The Victorian Internet (14 page)

While this reduced the chaos in the Gold Room itself, local merchants who wanted to know the price still had to send messenger
boys down to the Exchange to read the current price from the street indicator. Some firms employed as many as twelve or fifteen
boys to make regular journeys to the Stock Exchange and report back with the latest prices, which they obtained by noisily
pushing and shoving their way past each other.

Laws realized that the switches could operate more than just two indicators, and had the idea of installing indicators directly
into the offices of merchants and brokers, and charging a subscription fee. Having secured the rights to transmit the price
of gold in this way, he left his job at the Exchange, and by the end of 1866 his Gold Indicator Company had fifty subscribers,
all of whose indicators were operated in tandem from the central control switches in the Gold Room.

Then, in 1867, a telegraph operator named E. A. Callahan devised an improved indicator, which worked on a different principle.
Callahan was first struck by the idea when he got caught up in a knot of shouting messenger boys as he sought shelter from
a shower in the doorway of one of the Exchange buildings. "I naturally thought that much of this noise and confusion might
be dispensed with," he recounted, "and that the prices might be furnished through some system of telegraphy which would not
require the employment of skilled operators." But he soon found out that Laws had beaten him to it; therefore, he altered
his design so that it offered a continuous printed record of the fluctuations in prices of any number of stocks, printed on
a paper tape by two wheels. One wheel marked the tape with letters, and the other with numbers, and each machine could be
controlled by three wires from a central exchange. Because Callahan's invention made a chattering sound, it was almost immediately
christened the "ticker." Soon Callahan had signed up hundreds of subscribers throughout the financial district of New York,
and his invention was an immediate success.

An early stock ticker.

But the stock ticker was both a blessing and a curse. "The record of the chattering little machine can drive a man suddenly
to the very verge of insanity with joy or de­spair," complained one writer, "but if there be blame for that, it attaches to
the American spirit of speculation and not to the ingenious mechanism which reads and registers the beating of the financial
pulse." A Boston businessman was more blunt: "The letters and figures used in the Ian guage of the tape are very few, but
they spell ruin in ninety-nine million ways," he lamented.

I
n 1869, THOMAS EDISON, then aged twenty-one, arrived in New York looking for work. He had nowhere to stay, but thanks to
his contacts in the telegraph community, he was able to spend a few nights sleeping on the floor of the battery room of Dr.
Laws's Gold Indicator Company. Having previously devised an unsuccessful stock printer of his own, Edison soon figured out
how the indicators and the central control system in the Gold Room worked, and he happened to be around one day when the control
system suddenly made a terrible noise and stopped working. Gold prices were no longer being sent out, and each of Dr. Laws's
panic-stricken subscribers, who by this stage numbered over three hundred, sent a messenger boy down to the Exchange to see
what was happening.

"Within two minutes over three hundred boys crowded the office, that hardly had room for one hundred, all yelling that such
and such a broker's wire was out of order and to fix it at once. It was pandemonium," Edison later recalled. He went over
to the controller and figured out what the problem was: A spring had fallen out of part of the machine and got jammed between
two of its gear wheels, preventing them from turning. "As I went out to tell the man in charge what the problem was, Dr. Laws
appeared on the scene. He demanded of the man the cause of the trouble, but the man was speechless. I ventured to say that
I knew what the trouble was, and he said 'Fix it! Fix it! Re quick!' " Edison pulled out the spring, reset the machine, and
before long everything was working again.

The following day, Edison went to see Dr. Laws and suggested a number of improvements and ways in which his design could be
simplified so that the system would be less likely to break down again. Suitably impressed, Laws decided to put Edison in
charge of the whole operation, on a salary of $3oo a month. To Edison, who was penniless and unemployed at the time, this
was an absolute fortune.

Soon afterward, Laws's company merged with Callahan's, so Edison decided to start his own company. He teamed up with Franklin
Pope, another young engineer who had previously worked for Dr. Laws, and the two of them went into business installing private
telegraph lines and supplying specialist telegraphic equipment to business users. They also devised a stock ticker that needed
only one wire, rather than the usual three, and offered a special service to importers and exchange brokers that provided
just gold and sterling prices, but at a far lower price than a full stock ticker. Eventually this company too was absorbed
by Callahan's business, by now known as the Gold and Stock Telegraph Company.

