The Tyranny of E-mail (6 page)

Mrs. Clara Carter of West Ellsworth, Maine drives the mail coach from that place to Ellsworth, seven miles away….

This energetic woman rises early in the morning, does the cooking for five in the family, starts at seven for the city with the mail and numerous errands that are given to her without memoranda. She returns at
noon, gets dinner, goes to the blueberry fields and picks ten quarters of berries or more in the afternoon, and in the cool of evening does the family washing and ironing and other household tasks. This amount of work she performs six days in the week, varying the routine in the afternoon, out of berry season, by sewing for the family. She finds time, too, to play on the parlor organ an hour or more in the evening, or to entertain visitors.

Prior to rural phone service, the postman “would carry news of forest fires, of accident, or an outbreak of illness on a farm, to the nearest communication center. Unofficially he (or she) became the bearer of local news, or gossip if you wish.” People who read the news wrote to one another about what they learned, especially emigrants in America; it was a way to connect the past with the present over here with what was once home. “I see in the newspaper that they have had some trouble between Sweden and Norway,” wrote Olaf Larsson from Kellogg, Idaho, in a 1905 letter.

The mail was also a highly effective tool at keeping new emigrants in touch with one another. Here’s a letter Pet Stred sent to his brother in Sweden from Bay Horse, Idaho, in 1897:

I am well and work and grind away a little every day but I have been sick, not so that I was bedridden, but I was still very ill a few days ago but am now completely healthy again. I have worked at various jobs this summer. For a while I worked on a road that was being built. One month I worked for a farmer and now I work at a smelter where they smelt ore that is taken out of the mines. That is hard work and takes
real Swedish strength to bear with it. The work is very tough and it is hot like a certain
place
[meaning Hell; underlined in original]. I do not know how long I will stay here, when I get tired of it [I] will have to try something else. Those who are young and inexperienced should try everything.

As in England, some people enjoyed seeing just how far the mail could go. In 1903, one man set up a Nonsense Correspondence Club and began sending unusual items through the mail. “I owed a friend a dollar,” the man wrote. “I mailed him a silver dollar with a two cent stamp stuck on one side and the address on the other. He received it.” His next prank, however, created more havoc. When dining in Key West, he filched some croquettes off the dinner table, wrapped them in tinfoil, and mailed them to Philadelphia, labeled
NATURAL HISTORY SPECIMENS
. The packet burst in the mail, and, worried that it had scattered someone’s remains, the Philadelphia post office sent the remains to the morgue and placed them on ice. It then mailed him a letter saying he would be responsible for the cost of this treatment.

As the range of communication options proliferated and messages traveled ever faster, two inventions made them go swifter yet. The first actually made it easier to write, once people learned how to use the darn thing. Although the earliest model dates back to 1714, the typewriter was finally perfected in 1868 by a newspaperman, printer, and politician named Christopher Latham Sholes. He tried to sell the rights to manufacture the
machine to Western Union, which turned him down, eventually settling with the Remington Arms Company, which made farm machinery, sewing machines, and, most famously, guns.

Remington took the typewriter to market in 1873, and it raised a stir at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876, while the Hammond typewriter—the first single-element machine, which featured a curved keyboard—stole the show at the Paris Exposition of 1889.

Mark Twain purchased one of Remington’s earliest models in 1874 for $125 and became the first author to submit a manuscript typed on one. In a letter to his brother, Twain described the way the machine established an element of speed in writing that had not yet been there before—even though one could, as yet, type only in capital letters:

I AM TRYING TO GET THE HAND OF THIS NEW FANGLED WRITING MACHINE. BUT I
AM NOT MAKING A SHINING SUCCESS OF IT…. I PERCEIVE I SHALL SOON & EASILY ACQUIRE A FINE FACILITY IN ITS USE…. I BELIEVE [THE MACHINE] WILL PRINT FASTER THAN I CAN WRITE.

