Book Review "Tales of the Telegraph" 1899

 This is another review by Jim Haynes from the old Telegraph Lore website.

A PDF of the book is available at the Internet Archive here.

Enjoy

73
Ciao
KJ

"Tales of the Telegraph"

The Story of a Telegrapher's Life and Adventures in Railroad Commercial and Military Work

by Jasper Ewing Brady, 1st Lieutenant 19th United States Infantry, Late Captain Signal Corps U.S. Volunteers

Published by Doubleday & McClure Co. 1899

This book is a collection of stories from a lifetime of employment in the telegraph business in the late 19th century. The span of jobs held by Mr. Brady covers just about every type of landline Morse telegraph work imaginable. Reading this book should give the reader a pretty good picture of employment in the telegraph business in the 19th century, particularly in the south and western areas of the United States.

Brady started out as a boomer telegrapher straight out of telegraph school. The first few chapters of the book contain various stories and incidents while working various railroad telegraph offices. The quantity and destructiveness of the various railroad accidents he describes led me to believe that this was a work of fiction, until later I read that 2000 railroad related deaths per year was not uncommon in the late 19th century. The next phase of his career was spent doing commercial work. I have never found a description of working quadruplex Morse circuits until reading this book.

After tiring of commercial work, Brady decided to return to the railroad, this time with aspirations of becoming a dispatcher. Interrupting the flow of the book, Brady did a fine job with a chapter describing the role of the dispatcher in the running of railroad. He then continued on with several chapters covering various train dispatcher stories.

Brady then suddenly decides to join the military, hoping to quit the telegraph for good. He succeeds for a year, and then he took an assignment working as a telegrapher for an isolated Texas military camp. The next chapter is a detour to a story he picked up from one of the older soldiers while out west. The story is about an operator who literally dies at the key. The remaining chapters conclude Brady's military career including work as a censor of telegraph traffic while stationed in Florida during the Spanish-American War. This book is excellent reading for fans of Morse telegraphy. Brady gives a good overview of three important phases of telegraphic communications: railroad dispatching, commercial, and military.

 

Book Review "The American Telegrapher"

Here is another interesting review from Jim Haynes at the old Telegraph Lore website.
I have included the second part of the Review as it has some great stories.

Enjoy
73
Ciao
KJ

Review - The American Telegrapher: a social history 1860-1900by Jim Haynes

The American Telegrapher: a social history 1860-1900
Edwin Gabler
Rutgers University Press, 1988
ISBN 0-8135-1284-0 (hardbound), 0-8135-1285-9 (paperback)

I seem to read a lot of books which are at the same time both interesting and tedious. This is one such book. Written by an academic historian for reading by other academic historians, it is long on footnotes, theories, and statistics and short on flesh-and-blood storytelling; yet there is enough of the latter to entertain the casual reader. Part I of this review is an attempt to convey the general message of the book. Part II is for fun: a selection of stories about the lives and times telegraphers a century ago. 

Part II

Dr. Gabler had access to a vast amount of material: census records, archives of the telegraph companies, contemporary newspaper accounts, magazines published for the edification and amusement of operators, and even novels in which telegraphers were used as characters. The footnotes and bibliography take up 48 pages. One page in the book is an illustration of advertisements in a telegraphers' magazine of 1883. They include a book on shorthand, a book of money-making secrets, a book on the mysteries of love-making, a book on fortune telling, watch charms with microscopic pictures, a book of advice to the unmarried, a package of stationery, a book on politeness, a book of letters for all occasions, playing cards with marked backs, a book of magic tricks, a book on business, and a book on ballroom dancing. The theme is that these appealed to working-class young adults who felt a need to learn how to behave properly as new members of the middle-class.

A number of telegraph operators rose to prominence. Thomas Edison and Andrew Carnegie are the best known; Theodore N. Vail was a founder of AT&T; others found success in business or politics; and almost all the upper management of Western Union was drawn from the ranks of operators. In 1885 there were five doctors and one dentist moonlighting as telegraph operators - maybe medicine and dentistry didn't pay all that well in those days.

Thomas Edison, as a young telegrapher in the 1860s, would work a full day and then stay in the office at night, listening to a press circuit to get high speed code practice. Later he worked the Boston end of a New York circuit with an operator named Jerry Borst. Operators formed friendships with their counterparts at the other end of the wires. The telegraph companies insisted that operators should work at whatever circuits they were assigned. Edison and Borst conspired to change three characters of the code, so that nobody else could copy their transmissions and they could always work together. Cockroaches were such a problem in the office that Edison devised a bug zapper to protect his lunch from the little beasties.