Edison's resourcefulness soon came to the attention of General Marshall Lefferts, the president of the Gold and Stock Telegraph
Company, who offered to fund Edison's research in return for the right to use his inventions. Roth parties benefited from
the arrangement: Edison was able to devote all his time to inventing, and the machines he supplied gave the company a decided
commercial advantage over its competitors. Before long, Edison had devised further improvements to the stock ticker, including
a cunning device that enabled tickers that got out of step to be reset from the central station, without the need to send
an engineer to the broker's office. Anxious to prevent anyone else from exploiting such inventions, Lefferts decided to offer
Edison a cash payment for the patent rights. He offered $40,000, a figure that was so much more than Edison had expected that
he almost fainted. (Edison's inexperience with large sums of money was highlighted when he cashed the check and was presented
with the entire amount in small bills by a mischievous bank clerk.)

In a very short time, Edison had gone from poverty to financial independence. He rented a large workshop and was soon employing
fifty men to build stock tickers and other equipment. Such was his obsession with quality that on one occasion Edison locked
his workforce in the workshop until they had finished building a large order of stock tickers, with "all the bugs taken out."
His improved stock tickers were soon being used in major cities all over the United States, and on the London Stock Exchange.

Although today Edison is principally remembered for inventing the phonograph and the light bulb, it was his telegraphic background
and the enhancements he made to the stock ticker that gave him the financial freedom to pursue his career as an inventor.

But, ironically, it was the improvements that he and other inventors devised that would eventually lead to the demise of the
telegraph and the community that had grown up around it; for any industry founded on a particular technology faces the danger
that a new invention will render it obsolete.

11.

DECLINE AND FALL

The highway girdling the earth is found in the telegraph wires.

—Tribute to Samuel Morse, the Father of

the Telegraph, 1871

O
n JUNE 10, 1871, a bronze statue of Samuel Morse was unveiled in Central Park amid cheering crowds, speeches, and the strains
of a specially composed "Morse Telegraph March." The statue had been funded by donations sent in by telegraph operators around
the world to acknowledge their gratitude to Morse, then eighty, as the Father of the Telegraph. It was a title Morse had fought
hard to defend.

For despite the use of his invention around the world, Morse started off with surprisingly little to show for it. Admittedly,
he made enough to buy a house in 1847—a large villa in the Italian style on the banks of the Hudson near Poughkeepsie, surrounded
by two hundred acres of land, which he named Locust Grove. The following year, at the age of fifty-seven, and twenty-three
years after the death of his first wife, he was married for the second time, to a woman thirty years his junior. The local
telegraph company installed a telegraph line right into his study, so that, in the words of one of his friends, Morse was
"like an immense spider in the center of the vast web he himself had woven. Here he could hold court with the world."

But by the 1850s, although Morse was in a comfortable position financially, he was being cheated of the spoils of his invention.
As the holder of the telegraph patent rights within the United States, he was entitled to royalties from any company that
used his invention; but very few of the dozens of telegraph companies that sprang up to meet the explosive demand for telegraphy
honored his patent. Instead, they used apparatuses based on subtle variations of his design, devised by rival inventors who
disputed his claim over the patent rights. Numerous scientists and inventors crawled out of the woodwork claiming to have
built working electric telegraphs before Morse or to have contributed toward his design. A controversy ensued over who had
been the original inventor—and was therefore entitled to the royalties—so that Morse soon found himself estranged even from
Gale and Vail, his former associates, and embroiled in a series of lengthy and costly legal battles.

The matter finally came before the Supreme Court in 1853. The court considered every aspect of electric telegraphy, from its
earliest origins to its eventual adoption, and although it was clear that Morse's invention had required previous inventions
and discoveries by others, Chief Justice Roger Taney said this did not detract from Morse's achievement, because nobody else
had successfully fitted the pieces of the jigsaw together in the way Morse had. He had not invented the battery, discovered
electromagnetism, invented the electromagnet, or figured out the correct battery configuration for long-distance telegraphy,
but he had been the first to combine them all into a practical, working telegraph. The fact that Morse had received advice
from others was declared to be irrelevant. "Neither can the inquiries he made, nor the information or advice he received from
men of science in the course of his researches impair his right to the character of an inventor," Taney ruled. "For no man
ever made such an invention without having first obtained this information, unless it was discovered by some fortunate accident.
The fact that Morse sought and obtained the necessary information and counsel from the best sources, and acted upon it, neither
impairs his rights as an inventor, nor detracts from his merits."

