Vail broke the intended circuit into smallish pieces, and at each junction he introduced a device that he called a relay. This was another magnetic transmitter that “read” the incoming impulse, no matter how weak; boosted it; and then sent it on its reenergized way down the wire of the next circuit. The magic of the relay was that its work could be performed as many times as relays could be built and installed into the line. The line could be continued endlessly until a chain of circuits circled the entire planet, if that was wished.
In electrical terms, the key was the sensitivity of the relay. Alfred Vail put his wish for it this way: “It matters not how delicate the movement [of the receiver] may be. If I can obtain it at all, it is all I want.” So he built the device—a tiny magnet that could be triggered by even the tiniest movement at the circuit’s receiving end and would then open and close the next circuit. Messages could always be sent as fast as anyone wanted to send them; now, with what was called Vail’s “creative engineering achievement of the first order,” they could be sent as far as anyone wanted to send them, too.
Morse traveled the world for four years in search of support, all the while continuing to experiment, improve, and hone his invention and to inveigh against its naysayers. Then, suddenly and to universal surprise, the political climate changed, and congressional intransigence melted away like an April frost. Morse was summoned to Washington, where he arranged to string wires between congressional committee rooms to demonstrate his system’s abilities. The show seemed to soften the mood of the hitherto ill-tempered politicians sufficiently to prompt Morse to make yet another attempt to wheedle money from them.
This time he succeeded. It was hardly a rout: his plea only squeaked through by 89 votes to 83, but he cheerfully remarked that six votes were as good to him as a thousand. He had been offered a $30,000 subvention earmarked for a trench and a line between Washington and Baltimore, a distance of forty-four miles, to conduct the demonstration of his life.
This was the first electrical engineering project ever undertaken in America, and the technical problems turned out to be legion. The trench was tricky to excavate, especially when winter froze the ground. Not enough wire was available; the lead tubes used to insulate the conductor often broke; not enough batteries could be found. The paperwork required to free the government moneys was wretchedly complicated, and feuds broke out among contractors, would-be inventors, and new claimants to the existing inventions. Finally an exasperated Morse decided that the line need not be underground at all but could be suspended in the air from thirty-foot-high chestnut poles, spaced two hundred feet apart.
This turned out to be relatively easy, and he started to employ such of the line as had already been built to send news of the Whig Party’s national convention, which by chance was being staged in Baltimore, back to Washington. He had a colleague at the convention ride out on the train to the closest telegraph pole and report what he had found out to an operator, who would then telegraph it to politicians in Washington. On May 1, he was able to report that the convention had nominated Henry Clay for president. The whole city was suddenly agog with news that was spread about long before the newspapers had it; the atmosphere of febrile excitement that suddenly gripped political Washington generated enormous publicity for the device that transmitted the first official news message ever sent at the speed of light, city to city.
Of that later moment in telegraph history, the famous Friday, May 24, 1844, when the first formal telegraph message was sent, we know rather less than we might wish. Alfred Vail set up his instrument in the offices of a railway station about a mile outside Baltimore. Samuel Morse, well aware of his place in posterity, set his up in no less august a setting than the chamber of the United States Supreme Court, which was then on the ground floor of the north wing of the US Capitol, close to the rotunda whose giant ceiling Morse had once hoped to adorn. But there would be no disappointment now, on this, his second great encounter with the enormous government building.
The first public message to be sent by telegraph—WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT, from the Book of Numbers—was transmitted by Morse on May 24, 1844, from what was then the US Supreme Court chamber in the Capitol, to the railroad depot forty miles away in Baltimore.
Morse had taken advice on what the first message should be. Patent Commissioner Henry Leavitt Ellsworth had championed the invention, and Annie Ellsworth, his daughter, had brought Morse the news of the congressional funding vote, so as a gesture of gratitude, he asked her to choose a suitable phrase. We know little as to how many congressmen were present in Washington and how many others were watching and listening in the depot forty miles away in Baltimore. All we do know is that sometime on that warm afternoon, in the presence of a select group of the nation’s elite, Morse sat down before his confection of wires and magnets and cogwheels and mercury vials and levers, and tapped out eighteen letters, the final four words of the twenty-third verse of the twenty-third chapter of the Book of Numbers: WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT.
The words alone formed a simple declarative exclamation, a statement of Samuel Morse’s faith, a plangent line of gratitude, and above all, a suitably portentous epigraph for an era of change that now commenced with unimagined speed and unimaginable consequences. It marked the moment when, as Henry Adams would later write in his Education of Henry Adams, “the old universe was thrown into the ash-heap and a new one created.”
New telegraph lines went up almost overnight. They went up so fast, according to the music-hall wits of the moment, that it seemed new wires were being spliced onto the tops of cornstalks and beanpoles. Lines were sent out strategically, tactically, or randomly, and were planned to run hither and yon, some for highly profitable reasons and others for purposes less commercially wise. Major cities would be connected in a matter of months; distant states within just a few years.
