The Telegraphic Era. 595 CHAPTER XXXVII. THE TELEGRAPHIC ERA. VARIOUS MODES OF TRANSMITTING INTELLigence for NEWSPAPERS.-CARRIER PIGEONS AND BALLOONS.-INTRODUCTION OF THE TELEGRAPH.-ITS STRUGGLES. -OPINION OF A WALL-STREET MILLIONAIRE. - NOMINATION OF SILAS WRIGHT.-INFLUENCE OF THE TELEGRAPH ON THE PRESS.-CURIOUS PREDICTION OF LAMARTINE. THE BATTLES IN MEXICO.-MARVELOUS PROGRESS.-THE BATTLES IN EUROPE.-AFFAIRS OF THE WORLD DAILY ELECTROTYPED FOR THE JOURNALIST.-THE LIGHTNING EXPRESS LINES. MORSE has been a benefactor of the Press. This, it is true, is not the opinion of every publisher, narrowly, perhaps meanly, looking after the financial affairs of his establishment, nor of every journalist desirous of an influence beyond the limits of the city where his paper is published, especially when he reads an announcement that "the Elmira (N. Y.) Advertiser publishes telegraph news fifteen hours in advance of the receipt of the New York dailies." But newspaper statistics prove our position. Morse has undoubtedly struck, as with lightning, many newspapers off the lists of journalism, yet he has added many others, and increased newspaper enterprise and newspaper readers by the thousands. He has placed an electric force in every printing-office in the land. When the News-Letter was the only paper printed in America, it had but three hundred weekly circulation. When the Gazette and Mercury in Boston, the Mercury in Philadelphia, and the Gazette in New York were added to the number, all within the period of twenty years of the first issue of the News-Letter, and with only a small increase in population, the weekly circulation of these five papers reached an aggregate of two or three thousand copies. The colonists had acquired more taste for newspapers by their periodical appearance, and this taste had increased with the increase of papers, and the facilities for acquiring news and spreading it before the people. It is probable that the circulation of the New York Herald or the New York Sun is as large to-day as the united circulation of all the New York papers, daily and weekly, issued in 1844, when the telegraph was first practically introduced in this country. Other cities present the same fact. This circulation is, perhaps, not so comprehensive in a national point of view; but the facilities for obtaining news from every quarter of the globe are now so easy and ex tensive, that nearly every one acquainted with the alphabet reads the papers, and every one in New York, or London, or Paris, or Berlin feels as much interest in the affairs of the rest of the world as they previously did in events nearer home. Village gossips are magnified into world gossips. "No pent-up Utica contracts our powers, The whole boundless universe is ours." Intellectual vitality and physical energy are constantly at work devising means to annihilate space. Fast horses in the time of Reeside, the great mail contractor in the days of mail-coaches; carrier pigeons, with their tissue-paper dispatches prepared in cipher; swift locomotives and steam-boats on our public highways, and telegraphic lines in this electric age, have been the progressive steps in developing the physical forces of the world. While canals, railroads, steam-ships, telegraphs, have occupied the minds of active and acquisitive business men, these same enterprises have entered extensively into the dreams and calculations of journalists, as necessary parts of the machinery of well-organized newspaper establishments. Means of swift communication have always been a study in the offices of leading journals. Horses, pilot-boats, pigeons, steam-boats, locomotives, and semaphore telegraphs had become common carriers of news previous to 1844. Of all these means of communication between distant points anterior to the magnetic telegraph, none surpassed the carrier pigeon for speed. Next to light and electricity, these beautiful birds are the most rapid in their flights. They were used in 1249 in the crusade of Louis IX. In the midst of the battle of Mansourah, a pigeon was dispatched by the Saracens, in great alarm, to Cairo. This pigeon carried this message under its wing: At the moment of starting this bird the enemy attacked Mansourah; a terrible battle is being fought between the Christians and Mussulmans. This threw that city into a state of great commotion. Another pigeon was sent off late in the afternoon announcing the total defeat of the French. Since then, carrier pigeons have been more or less used by journalists, speculators, and governments. They are swift flyers, and can go long distances without intermission. Their speed ranges from forty to seventy-five miles an hour. They have been known to fly, in a few instances, at the rate of one hundred miles an hour. Nothing practical but the telegraph can exceed this velocity. Cannon balls move at the rate of 1200 miles per hour; eagles fly 145 miles; swallows, 185 miles; and the ice-yachts Quick Step, Flying Cloud, and Icicle run over the frozen surface of the Hudson at the rate of a mile a minute; but neither cannon balls, nor eagles, nor swallows, nor ice-yachts can be employed as news mes Carrier Pigeons and Balloons. 