The final judgment was unequivocal: "Writing, printing or recording at a distance . . . was never invented, perfected, or
put into practical operation, till it was done by Morse." Morse's patent was upheld; he was officially declared the sole inventor
of the telegraph, and the telegraph companies finally started paying him the royalties he deserved.

Even so, Morse received no official recognition from the U.S. government—in marked contrast to the situation in Europe, where
he spent many years making the rounds and collecting honors and decorations. In 1851, the Morse apparatus had been adopted
as the standard for European telegraphy, and Rritain was the only country where other forms of telegraph (the needle telegraphs
devised by Cooke and Wheatstone) were in widespread use—and even there, the Morse system was steadily gaining ground due to
its evident simplicity. Indeed, when chairing a banquet in Morse's honor in London in 1856, Cooke himself was happy to admit
the superiority of the Morse system. "I was consulted a few months ago on the subject of a telegraph for a country in which
no telegraph at present exists," he said. "I recommended the system of Professor Morse. I believe that system to be one of
the simplest in the world, and in that lies its permanence and certainty."

Morse had honors heaped upon him by the nations of Europe. He was made a chevalier of the Legion of Honor by Napoleon III;
he was awarded gold medals for scientific merit by Prussia and Austria; he had further medals bestowed upon him by Queen Isabella
of Spain, the king of Portugal, the king of Denmark, the king of Italy; and the sultan of Turkey presented him with a diamond-encrusted
Order of Glory, the "Nishan Iftichar." He was also made an honorary member of numerous scientific, artistic, and academic
institutions, including the Academy of Industry in Paris, the Historical Institute of France, and, strangely, the Archaeological
Society of Relgium.

But although the countries of Europe ceremonially recognized Morse as the inventor of the telegraph, they weren't paying him
any royalties—for he had failed to obtain patents in Europe during a yearlong trip to promote his invention in i838—39. (The
one exception was in France, where Morse had in fact been granted a patent, something that had been conveniently overlooked
by the state-run telegraph company, which used his invention without paying for it.) Morse pointed out this incongruity to
the U.S. ambassador in Paris, who took up his case, and in 1858 Morse was awarded the sum of 400,000 French francs (equivalent
to about $80,000 at the time) by the governments of France, Austria, Relgium, the Netherlands, Piedmont, Russia, Sweden, Tuscany,
and Turkey, each of which contributed a share according to the number of Morse instruments in use in each country or region.

In the face of such official recognition, many Americans, particularly those in the telegraphic profession, felt Morse had
been slighted by his native country. Robert B. Hoover, the manager of a Western Union telegraph office, proposed that the
nation's telegraphers should erect a statue in Morse's honor. The project was launched in the pages of the
Journal of the Telegraph
on April 1, 1870, and quickly won the backing of William Orton, president of the Western Union. Donations were soon pouring
in from all over the country, and the enthusiasm for the scheme was such that telegraphers in other countries around the world
sent contributions as well.

The following year, on the evening of the statue's unveiling, a huge banquet was held at the Academy of Music in New York
in Morse's honor, followed by numerous adulatory speeches. The telegraph and its inventor were praised for uniting the peoples
of the world, promoting world peace, and revolutionizing commerce. The telegraph was said to have "widened the range of human
thought"; it was credited with improving the standard of journalism and literature; it was described as "the greatest instrument
of power over earth which the ages of human history have revealed." As well as the speeches, there were quotations from the
Bible and, inevitably, more ghastly telegraph poetry. Morse, an old man whose flowing white beard lent him a distinct resemblance
to Father Christmas, was heralded as a "true genius," as "America's greatest inventor," and, of course, as the Father of the
Telegraph.

