Chapter 18 - Everybody Shares the News

Newspapers before the Civil War were not very newsy and mostly contained stories, poems, and opinions. News was copied from other newspapers and political parties controlled the well-known ones. People used different methods to send urgent messages over long distances, such as semaphore and carrier pigeons. Samuel F.B. Morse invented the telegraph, which could send messages using electric currents. Morse faced challenges in building the telegraph line, but eventually succeeded. The telegraph impressed people and was used for various purposes, including catching criminals. The telegraph network expanded as railroads were built across the country. Chapter 18, Everybody Shares the News Until nearly the time of the Civil War, newspapers were not generally very newsy. They used up so much of their space to print stories, poems, essays, and the strong opinions of their owners. And they copied much of their news from other newspapers that arrived by slow mail. Political parties owned or controlled the best-known newspapers. They praised their own side and slandered the other. If you wanted to know what was happening far outside your neighborhood, you had to wait for a traveler to come by. Businessmen and generals organized their own systems to send urgent messages over great distances. One of the oldest examples is the semaphore, from the Greek word meaning signal-bearer. People arranged in advance what their signals would be. Then they built fires, sent up smoke, or arranged a pattern of boards on a high tower. All of these could be seen at a far greater distance than the voice could carry. The Greeks, Romans, and American Indians had all developed lines of semaphore stations to relay messages for many miles. By the mid-1800s, the French semaphore system used 556 separate stations to stretch 3,000 miles. Wowee, that's a long way. In the 1840s, a young New England go-getter, Daniel Craig, decided to send messages by carrier pigeons. He ordered pigeons from Europe and trained them for his Pigeon Express. Soon, newspapers subscribed to his service. He would go many miles out into the Atlantic in his boat to meet a ship arriving from Europe. The captain would throw him a watertight canister that contained the latest London newspapers, and Craig would quickly summarize the news on thin pieces of paper. These he would attach to the legs of pigeons, and the pigeons then swiftly flew the news to the newspapers. Let's gaze above at the picture that looks like it shows the carrier pigeons flying out the window. Let's read the caption. In the days before the telegraph or radio, sending news by air meant using carrier or messenger pigeons. Pigeons trained to carry messages reliably between two points. Pigeons had been used for this purpose since the 500th B.C. Let's also gaze on the picture next to this page. There's a man waving to something on a horse. In the distance, you can see another man on a ladder waving back. Let's read what it says. A brief moment in time as two epochs of communication meet, a Pony Express rider passes the transcontinental telegraph line under construction. The meeting of two epochs of communication. The Pony Express only ran from April 3, 1860 until October 24, 1861. When the finished transcontinental telegraph line put the service out of business, horses and riders could not compete with electrical signals. View. View. Craig's pigeons went all the way from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to a newspaper in Washington, D.C. The New York Sun even built a dovecote for its own carrier pigeons on the roof of its new building, but the pigeon service proved unreliable. And there was a limit to how much news a pigeon could carry, because they're weak and they're stupid with beautiful little eyes. It was hard to imagine a system that did not depend on seeing signals or on sending written messages, but Samuel F.B. Morse I wonder what he invented. found a way to make an electric current do the job. Morse was a man of many talents. At Yale, he painted portraits of his fellow students for five dollars apiece. Then he went to London, where he studied at the Royal Academy, the honor society of English artists. When Morse came back in 1815, he was a famous artist, but he nearly starved because people would not buy his large paintings. So once again, he made a living by painting portraits. At the age of 30, he went to Italy and France, the headquarters of painting at the time. In 1832, on the sailing ship Sully, as he came back from Europe, a talkative young physician from Boston was among Morse's fellow passengers. Dr. Charles had learned a great deal about electricity while he was in Paris. To while away his six-week ocean trip, Morse asked him lots of questions. Morse was an educated man, but he still knew very little about the new science. Would electricity flow through a long line? A straight line? And a wire? How fast did it travel? Why couldn't electricity be used to send messages? He asked. Others before Morse had asked the last question and got nowhere with their answers, but Morse did not know enough about the subject to be discouraged. He suddenly decided to make an electric telegraph. Telegraph is from the Greek words for far writer. As an artist, Morse had a bold imagination about shapes of things, and so right then and there he began to invent his telegraph. Even today you can find the shipboard notebook in which Morse wrote his new ideas. It's in the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. Before you reach New York, Morse had drawn a picture of a telegraph instrument much like that that is used today. He had even planned how to use dots and dashes for his new Morse code. Well, Morse told the captain of the ship as they arrived in New York on November 16, 1832, should you hear of the telegraph one of these days, remember the discoverer who was made on board the good ship Sully. It took Morse five years to make a telegraph instrument that would work. During that time he supported himself by giving painting lessons. To build a telegraph line required a small fortune. Many people thought the telegraph was nothing but a toy, a thunder and lightning gimmick. Morse decided to change their minds by a public demonstration. He took his machine with him to Washington, where the Committee on Commerce of the House of Representatives allowed him to demonstrate his telegraph in the Capitol. It was a sensation. The world is coming to an end, one witness declared. Time and space are now annihilated. Somewhat of a dramatic statement, if I may dare say. President Martin Van Buren and members of his cabinet came to see the new electric marvel. The chairman of the House Committee, Congressman Fogg Smith of New York, that of New Hampshire, saw his own chance to make a fortune. When he asked Morse to make him a partner in a firm developing the telegraph, Morse could hardly refuse. For Congressman Smith had the power to persuade the House of Representatives to give the Morse the money to build a telegraph line. The congressional debate was hilarious. Opponents