597 sengers. Locomotive engines can run one hundred miles in sixty minutes, but they very rarely accomplish this rate of speed, and in all the newspaper expresses on railroads, all hinderances considered, rarely averaged over thirty-five miles per hour. But pigeons were not reliable on distances exceeding four or five hundred miles. The Belgians are fond of pigeon races from the southern provinces of France. Our best birds come from Antwerp. There were over ten thousand trained pigeons in Belgium in 1870, when the war between France and Germany commenced, and they were declared contraband of war for fear that they would be made military couriers through the air. They were employed, in connection with balloons, to convey intelligence between the Gambetta government at Bordeaux and the Favre government in Paris. On one occasion, during the siege of the French capital in 1870, a carrier pigeon carried into that city a newspaper 4 inches square, with 226 dispatches microscopically photographed upon it, embracing the news of the day from all parts of the world. This paper had to be read by the aid of a powerful microscope and the magic lantern. There are many curious incidents and anecdotes related of the pigeon as a news-carrier. One is of an Antwerp journalist, who sent a reporter with two carrier pigeons to Brussels in 1846 to await the king's speech, and send it to Antwerp by these birds. On his arrival at Brussels, the reporter gave the pigeons in charge to a waiter at the hotel and ordered breakfast. He was kept waiting for some time, but a delicious fricassee atoned for the delay. After breakfast he paid his bill and called for his pigeons. "Pigeons !" ejaculated the waiter; "why, you have eaten them!" But with this extraordinary bird there were great difficulties in its use and management, and it could be employed only on occasions when events were anticipated. On unlooked-for emergencies in unexpected places the pigeon was of no value. Something else was needed to satisfy the craving, grasping mind of a modern journalist. Telegraphs by signs, arms, flags, and signal-fires on hill-tops had been tried. Ships at sea and in action, yacht squadrons and military movements, are now more or less regulated by the use of signal flags. Quite a conversation can be carried on in this way. But only short distances are overcome by such means as these. Others had to be devised for newspapers. It was contemplated by the Herald to bring balloons into requisition for the transmission of news. This was during a mania for aerial flights, and when several distinguished æronauts believed that the air could be navigated. The subject was thoroughly investigated. All that the experience of Durant, Wise, Clayton, La Mountain, Green, Godard, Lauriat, and Lowe, the well-known balloonists, could give on the matter was thoroughly examined and sifted. It was wisely decided that regular balloon expresses were an impossibility; that the practical navigation of the air was out of the range of probable events. This conclusion has since been amply sustained by the use of balloons during the siege of Paris in 1870. They were very convenient and serviceable in carrying dispatches out of the city. Fifty-four balloons left Paris from September 23, 1870, to January 28, 1871. They carried 2,500,000 letters outward. But none dropped from the clouds into that devoted capital; and carrier pigeons proved to be the only reliable aerial news messengers yet discovered. After all the experiments, the study, and investigation, and after the employment of all the means and appliances known to be within the reach of man, the great desideratum, in the form of the magnetic telegraph, was discovered and put into practical operation by Morse. It is of no consequence to us when electricity was first known as an agent of communication if it could not be brought into practical use. The point was the power to transmit a message instantaneously from one city to another. News of a disastrous event happening in Chicago at midnight, and published in New York and London the next morning to arouse the sympathy and