By the mid-1850s, there were dozens of telegraph companies, offering services of wildly variable quality. Many of these companies had been established so quickly and with so little thought of geography that one message often had to pass through several competing companies’ hands before it reached its target destination. Between Chicago and New York, for example, a message might pass through the operators of six different companies, with each retransmission occasioning delay and risking inaccuracy. Then a team of investors led by Hiram Sibley, a wool carder, agricultural equipment dealer, banker, and county sheriff based in the wheat-processing center of Rochester, New York, decided to buy up all the competing companies and create a giant near-monopoly. Sibley and his crop-buying business friends needed accurate and up-to-the-moment news on wheat prices, and for that there had to be one telegraph company, and one only.
There might have been missteps. Sibley first backed a rival telegraph system, which was based on keyboards and the Roman alphabet rather than Morse code, and which had been invented by a man with the magnificent name of Royal House. And the giant new company was nearly given the name the New York and Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Company. But in the end, Morse’s system proved entirely more reliable than the House brand, and the new name chosen for the company was memorable and elegantly spare: Western Union.*
It was under the banner of this Western Union, appropriately, that the push then began to unite the nation telegraphically, coast-to-coast. Sibley pressed Congress as early as 1857 to support building a transcontinental line. Three years later, the politicians passed the Pacific Telegraph Act of 1860, which underwrote the $40,000 Sibley decided the line would cost.
The act was signed into law on June 16 by President James Buchanan—one of the few notable deeds of a president whose repute remains mired by his having to watch as the slave states of the Deep South seceded and the sides drew apart to begin the first fighting of the Civil War. His decision in signing the telegraph legislation was fully intended to unite the nation, and yet it was a decision taken even as the country was beginning the most savage period of division and disunity in all of its history.
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p; Within weeks Sibley had set up companies to undertake the various sections of the line from Omaha to Sacramento—the same route, more or less, that would soon be taken by the transcontinental railway. By the time construction began in the early summer of 1861, the Civil War was well under way. The attack on Fort Sumter, the generally accepted starting point, had been in April. It thus took more time and trouble than had been expected to acquire supplies of wire and wet-cell batteries and insulators for the fifty-volt line and other essential material—especially supplies for the western half of the line, which still had to be shipped from Northern ports, around Cape Horn, and up to San Francisco.
Once supplies were at hand, the business of cutting poles and making holes, tipping the one into the other, nailing up the cross ties and setting into them the iron-and-glass insulators that would carry the wire, then lifting the wire from an adjacent pole or splicing a new one onto the free end all turned out to be none too difficult, and progress was swift. The prospect of the linemen having to spend a harsh winter in the Rockies was a powerful disincentive to delay. The line had reached Laramie in August, Salt Lake City in early October, and then with Sho-kup’s generous sanction, the tiny town of Fort Carson later in the month. By October 24, 1861, the line was complete.
The first message was sent out from San Francisco by a high panjandrum of one of the telegraph companies. It went to an American president who was by then already reeling under the first months of the Civil War. “I announce to you,” went the message to Abraham Lincoln, “that the telegraph to California has this day been completed. May it be a bond of perpetuity between the states of the Atlantic and the Pacific.” No mention was made of the North or the South.
The message was a harbinger: in all the future development of the nation, east and west time and again would trump north and south, leading to marginalization of the southeastern corner of the country—a marginalization that to a degree remains today.
It was all so quick. It had been no more than a decade and a half after the first signal messages had gone from near Baltimore to the Capitol building that engineers had come inquiring at tepee doors in Idaho, explaining that they were planning the line to California, and could they please pass by? And then it was just moments later, in the greater scheme of things, when all America was connected. Once the final connections had been soldered together and the last of the knurled brass screws tightened, when switches were thrown and voltmeters flicked upward and to the right, quivered and stayed there, then began the roar of a long-withheld national conversation.
Borrowers could now talk to lenders; buyers could negotiate with sellers; stock market trends could be sent to all corners of the nation; commodity prices could be relayed to potential market makers; credit references could be checked no matter how far from home the applicant was. In short, the whole complicated apparatus of a fully functioning capitalist economy, lubricated with what economists would come to call “perfect information”—data that were up-to-the-minute, accurate, and offered disinterestedly to all—was now in place, ready to be pressed into service. America could now be instantly in touch with itself, and from that moment on, the din has never ceased.
But . . . neither of the progenitors of the system remained much interested in their creation in later life, though both benefited mightily, accruing great fortunes. Samuel Morse tried to go back to painting but found his talent had deserted him, and he died, less content than he deserved to be, in 1872. Hiram Sibley lasted sixteen years longer, and after retiring from Western Union, became a successful dealer in seeds, leaving the technological developments of the age firmly behind him and his company’s legacy to others.
Western Union once carried more than 90 percent of all telegraphed messages sent in America, but it eventually dwindled in standing as its technology was superseded. Horticulturists, however, belong to a community that today remembers Western Union’s leader for an entirely different legacy. A century ago, Hiram Sibley and Company, seed merchants of Rochester, New York, found and then promoted lavishly a banana-shaped summer gourd that is known still to keen gardeners as the Sibley squash. Though the company’s last telegram was sent in 2006, the Sibley squash endures and will presumably continue until the end of botanical time.
