention.
The timeliness of telegraph news had pronounced consequences for readers and society by allowing people to
respond to situations fast enough to affect their outcome.
News of the great Chicago fire of 1871 and the Johnstown
flood of 1889, just two of many disasters flashed to the nation
over the wires, prompted outpourings of aid that eased the
victims’ plight. In the realm of politics, citizens far from
Washington followed the daily or hourly news reports of
congressional deliberations and pressured lawmakers by
phone or telegram in time to influence legislation.
The rush of telegraph news, combined with its staccato
nature—impulses of constantly revised intelligence—created emotionally charged public spectacles around the
nation. In 1910, for example, former heavyweight champion Jim Jeffries came out of retirement as the “Great
White Hope” in a bid to reclaim the title from an African American boxer, Jack Johnson. Telegraph companies
upgraded the circuits from Reno, Nevada, to accommodate
the voluminous dispatches filed by wire service reporters
and dozens of special correspondents. For days before the
July 4 fight, newspapers around the nation featured reports,
many unabashedly racist, from the boxers’ training camps.
While twenty thousand boxing fans witnessed the match
live, hundreds of thousands more gathered outside newspaper offices around the country to share the round-byround telegraph bulletins posted by the papers. News of
Johnson’s decisive victory over the “Great White Hope”
unleashed violence throughout the country in which mobs
burned buildings, assaulted individuals, and killed many
African Americans.
Eclipse of the Telegraph (1920s–1980s)
The telegraph continued to distribute news for the wire services well into the age of the telephone, radio, and television
even as its role as a tool for individual reporters faded. For
most stories, reporters found it simpler to telephone their
newspapers rather than work through a telegraph operator.
Reporters, however, still depended on the telegraph’s transmission capacity to relay the huge volume of dispatches filed
for political conventions and other major news events. As
late as the 1960s, correspondents used submarine telegraph
lines—and contended with foreign cable censors—to transmit stories from Vietnam to offices in the United States.
The value of the telegraph in distributing the wire services’ output was enhanced by developing simpler equipment and new applications. The teletype, which substituted
simple typewriter-like equipment for the sending and receiving apparatus that used Morse code, spread quickly through
newsrooms after 1920. Radio and television stations also
received much of their news by teletype, and some even
incorporated its clattering sound into the background of
their broadcasts to create a journalistic soundscape. In 1935
the Associated Press launched its Wirephoto service, which
transmitted pictures to newspapers around the world over
telegraph and telephone lines. This innovation capped more
than fifty years of experimentation, much of it inspired by
newspapers, in phototelegraphy. Another 1930s innovation,
the teletypesetter, used the telegraph’s electrical impulses
to code tapes that operated automatic typesetters, saving
considerable labor in preparing stock market tables and
similar text.
In the 1980s, computers linked by sophisticated telecommunication networks finally replaced the telegraph as
the basis for transmitting news. Even though telegraphy has
passed from the journalistic scene, its imprint can be found
in reporters’ idiom (e.g., news “flashes” and “bulletins”), in
television’s rediscovery of news tickers (news briefs crawling across the bottom of the screen), and in the frenzied
scramble to beat rivals in delivering news to the public.
Further Reading
Blondheim, Menahem. News over the Wires: The Telegraph and
the Flow of Public Information in America, 1844–1897.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994.
Coe, Lewis. The Telegraph: A History of Morse’s Invention and
Its Predecessors in the United States. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1993.
Harnett, Richard M. Wirespeak: Codes and Jargon of the News
Business. San Mateo, CA: Shorebird Press, 1997.
Kielbowicz, Richard, B. “The Telegraph, Censorship, and Politics
at the Outset of the Civil War.” Civil War History 40 (June
1994): 95–118.
Schwarzlose, Richard A. The Nation’s Newsbrokers, 2 vols. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1989 and 1990.
Thompson, Robert L. Wiring a Continent: The History of the
Telegraph Industry in the United States, 1832–1866. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947.
Richard B. Kielbowicz