Friendships over the wires were nourished during lulls in traffic by exchanges of jokes and local news, and by checker games. Sometimes love and courtship blossomed too. At other times operators were rude to one another. On one occasion two operators got so angry at each other that they arranged to meet at a town halfway between their posts and settle the matter with fists at 1:00 AM. "Salting" (sending too fast for the receiving operator) was a frequent source of irritation. Salting was also part of the common practice of hazing new operators.

Operators frequently got privileges, such as free passes to theaters and on trains. With the chronic oversupply it was common for operators to travel back and forth across the country looking for work, or for better conditions. Operators didn't get vacations, paid or otherwise; but in the summer months telegraph offices would open in the resort towns where the rich took their vacations, and operators could find work there.

In 1883 Western Union employed 444 telegraphers in New York City, 96 in Boston, 88 in St. Louis, and 83 in Chicago. This seems to support a conjecture of mine that W.U. was weakened all its life by overattention to serving New York City and insufficient effort to develop the business in other parts of the country.

There was friction between the city operators and the rural operators. The city operators were proud of their skills, and wanted to move the traffic. They resented they way country operators would frequently interrupt transmissions. The country operators, usually working in railroad depots, countered that telegraphy was but a small part of their duties. They had to answer questions from the public, sell tickets, meet trains, tend switches and signals, handle freight, and keep the lamps burning. They commonly worked shifts as long as twelve or even sixteen hours.

Development of duplex and then quadruplex operation greatly increased the pressure on operators, as the receiving operators could not interrupt the senders. Gender stereotyping held that only male operators had the stamina to handle these heavily-loaded circuits; yet the book cites a number of examples of women who worked these circuits. Women were consistently paid less than men. The companies were well aware that women were a bargain compared with men, and continually tried to replace men with women.

Nellie Welch had full charge of the telegraph office in Point Arena, California in 1886. She was eleven years old.

Western Union and the Cooper Union Institute in 1869 jointly started a free eight-month telegraphy course for women. It lasted through the early 1890s, turning out about 80 graduates a year. They would first take non-paying jobs assisting regular operators, and then be hired as operators on lightly loaded city circuits. This school was much despised by men for its contribution to the oversupply problem, thought it probably hurt the opportunities for women more than those for men.

Beginner and less-skilled operators were called "plugs" or "hams." (Note the endless controversy over the origin of the term "ham" for amateur radio operators.) The schools that turned out these operators were called "plug factories."

Craft magazines sought to shame operators who taught telegraphy. They were urged to pass on the secrets of Morse only to brothers, sisters, sons, and daughters. At least one railroad operator quit his job rather than cooperate with a student placed with him by the company. (Some other material I have read tells of operators who took on students for a fee; and notes that the operator not only gained the income but also used the students to run errands for him.)

 

The Brasspounder

Here is another interesting review from Jim Haynes at the old Telegraph Lore website.

Enjoy
73
Ciao
KJ

The Brasspounder
by D. G. Sanders
Copyright 1978, ISBN 0-8015-0881-9
Hawthorn Books, Inc., New York

D. G. Sanders grew up in the little coal mining town of Hemlock, Ohio. At the age of thirteen he got interested in telegraphy by hanging around the railroad depot. "Now be it noted that in that day [1912] telegraphers were a special kind of people. They were thought to be especially talented and their advice was sought. They got notices in the paper now and then, and fables were attached to some. There was one fabulous fellow, never named, who could send a message with one hand while taking down another message with the other hand..." The station agent helped him to learn Morse code. By taking care of horses, and by trapping muskrats, he earned enough money to order a Morse practice set from Sears, Roebuck. A four mile walk took him to a town where the telephone company would sell a used but still serviceable battery for a nickel.

When he was sixteen his family moved to Coshocton, a city large enough to have a bustling Western Union office. Within a few days he had acquired his first pair of long pants and a job as a Western Union bicycle messenger. A fringe benefit of that job was an opportunity to learn telegraphy. After a few months he realized that a career with Western Union would entail working in an office in a city, and that the rural life was more to his liking. A railroad worker friend suggested that he use the railroad telegraph to introduce himself to a supervisor and ask for a job. He was hired by Pennsylvania Railroad and sent to a station to work and be trained on the job. After five months he was assigned to a signal cabin where he would work alone. He was a few months short of seventeen years old - he had told the railroad he was 17 already.