Aside from Twain, most of the typewriter’s early users were not authors, however, but rather stenographers and typists, whose numbers in America shot up from 154 in 1870 to 112,364 in 1900. Many of them were women. “Some of the more enterprising of the girls secure an office in a big building, where lawyers are numerous, put out a sign, and find employment all day long,” wrote a reporter in
The New York Times
. “The regularly-employed girls get $10 and $12 a week, but the owners of the machines manage in some cases to earn so much as $20 and $25.”

And they typed fast. To be a member of the New York State Stenographers’ Association, for example, one had to be able to take dictation at 150 words per minute for five consecutive minutes. The first woman ever hired by New York City’s Health Department was Miss Martha N. Manning, a typist. Typewriting contests began to be held. One of the earliest was won in New York City by F. E. McGurrin of Salt Lake City, who then closed the contest with an encore act of typewriting 101: words a minute while blindfolded. In 1889, a woman named Miss M. E. Orr “made her fingers fly over the keys for a minute and 139 correctly printed words was the result.”

Henry James briefly made dictation a craze when, to overcome a writer’s block, he hired an amanuensis to take dictation. He found that he wrote more, his sentences grew longer, and he could work only to the rhythmic click of the Remington. The shadow of this method was large enough that when William
Dean Howells was interviewed by
The New York Times
in 1882, he was asked if he, too, wrote by dictation. “I do not dictate,” he said, “but use a little Hall typewriter. I use it entirely if I have a clear block of stuff before me; if I have to come down to close quarters and feel a little anxious about my work I take a pen.”

With female typists in the closest proximity to those giving them dictation, the workplace became newly sexually charged. It took some getting used to—for both employees and their families. In Atlantic City in 1892, two high-profile court cases revolved around men who had married their “typewriters”— there was no distinction, apparently, between the women and the machines they worked upon. Relatives of two different men who had married their typewriters attempted to annul the marriages, stating that the men had not been of sound mind when the marriage had been entered into.

Oddly, the change in writing practices that had a greater impact on what people wrote to one another in private was a small, square piece of card—the
carte de visite
or, as it soon began to be called, the postcard. Rumor had it that the thing had been invented on the Left Bank in Paris, where a man spilled his coffee on a square piece of writing stock. The stain made an interesting shape, so he affixed a stamp and an address to it and mailed the card to a friend. In America, another story revolved around “an economical young woman in San Diego who had to pay postage to write her sweetheart, but who would not buy writing paper. She wrote her epistles in minute penmanship on the reverse side of a stamp and mailed only the stamp itself.”

In any event, the first postcard was sent in England in 1871, and by 1873 more than 72 million of them per year were dropped into the British post. That same year, 26 million were sent in Germany, which later became the nation that printed most of the world’s postcards. The postcard craze had arrived. It’s easy to see why people took to it. A postcard was a cheap, relatively quick way to say, “Yes, I received your letter” to send and receive, accept and decline invitations. Doodles, jokes, and romantic asides traveled this way at a fraction of the cost of a telegram.

In the era before cameras were portable and cheap to own, postcards allowed tourists to bring back some sort of visual rendering of where they had been. As Susan Sontag has noted, this newly created act of recording what had been seen led to an intellectual idea that all the world’s visible things—be they a painting or a pizza—could be captured on film and, later, that the purpose of the travel was the obtaining of that image. Before this development, the way people recorded was that they remembered, or they sketched, if they had the inclination, or kept a private diary. What is unique about all of these activities is that each has a singular aura. Postcards, however, were mass-produced.

That didn’t bother most travelers. By the early 1900s, the postcard had become a full-fledged obsession in America as well. In 1906, it was estimated that one in eight Americans bought a postcard every day. The country spent more than $1 million on the little pieces of stationery each week, and in the course of just a few years they became available at more than eighty thousand merchants nationwide. Many of these stores began selling albums for collectors, which ranged from less than a dollar up to $15. Postcard clubs, which allowed people to trade postcards from faraway places, sprang up.

Postcards also became a way to teach geography. One New York state schoolteacher in a small rural town with no public library started a pen pal course between her pupils and foreign students in Africa, Australia, Ceylon, Cuba, Iceland, New Zealand, most of the countries of South America, and all of Europe. “The postcards brought children into touch with the whole world in a way no other means at their command would have done,” wrote a newspaper reporter covering the story of the children’s correspondence. Some places they received return cards from didn’t even appear in their textbooks.

