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.)