THE SIGNAL POWER OF HUMAN SPEECH
In scientific terms, the telegraph truly transformed the age and broke new ground. It created a profoundly new epoch in human history. Yet it was quite lacking in intimacy and privacy. Ordinary people did not warm to the idea of having telegraph instruments in their drawing rooms any more than they had wanted railway stations in their backyards. Most people could not read Morse code any more than they could shunt steam engines.
But then came the telephone, a device of immense social value, an instrument of personal empowerment. For it was private, intimate, and immediate. The telegraph allowed the transmission of information, but the telephone let individuals have their own long-distance conversations without any need for an intermediary—making it an immediate object of desire.
The telephone became something that was to be owned, to be placed proudly as the centerpiece of a sitting room, next to the aspidistra and across from the soda siphon. And that simple fact—that an electrical device was now made to be installed inside a private house—led to the creation of an entirely new skein of networks, for telephony first but also for an entirely new electrically powered world besides.
Alexander Graham Bell was the genius first seized with the idea of the telephone, in 1874. He was at the time employed in Boston as a teacher of the deaf—both his father and later his wife were afflicted—so he knew a good deal about vibrations in the air. One day he had wondered out loud whether, as he later wrote, “it would be possible to transmit sounds of any sort if we could only occasion a variation in the intensity of the current exactly like that occurring in the density of air while a given sound is made.” It was a technological epiphany that impressed many, not least the imperious Joseph Henry, one of the country’s greatest electrical engineers, then the head of the Smithsonian Institution.
“You have the germ of a great invention,” he said to Bell, who replied pathetically that he did not have the skill to do the necessary work. Henry’s stark bark of a reply remains the stuff of legend. “Get it!”
And Aleck, as his family knew him, promptly and famously got it. Less two years later, in March 1876, this twenty-nine-year-old Scotland-born Canadian American teacher and inventor was awarded the famous US Patent No. 174,465, “for transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically . . . by causing electrical undulations, similar in form to the vibrations of the air accompanying the said vocal or other sounds.” Some weeks before the patent was awarded, he had conducted the equally famous experiment that concluded with perhaps the most important fragment of peremptory speech ever known.
Bell had been experimenting for months with different ways of transmitting “the vibrations of the air” by means of the electric telegraph. Much of his work had been done in a damp basement in Salem, a dire place where the witches’ trials had been held back in colonial times. But in early 1875 he rented a much more agreeable and airy space on Court Street in Boston, in the shop attic of the man who supplied him with electrical equipment—a man who also customarily supplied his inventor tenants with assistants. He happened to assign to Bell an equally young man named Thomas Watson, who became a faithful companion and assistant for the next several decades and played a significant supporting role in the history of America and the world.
One day in the summer of 1875, the two men happened to be working in adjoining rooms, testing three vibrating reeds they were using for an experiment on sending multiple signals along a single telegraph line. One of Watson’s reeds had become too firmly stuck to a magnet, and the young man pulled it clear, with a twang. At the very same instant, Bell, in the next room, heard the same twang through his own receiver—and realized the vibration had induced a tiny electric current that had traveled from one room to the next b
y wire and had made the reeds on Bell’s magnets twang at the same frequency as Watson’s, at the very same time. He bent his languid frame over the instrument and cupped his ear: there was no doubt about it. Sound was being sent and received where only symbols had gone before.
It was an unanticipated moment of the purest serendipity, and it stopped the two men in their tracks. This, Bell realized, was how to send those “vibrations in the air” down the line—by making a magnet induce a small electric current that would travel along the wire carrying with it the encoded vibrations, as it were. Bell and Watson refined and refined what they were doing, working on ways that the full spectrum of sound frequencies and timbres could be sent, recognized, and received. And then on March 10, 1876, came the peremptory command that remains frozen in history.
Bell had rigged his instrument with a speaking tube, and the circuits between his own room and Watson’s were live. The magnets were working, varying the resistance and producing an undulatory current to mimic the sound that was causing the variation; all other components in the chain were working, too. Now Bell needed his assistant to come to his laboratory to check his instruments.
Whether by accident or design, Alexander Graham Bell spoke formally and sharply into his speaking tube: “Mr. Watson—Come here—I want to see you.” And Thomas Watson came as summoned, running. He burst through the door. “I could hear you. I heard what you said!” he exclaimed.
He had become the recipient of the first intelligible telephone message ever sent. Bell’s order may have lacked the sonorous majesty of the carefully thought-out WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT of Samuel Morse’s first telegraphic message thirty-two years before, but it came to serve as an epigraph of which he was inordinately proud.
Bell had occasion to recall it nearly forty years later, on January 25, 1915. By this time, the telephone was wildly popular, with millions connected around the country. But now and for the first time, a telephone line had been strung clear across the continent, and it was about to be tested. Alexander Graham Bell was in the American Telephone and Telegraph Company headquarters, on the fifteenth floor of the Telephone Building on Dey Street in Manhattan. Thomas Watson was in the Bell Building in San Francisco, almost three thousand miles away.
The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers Page 33