But the little invention was not without its abuses. A
New York Times
article in 1871 reported on behavior that resembles a print version of flaming (the practice on the Internet of harassing and criticizing someone publicly):

The handy little post-card has already been made the instrument of insult, ridicule or revenge. The anonymous letter has always held to be one of the most cowardly weapons of assault ever used among civilized beings; but with such letters the sting was limited in its application. The receiver might suffer, but he had the option of suffering alone…. The postcard, however, enables concealed scoundrels to deprive their victims even of this discretion. Gross insolence or contemptuous epithets can now by this means be leveled…. We regret to observe that many such instances have lately occurred in London, so many as to constitute a grave objection to the post-card system altogether…. The temptation to call people liars and scoundrels in so safe a way, to accuse them of robbing hen-roosts or murdering their grandmothers, seems quite irresistible to many ingenuous souls, and
impunity has apparently brought about something of an epidemic.

Postcards and typewritten letters highlighted a growing problem with written communication: Can you trust the person on the other end of the line? Handwritten letters had their own signature of authenticity, but typewritten letters instantly created a different impression, one of professionalism and business-mindedness—a fact exploited by some aspiring men, as revealed in this newspaper story:

The other day a lawyer had just finished a letter on his typewriter with the word “dictated” at the bottom of it. “Why did you add that to it when you wrote it yourself?” asked a friend. A look of pity filled the lawyer’s face at the stupidity of his visitor. “My guileless, far-away correspondents,” he said, “will believe that I am overrun with business and utterly unable to answer my own letters. If they regard it as a luxury for me to have a private secretary, why should I undeceive them?”

The growing lack of face-to-face communication also presented an ideal situation for all kinds of criminal or miscreant schemes. The earliest adopters of new modes of communication are often those engaged in illegal or unethical activity, who benefit greatly by being ahead of the curve. The newspapers of the 1880s were full of stories about swindles and heists perpetuated by the mail.

In 1884, an advertisement was placed in several Brooklyn papers: “ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS will be paid for information identifying the author of certain anonymous letters mailed to residents of the Nineteenth Ward during the last two weeks.” The advertising copywriter should have been more specific. In fact, a batch of Valentines, some “written in a woman’s angular hand,” some composed by typewriter, had been sent to women around Brooklyn containing messages so lewd that
The New York Times
couldn’t print them. Chaos had ensued. “In two families the marriage engagements of daughters have been broken off through the instrumentality of these letters.”

In most cases, financial gain was the goal. A New York man procured a list of lumber dealers and opened correspondence with them. Letters to his bankers in Philadelphia to verify his creditworthiness would “bring the reply that Mr. Rowe was a fair, honorable business man.” No sooner had the lumber been delivered, though, than he vanished. In the course of an investigation, an expert on the typewriter was called in to testify that the notes and the bank correspondence were the work of one man.

One of the most successful schemes of the day will ring bells for anyone who has received e-mails from a Nigerian attorney promising hidden millions. In 1887, two British men set up a business called the British-American Claim Agency in New York City, writing to people around the country and encouraging them to look up claims to estates of long-lost relatives in England. The London
Times
was made to appear an endorser of the scheme, and to light a fire under their “heirs,” the amount the paymaster in Chancery had ready to deliver to them was, according to
The Times
, £77,693,769.

All the targets had to do to start claiming their rightful fortunes was to write to the office and pay a $2 fee. Five dollars
secured an advertisement in London and $13.25 a guaranteed search. Police in the United States were tipped off to the heist by a judge, who shared the same downtown office building as the men behind the scheme; the two men, he said, had been receiving an unusual volume of mail. At the miscreants’ office, law enforcement discovered that the two men had employed fourteen young women to type up the advertising circulars on which the British-American Claim Agency sent out its entreaties. In reality, no searches had ever been performed, complaints were ignored, and the two hauled in as much as $500 per day.