sublime generosity of the people and millionaires of those cities, was the fact to be accomplished. Morse did this, and thus he became a benefactor, not to the Press alone, but to the human race. Let monuments to his honor, therefore, rise in Central Park and Pennsylvania AveLet them rise, as Webster said of the obelisk on Bunker Hill, "and meet the sun in his coming." nue. The Sun, and Herald, and Tribune seized upon this wonderful piece of machinery with great eagerness. The Herald predicted its success from its first flash. It recommended it to the public in every way; it urged it upon the Press; but journalists were not so wealthy then as now; they were struggling on limited resources. With some difficulty, and after Morse had offered to sell his whole patent right, represented to-day in this country alone by $50,000,000 of capital, for the sum of $100,000, Congress, amid the jeers of some of its members, appropriated $30,000 for the construction of an experimental line between Washington and Baltimore. This line was opened early in 1844, and it was no easy matter to draw public attention to this pioneer line. Except with the two or three telegraph operators, and the two or three owners of the patent right, there was no interest or excitement about the marvelous instrument. It was not till the nomination of Silas Wright for the vice-presidency by the National Democratic Convention at Baltimore in May of that year that the value of this new and wonderful means of communication was made manifest to the world. The Herald of June 4th, 1844, The First Official Telegram. 599 thus placed on record this important realization of the dream and hope of Morse. It is, indeed, the record of the first definite pulsation of the real nervous system of the world: ANNIHILATION OF SPACE. What has become of space? The magnetic telegraph at Washington has totally annihilated what there was left of it by steam locomotives and steam-ships. We give a certified copy of ten minutes' conversation between Mr. Wright at Washington and Colonel Young at Baltimore in relation to the nomination of Mr. Wright. This shows what can be done. CONVERSATION. WASHINGTON. Important! Mr. Wright is here, and says, Say to the New York delegation that he can not accept the nomination. Again: Mr. Wright is here, and will support Mr. Polk cheerfully, but can not accept the nomination for Vice-president. BALTIMORE. Messrs. Page, Young, Fine, Ballard, and Church are here, and have received Mr. Wright's communication, and hope he will reconsider it. WASHINGTON. Under no circumstances can Mr. Wright accept the nomination, and refers to his two former answers. BALTIMORE. Shall Mr. Fine say any thing to the Convention? Again: Mr. Wright has well considered, and begs his previous answers may be satisfactory. Assistant Superintendent of the Electro-Magnetic Telegraph for the United States. May 29, 1844. It should be borne in mind that the distance from Baltimore to Washington is thirty-six miles. This was its start-its first impulse; but, with this positive and unequivocal result in the presence of the assembled wisdom of the governing party of the nation, Morse still met with serious obstacles. Faith was yet needed. With the complete success of the line between the national capital and Baltimore, only a few men felt its influence and stepped forward in its behalf. Seven months subsequently the Herald published the following suggestive paragraph in its favor, in order to draw the attention of Congress to the fact it expressed : Professor Morse offers to sell his right to the magnetic telegraph to the government, as he prefers that government should possess it, although he thinks he could make more money by selling it to individuals. Another notice appeared in the same paper a few weeks later, on the 29th of March, which now reads strangely enough when we look at the innumerable telegraph lines spread over the surface of the globe in 1872. It was intended as a “puff”—a “first-rate notice." It reads more like a paragraph in favor of an exhibition of a useless automatic chess-player like Maelzel's: MORSE'S TELEGRAPH. The rooms for the exhibition of the electric telegraph present one of the most attractive and interesting lounges in this city. Just step up stairs at 563 Broadway, and be delighted, instructed, and astonished by the working of this magical means of communication. All things, however, must have a beginning, and these were the incipient steps of the telegraph. Morse, in this way, was compelled to bring his extraordinary invention before the people. While he was thus engaged, another ingenious man was at work-the Talbot |