Dots, dashes helped make city
The telegraph played a key role in Chicago’s early development
When Samuel Morse died in 1872, Chicago’s mayor offered an effusive elegy to the telegraph’s pioneer, as well he might. Without Morse’s contributions to the development of telegraphy, Joseph Medill would have had less of a city to preside over.
“How much, gentlemen, would Chicago, America, or the civilized world take to give up the electric telegraph?” Medill asked at a meeting of the City Council.
“Why, you might almost ask a man to give up his life, or the bread that he eats,” he said, answering his own question.
The telegraph played a role in Chicago’s early development, notably the year before Medill’s encomium to Morse. When the Great Chicago Fire broke out in October 1871, a desperate call for help was sent via telegraph to Milwaukee. Not so long before, such an appeal would have required a day’s ride by a messenger on horseback.
By telegraphy, Chicago’s As cumbersome as need for fire engines could that seems, the telegraph be known seconds after a enabled Chicago to fully telegrapher sent short and reap the benefits of its long bursts of electricity Midwestern location: across a wire, which his between the agricultural counterpart at the other potential of vast stretches end would read as SOS. of prairies and plains to
Offers of material assistance the west, and the bustling for the fire-stricken cities to the east and the city were received over the same ocean beyond that, across which wire. was a continent increasingly
“Thomas Whitney, of New short of the resources needed to York, telegraphs that a large feed its inhabitants. lightening train has left that city “The deficiencies in Europe for Chicago via the Erie Road, between the supply and demand containing bedding, clothing, has been variously estimated as etc.,” the Tribune reported. 235,000 and 254,000 bushels,” “Edward P. Bond, of Boston, telegraphs the Tribune reported in April that the New England 1879. “The vast transactions of shoe and cotton interest is this country in wheat and the preparing to make a large collection importance of this cereal as an of money.” article of commerce is indicated
Chicago’s tragedy would have by the enormous volume of been immeasurably worse if not exports.” for those telegrams. Survivors In 1848, Chicago established would have been hungry and the Board of Trade, which homeless for far longer if it wasn’t pioneered the purchase and for the telegraphers who sent and sale of commodities long before received those dispatches. they were ready to go to market.
Since first coming to Chicago, Futures trading, as it is known, the telegraph played a role in enabled farmers to lock in the shaping the city, starting with its price they’d get for wheat and skyline. In the mid-1800s, various other crops before they were companies wanted to be the new harvested. Bakers would know medium’s titan. Each strung a what flour would cost before the wire to subscribers and gathering wheat was ground. Both parties at the top of a pole those wires were ensured against market collectively resembled a bird’s fluctuations. nest. “The Chicago Board of Trade
Getting a message to a recipient has seen but sixteen summers in another city through the yet in that short period of time it array of wires linking every city, has carved out a noble name for town and crossroads village in itself, has achieved a proud position, the country could be complicated. and while bound up with Once sent from a telegraph the prosperity of our city, scarcely office in one location, the dots less so with that of the country at and dashes traveled through a large,” the Tribune wrote in 1864. wire strung to another telegraph Yet without the speedy office down the line and then, communication offered by the often, several more, in relay fashion. telegraph, it would have been a Thus by fits and starts the stunted venture. customer’s message reached its New York was the traditional intended destination. center of American commerce. A
seaport, ships brought its entrepreneurs news of what their European counterparts wanted. That news reached Chicago by train hours later, putting the city at a great disadvantage in a business where timing was crucial.
Chicago’s Board of Trade operated in an “open cryout” system, with buyers and sellers signaling by shouts and gestures the price they would give or take. Real-time knowledge of supply and demand often determined the difference between making a bundle and losing your shirt.
The telegraph leveled the playing field between Chicago and cities along the East Coast.
In 1855, the French government switched its wheat transactions from New York to Chicago’s Board of Trade. That endorsement caught the eye of investors.
“Everyone is seized with the mania of speculation,” a prominent Board of Trade associate told the Tribune in 1881. “All over the country the telegraph offices are besieged by people who want to send orders to Chicago.”
The novelist Frank Norris painted a word picture of the resulting frenzy at the Board of Trade. “Twenty voices shouted ‘sold’ and as many traders rushed toward him with outstretched arms,” Norris wrote in “The Pit,” a novel named for the trading floor and published in 1903.
“He could feel — almost at his very fingertips — how this market moved, how it strengthened, how it weakened. He knew just when to nurse it, to humor it, to let it settle and when to crowd it, when to hustle it, when it would stand rough handling,” Norris wrote.
Considering how telegraphy helped Chicago prosper, the city’s movers and shakers had a stake in improving it. Initially, messengers hand-delivered paper telegrams from the office to recipients’ offices or homes. To speed things up, a pneumatic tube was run from the Western Union’s building to the Board of Trade’s building.
“The steel tube is supported by a tightly stretched cable of galvanized iron, which extends between the roofs of the two buildings,” the Tribune reported in 1869.
The dots and dashes were translated into a written message and placed in a leather cup that was inserted into the tube. It whooshed to its destination by either compressed air or a partial vacuum. The message arrived in 10 seconds. Carried by a messenger, it was least two minutes before a trader might raise his and shout: “Sold!”
From a security standpoint, both systems presented problems. Before a message reached a commodity broker, it was read by any number of telegraph operators — to the potential profit of an unscrupulous one. For that reason, Medill, Chicago’s post-fire mayor, championed the Western Union Co., which came to dominate the business. By absorbing smaller telegraphic enterprises, it shrunk the circle of telegraphers that needed policing.
The telegraph was transformative, but its heyday was relatively short. In 1875, Alexander Graham Bell was hoping to improve the telegraph when he accidentally discovered that sound could travel down a wire and invented the telephone.
Knowing the letter equivalents of dots and dashes was no longer necessary.
Thus the telephone would eventually spell the end of the telegraph’s future contributions to Chicago’s fortunes.