Rensselaer Union, Volume 5, Number 52, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 September 1873 — Our Telegraph System. [ARTICLE]

Our Telegraph System.

When we look at a railroad map of the United States, with its intricate net work of black lines, and in imagination fill it out with its double tracks, its junctions and busy Stations, its depots and engine houses, and then people and vivify the picture with its swarming and hurrying life, and its gliding trains, ever making up, traversing the field, breaking and forming new combinations incessantly, succeeding, passing, and crossing each other, and when we add the bands of pioneers, surveyors, engineers, laborers and construction trains which form the fringe of this net work, constantly extending its meshes in every direction, and adding new intricacies to its most crowded parts—the mind is almost bewildered with the thought of such an immense labyrinth, such complex organization. If we could rise above the surface of the earth and take in the whole country at a bird’s-eye view, with visual power to discern all the details, the net work of the telegraph would be still more curious to look upon. We should see a web spun of 200,000 miles of wire spread over the face of the country like a cobweb on the grass, its threads connecting every important center Of population, festooning every great post-road, and marking as with a silver lining the black track of every railroad. We should observe men, like sliders, busily spinning out these lines in every direction, at the rate of five miles an hour for every working hour in the year. If we should trace these threads back from the circumference, we should fifid them con verging from every direction o certain central knots, like Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Buffalo, Washington and many others of equal importance, and thence running in great strands, doubling and multiplying in number as they approach the center, but so arranged as to bind every city and town to all its neighbors, near and far. If the eye, seeking to analyze this labyrinth, should pursue the converging lines, it would at last follow a great band of more than 250 wires, from every point of the compass, running into one great center in the city of New York, in the main office of the Western Union Telegraph Company. Other minor centers would appear, but this one would immediately be recognized as the great core or heart of the system.

If, now, such an observer could be gifted with a magic power of vision, which man has not yet dreamed of attaining, so as to be enabled to see that unseen and silent force we call electricity, and discern its instantaneous actions and reactions from point to point over this bewildering maze, the net-work of the telegraph would present a spectacle far more amazing than that of the railroad system. As the morning sun sends the hour of nine across the continent, the offices are filled with operators, an army of nearly 10,000 persons, engaged in the various functions involved in the service. The batteries, which We may imagine to have been mostly slumbering during the night, all awake to their work, and the quiverings and scintilations of electric action along the wires would show the whole net-work to be now alive. On the great

trunk lines the last of the night-work Is finished, the morning orders are calculated, and around the circuit flash the humorous salutations which the operators exchange with their unseen fellows, who seem to be concealed at their elbow, but who are in reality hundreds or thousands of miles away. Ten o’clock finds the offices full of business. Outward-bound messages pour in to be dispatched, and messages received are ticked off by the talking armature, to be written out and sent oft for delivery. By eleven o’clock the press news begins to crowd upon the operators, and then for two or three hours the excitement is at its height. Every one must be at his post, every faculty alert, and attention incessant. The zinc in the batteries burns fiercely under the corroding acid, the mysterious “current,” which becomes more wonderful the more conscious we become of human ignorance respecting it, leaps to its work. Every available circuit on the great lines is pressed to its utmost. The operator’s keys dance their tattoos, to which the distant receiving instruments instantly respond, reproducing the slightest, most transient motion. The whole net-work of wires, and the submarine cables which connect it with other equally active systems on the other side of the globe, are all quivering from end to end with signals of human intelligence. After two o’clock signs of relaxation appear. The press messages diminish; messages that have been waiting to take their turn are cleared off. At four the heavy business of the day in many offices is about over. The great lines are still crowded, and their work runs on into the evening. At last tlie business of night work begins, and the press messages from Washington, and the business and social messages that are taken at half-price, in consideration of their being allowed to be sent at leisure, to be delivered next morn. ing, are transmitted between the great cities north, south, east and west. Every phase of the mental activity of the country is more or less represented in this great system. The fluctuations in the markets; the price of stocks; the premium on gold; the starting of railroad trains; the sailing of ships; the arrival of passengers; orders for merchandise and manufactures of every kind; bargains offered and bargains closed; sermons, lectures, and political speeches; fires, sickness, and death; weather reports; the appearance of the grasshopper and the weevil; tlie transmission of money; the congratulations of friends—everything, from the announcement of a new plan down to an inquiry for a lost carpetbag, has its turn in passing the wires. The telegraph has now become so true a representative of our life that it would hardly be necessary to read the messages in order to find an indication of the state of the country. The mere degree of activity in the business uses of t'ie telegraph in any given direction affords an index of the prosperity of the section of, country served thereby. Mr. Orton, the President of the Western Union Company, gave a striking statement or this fact in his argument before a committee of Congress in 1870. He said: “The fact is, the telegraph lives upon commerce. It is the nervous system of the commercial system. If you will sit down with me at my office for twenty minutes, I will show you what the condition of business is at any given time in any locality in the United States. After three years of careful study of the matter, I am ready to appeal to the telegraph receipts as a criterion under all circumstances. This last year the grain business in the West has been very dull; as a consequence, the receipts from telegrams from that section have fallen off twenty five per cent. Business in the South has been gaining a little, month by month, for the last year or so; and now the telegraphic receipts from that quarter give stronger indications of returning prosperity than at any previous time since the war.”— Harper's Magazine.