The rest of the book is more about railroading than about telegraphy. There was a close relationship between Western Union and the railroads. He mentions that in small towns the railroad station might also be the Western Union office, and that in larger towns the railroad office might be used for telegraph business outside the hours when the W.U. office was open. On one occasion Sanders' boss from his Western Union days telegraphed him at at his railroad office, offering him a one-night moonlighting job receiving returns from the 1916 Presidential election. He typed these on transparent paper, which was then used with a magic lantern to project onto a sheet attached to a building across the street, where the public was gathered.

He mentions the distinctive style, or "fist", of each telegrapher, whereby he could identify who was sending. The possibilities for ambiguity in American Morse code led to some confusing and amusing messages, as when a bridge inspector's report was copied as "Found a lion under bridge 16..." (the intended message was "Foundation under bridge 16...").

In 1922 he was furloughed because a coal strike left his branch of the railroad without any traffic. He quickly found work as a farm hand, but after a month was called to Akron where the railroad was swamped with telegraph work. He could have remained there after the strike was over, but preferred to return to his former station. In 1937 he was offered the opportunity to become a train dispatcher, but turned it down so that he could remain in the country. In 1938 he got the second-shift operator's spot at Orrville and remained there until retirement in 1965, with 50 years service. He notes that by the end of World War II there were many railroad signal operators who did not telegraph.

 

Railroad Telegraphers Handbook 1991

This delightful little book was printed in 1991 and has since gone out of print.
However the Internet Archive has a scanned/PDF copy available for download at the link under the title below.

This review comes courtesy of Jim Haynes at the old Telegraph Lore website.

Enjoy
73
Ciao
KJ

Railroad Telegraphers Handbook
by Tom French, 1991

The Railroad Telegrapher's Handbook is a newly-written (1991) book that tells all about how Morse telegraphy was used on railroads until nearly the present time. (An article in Dots and Dashes reproduces a train order that was received by Morse in 1982, on the Burlington-Northern, and may have been the last train order so transmitted.) Lists of operating rules are given, presumably taken from the rule books of actual railroads, along with sample train order messages. Railroad telegraphy is a lot more complicated than the ordinary Western Union office. Railroad messages are critical to safety; some messages are not complete until they have been repeated back to the sender, delivered to the addressees, read and signed by the addressees, and the signatures transmitted back to the sender. Most require multiple copies. A railroad operator would write with a stylus on thin, translucent paper, using double-sided carbon paper. Semaphore signals and the hooks for delivering messages to the crews of moving trains are described.

Wiring diagrams are given for an operating table connected to several circuits, and for a Morse repeater. There is a map of the New Mexico Division of AT&SF;, showing how various offices are connected to several line circuits. A selector system is described, which allows calling up a particular telegraph office without requiring operators to listen constantly for their office call letters. (Most circuits were "way" operated, meaning that several offices were connected by the same circuit and sounders at all responded to all the traffic on the line.)

The book is made all the more enjoyable with reproductions of advertisements that appeared in trade magazines: typewriters, telegraph instruments, Vibroplex keys, swivel chairs, shorthand instruction, and an attachment to enable a bicycle to be ridden on the railroad rail. The Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad was advertising for operators "able to copy Morse at 25 words per minute, and should be in good physical condition." as recently as 1954. Of considerable interest in this day when we hear so much about repetitive motion injuries and carpal tunnel syndrome, there is an advertisement for Telegrapher Liniment, which never fails where directions are followed implicitly. "Operator's Paralysis or Writer's Cramp comes like a thief in the night, and almost before you are aware of it you find it impossible to send any kind of readable Morse." Another advertisement is for the "Operator's Friend" a massage or exercise device which "prevents and cures telegrapher's paralysis and writer's cramp." The front cover reproduces an artist's illustration from the front cover of a 1904 telegrapher's magazine, showing a young man clad in white shirt, high collar, and vest working at his key while a uniformed trainman waits at his elbow for orders. There are two pages of railroad slang and two pages of bibliography.

Fraser’s Calendar and Telegraphy Notebook 1872

 This is a real gem of a find from the Internet Archive courtesy of Alberta MTC member Marian Gibbard.