Finally, at 9 P.M., all the telegraph wires of the United States were connected to a single Morse key, on which Morse himself
bade farewell to the community he had created. "GREETINGS AND THANKS TO THE TELEGRAPH FRATERNITY THROUGHOUT THE WORLD. GLORY
TO GOD IN THE HIGHEST, ON EARTH PEACE, GOOD WILL TO MEN," ran the message, transmitted by a skilled operator, after which
Morse himself sat down at the operating table to tremendous cheers, which were silenced by a gesture from Orton. In total
silence, Morse then tapped out his signature, "s. F. B. MORSE," and the entire audience rose to its feet in a standing ovation.
When the applause and cheering fonally died down, Orton said, "Thus the Father of the Telegraph bids farewell to his children."

On June 10, 1871, Samuel Morse, hailed as the Father of the Telegraph, bids farewell to the telegraph community.

For the rest of the evening, congratulatory messages flooded in over the telegraph network from all corners of the United
States and the rest of the world: from Havana, from Hong Kong, from India, from Singapore, and from Europe. People lined up
to shake Morse's hand. When the festivities ended at midnight, a magnificent—natural-auroral display is said to have appeared
in the sky.

But the day of celebration and hyperbole that culminated in Morse's telecast farewell was the high-water mark of the telegraph.
The triumph of the telegraph, despite the initial bewilderment and skepticism that greeted it, had demonstrated the futility
of resisting the inevitable; further technological advances were shortly to have a devastating impact on the telegraph and
the community that had sprung up around it.

T
He FITST SIGN OF CHAIIGE was the telegraph companies' growing enthusiasm for automatic telegraphy, which started to gain
ground in the 1870s. Automatic telegraphs—machines that could send messages without the need for skilled operators—had been
around for many years, but as the level of traffic increased on busy parts of the network, the prospect of using machines
to send messages faster and more reliably than human operators could became increasingly attractive.

The earliest automatic telegraphs were relatively clumsy affairs, devised by inventors who thought Morse code was too complicated
to be learned by members of the public. One of the most successful attempts to make telegraphy easy enough for anyone was
Wheatstone's ABC telegraph, which he patented in 1858. It consisted of two circular dials, each with a pointer like the hand
of a clock, and marked with the letters of the alphabet; the upper dial was used to indicate incoming messages, and outgoing
messages were spelled out on the lower dial, which was surrounded by a set of buttons. Sending a message involved pressing
the button next to each letter in turn and turning a handle until the pointer moved to that letter, at which point it was
prevented from turning further. Pulses of current sent down the line cause the pointer on the upper dial at the other end
to indicate the same letter, and also rang a bell, to call attention to an incoming message. The ABC telegraph, known as the
"communicator," was used extensively for point-to-point communication on thousands of private lines in Britain, since it had
the advantage that no operator was required. It was used by businessmen and state officials, including the commissioner of
police at Scotland Yard, who sat "spider-like in a web of co-extension with the metropolis" as he monitored reports coming
in from all over London. Members of the royal family also had their own private lines installed.

Another popular automatic system was devised by David Hughes, a professor of music in Kentucky. Appropriately enough, given
his musical background, the Hughes printer, launched in 1855, had a pianolike keyboard with alternating white and black keys,
one for each letter (the modern QWERTY keyboard was not invented until twenty years later). It worked on a similar principle
to that of the ABC telegraph, but with a constantly rotating "chariot," driven by clockwork, which was stopped in its tracks
whenever a key was held down at the sending station. At the same moment an electromagnet activated a hammer, printing a character
on a paper tape. The Hughes printer could be operated by anyone—it simply involved pressing the letter keys in order—and it
provided a printed message that anyone could read, without the need for an operator at the receiving end. Although the original
design was crude and technical limitations restricted its range to short distances, it was later improved to work over long
lines, and was used in Britain, France, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, and Prussia.

Although these systems were easy to use, they weren't as fast as a Morse key in the hands of an experience telegrapher. Their
use was also limited by their total incompatibility with Morse equipment. But in 1858, Wheatstone patented an automatic sender
that could transmit messages in Morse at very high speed from a prepunched tape. This was a direct replacement for a human
telegrapher, and it was capable of up to four hundred words per minute—ten times faster than the finest human operators. At
the receiving end, messages were printed out as dots and dashes by a standard Morse printer, and could then be decoded into
letters and numbers in the usual way. Admittedly, messages had to be punched onto a tape by hand before sending, but this
was less skilled work than operating a Morse key, and it could be done in advance; long messages could be punched by several
operators in parallel, each punching a different paragraph, and then spliced together.