jokingly proposed that the money be split among Morse's telegraph and the supporters of hypnotism and the crackpots who believed the world was about to end. Finally, in 1843, eleven years after Morse had his first inspiration, Congress appropriated $30,000. With this money, Morse was supposed to sketch a telegraph line from Baltimore to Washington. At first, Morse and his partners tried buying the wire. They spent $23,000 before they discovered that did not work, because the wire was defective and the very line would not work. They then started all over again by stringing a wire on poles. They were in a hurry to get the job done before the whole Congress began to believe the telegraph was a hoax. Mile after mile, they placed 24-foot high chestnut poles 200 feet apart. They bored holes in the poles, stuck the next little bottles in the holes to serve as insulators, and then thread the wire through the glass-lined holes. Luckily, at the very moment in May 1844, both the main political parties were holding their national conventions in Baltimore. This gave Morse his chance to impress all the people in Washington who were especially anxious to learn the names of the candidates. But when the candidates were actually selected, Morse's wire still reached only 22 miles from Washington to Annapolis Junction to demonstrate the telegraph. Morse had the news brought by train from Baltimore to Annapolis Junction. Then, to beat those who had to carry the news all the way back by train, he flashed it over the wire to his telegraph-receiving machine in the Capitol. The politicians there were amazed when Morse told them, before anyone else in Washington knew, the names of the Whig Party candidates. Henry Clay for president, and Theodore Frelinghuysen for vice president. Frelinghuysen. This was the first news ever flashed by electric telegraph! The telegraph soon impressed people who were sensational users. What? The telegraph soon impressed people by other sensational uses. When a thief escaped from Washington by train, his description was telegraphed ahead to the station in Baltimore. There, he was arrested as he stopped off the train. Ha ha. Newspaper editors predicted that before long there would be no more crime, since criminals would be too afraid to be stuck by the telegraph lightning. Turns out they were wrong. Morse joined two newspapers to form the Magnetic Telegraph Company. They built new lines from Philadelphia to New York, from Philadelphia to Baltimore, and around to all the larger cities. By 1848, the telegraph network reached northwards to Portland. Gaze at the picture below. As the railroads pushed westwards across the continent, telegraph lines kept pace. And on the picture we see a railroad track in construction, and alongside it, two telegraph poles also in construction. Just gaze at the map at the top of the page. In 1844, the presidential candidates were being selected by Baltimore. In Baltimore, Maryland. But Morse's telegraph line only reached from Washington to Annapolis Junction. Still, to demonstrate his telegraph, Morse had the news brought by train from Baltimore to Annapolis Junction. Then he flashed it over the wire to his telegrapher sheet receiving machine in the Capitol. We already read this, but this is what it says. Morse's telegraph beat the train by a good half hour, reporting the names of the Whig party candidates before anyone else in Washington could give word. Hmm? Oh. By 1848, the telegraph network machine reached northwards to Portland, Maine. Southwards to Charleston, and westwards to St. Louis, Chicago, and Milwaukee. Regular newspaper columns offered the latest bulletins under the heading, Bi-Magnetic Telegraph. Newspapermen boasted of the mystic band that now held the nation together. The Mexican-American War, the California Gold Rush, and the national troubles that foreshadowed a civil war. All these were whetted Americans' appetite for news. And the more news people received, the more they wanted. Because it was expensive to gather news by telegraph, the newspapers came together in groups. Since they had all shared the latest dispatches, each of them had to pay only part of the cost of telegraphing the news. In 1848, six New York daily newspapers formed the first Associated Press. Their man in Boston took the news brought by ships from Europe and put it in one telegram to the New York office. Then the Associated Press sold its speedy and reliable dispatches to newspapers in Boston, Philadelphia, and elsewhere. Gathering and selling news became a big business. And the news-gathering experience of the Civil War behind them, go-getting reporters extended the Associated Press throughout the nation. Then every membered newspaper supplied its own local news to all the hundreds of other members. Since there were so many members, they could also afford to open offices with full-time reporters all over the world. This increased the quantity and improved the quality of the news. The Associated Press stories tried not to be prejudiced or one-sided for their readers. Newspapers were members of all political parties. Papers would not buy the AP news unless it gave them straight facts. By the early 20th century, there was also a United Press and an International News Service. At the same time, many other new inventions were helping to turn out papers fast and by the millions. In the early 1800s, an ingenious Englishman improved the presses used by big city newspapers. Instead of using a frame that went up and down, he used a cylinder. He had a press attach a blank paper to the cylinder and then let the cylinder roll it against the pipe. This was much faster because the cylinder could keep rolling continuously and the machine could feed a new piece of paper in every time the cylinder went around. Richard Hoe, a young New Yorker, had a still better idea. Why not put the pipe itself on a cylinder and roll the pipe smoothly and rapidly against the paper? Huh? Why not? Well, he did, and by 1855, his whole rotary press was printing 10,000 newspapers in an hour! Oh my! The next step was to manufacture paper in long rolls instead of sheets. In 1865, a Philadelphian, William Bullock, made the first machine that printed on a continuous roll of paper. And printed using both sides of the paper at once! Oh my! Gadgets to cut and even fold into papers as they came off the press applied the finishing touches. Some metropolitan papers soon put out six different editions every day. Newspapers became larger and larger. Sunday newspapers, including advertisements, comics, magazine sections, book reviews, and everything else, became big enough to fill the whole day for Americans who did not go to church. Bye, bye, bye, people. This case above is a picture of the printing press in action! Richard Hoe's speedy web printing machine was among the new wonders shown in the machinery hall at the centennial exposition of Philadelphia. Instead of printing on separate sheets, this new style of press used a continuous roll of paper. The roll might be more than four miles long! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!