Fraser’s Calendar and Telegraphy Notebook from 1872 is fascinating look at the telegraph in British India in the latter half of the 19th C.

You can check out the Internet Archive copy here:
https://archive.org/details/dli.ministry.02181/mode/2up

The book is a calendar/log book for those working for the Indian Telegraph which was under the control of the Colonial Government much as the Postal Telegraph was in Britain. However, what makes this book particularly interesting is the wealth of information on the state of telegraphy at that time, theory, practice, and practical information on running a telegraph line across such a diverse country as India.

 At 101 pages, a third of which is the log book with a page for each month of 1872 and 1873, there is an amazing amount of information here, weights and measures, calculating distances for mapping, strengths of wire, problems with escapes caused by damp spider webs, electrical theory, regulations, rates, legislation from the government etc.

There is also very practical and useful information ranging from how to load a cap and ball pistol in damp conditions to how to treat "strangles", a dangerous disease of horses Marian tells me.

Also of interest is the Morse Code being referenced. It is the Continental Code not our American/Railway code which, given that this was published in 1872 makes it one of the earlier references to that code that I have seen! Of course by 1872 the globe was crisscrossed with undersea cables most of which used that code .

Worth a perusal.

73
Ciao
Kevin Jepson
Editor

Modern Practice of the Electric Telegraph 1892

 Today your humble editor received a real treasure!

A paper copy of Pope's "Modern Practice of the Electric Telegraph" written in 1892.
This magnificent book is produced in paperback form by the Leopold Classic Library from a scanned copy, made by Google I believe.
I have a PDF of the scanned copy of the 1874 edition from the Internet Archive but nothing compares (at least to me) to being able to peruse such old documents in paper form.

 Inside this book is a fascinating look at the state of electricity and electrical apparatus at the end of the 19th Century. There is practical advise on the design, construction, and use of the telegraph. Also trouble shooting tips for when things don't work!

There are 185 illustrations in this book that help to show not only the principles that Pope is describing, but are also a pleasant snapshot of the state of the technology at the time. 

I have perused the PDF file quite a bit but I have to say that being able to flip back and forth and wander around the book in it's physical form really helps me to cement my understanding and gives me a great appreciation for the technicians and craftsmen who created these globe spanning systems even when their understanding of the fundamental science was primitive in the extreme.

 

There were several editions of this book. The Internet archive has at least three that I have found one from 1866, 1874 and one from 1899.

All the PDF copies are in good shape with the scanned illustrations being very clear.

The paper copy I have was produced from the best scanned copy that was available and has the same detailed and clear illustrations.

Of interest to those of us struggling to lear the code and improve our sending and copying is a short section at the very end of the book with "Hints for Learners". Definitely worth a gander.

I found this page, the last page of the text, to be particularly apropos to me and the Heritage Park's gang of happy amateurs.
I have included a photo of the page.

Enjoy
73

The Train and the Telegraph

 This is a fascinating book with an interesting take on the relations between Telegraph companies and Railroads.
Definitely worth a read.

 

The Train and The Telegraph
by Benjamin Sidney Michael Schwantes, 2019

From the Amazon listing:

A challenge to the long-held notion of close ties between the railroad and telegraph industries of the nineteenth century.

To many people in the nineteenth century, the railroad and the telegraph were powerful, transformative forces, ones that seemed to work closely together to shape the economy, society, and politics of the United States. However, the perception—both popular and scholarly—of the intrinsic connections between these two institutions has largely obscured a far more complex and contested relationship, one that created profound divisions between entrepreneurial telegraph promoters and warier railroad managers.

In The Train and the Telegraph, Benjamin Sidney Michael Schwantes argues that uncertainty, mutual suspicion, and cautious experimentation more aptly describe how railroad officials and telegraph entrepreneurs hesitantly established a business and technical relationship. The two industries, Schwantes reveals, were drawn together gradually through external factors such as war, state and federal safety regulations, and financial necessity, rather than because of any perception that the two industries were naturally related or beneficial to each other.

Complicating the existing scholarship by demonstrating that the railroad and telegraph in the United States were uneasy partners at best—and more often outright antagonists—throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, The Train and the Telegraph will appeal to scholars of communication, transportation, and American business history and political economy, as well as to enthusiasts of the nineteenth-century American railroad industry.