I’ve never received a telegram. It looks like I never will. On
Jan. 27, Western Union marked the end of an era by delivering its
last telegram.
I’ve never received a telegram. It looks like I never will. On Jan. 27, Western Union marked the end of an era by delivering its last telegram.
When I heard the news, I was surprised. I never suspected that people in our digital age still sent and received telegrams. I just assumed telegraphic communication had gone the way of the Pony Express. With an abundance of e-mail, faxes, cheap long-distance calls, cell phones and instant messaging, the notion of sending information via telegraph wires seemed quaintly nostalgic.
The age of the telegram was ushered in on May 26, 1844, when inventor Samuel Morse transmitted the first telegraph message from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore. He sent a question quoted from the Bible, Numbers 23:23: “WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT?”
The technology took about nine years to reach the West Coast. In 1853 entrepreneur James Gamble built the first telegraph line from San Francisco to Marysville via San Jose and Sacramento. The first telegraph message in California was sent from San Francisco to Belmont on a test run. Gamble showed the message to astonished local residents who had witnessed the historic moment.
The naive Belmont folks believed the wire was a long hollow tube through which the message traveled. Gamble decided to pull a gag on the crowd. He wrote a return message on a slip of paper and placed it in an envelope.
According to his account: “I took it from the table on which I had placed it, and instead of handing it to the boy for delivery I put it, holding it in my hand, under the table which was provided with sides sufficiently deep to hide the envelope from their view.
“As I did this I kept my eyes fixed on the wire, while, with my right hand, I took hold of the key and began working it. The moment the crowd heard the first click of the instrument they all rushed from under the veranda out into the street to see the message in the envelope pass along the wire. On seeing them rush out tumbling one over the other to catch a glimpse of the message, we on the inside burst out into one long and continued roar of laughter.”
Practical jokes aside, Morse’s device revolutionized communication. Before his telegraph, the notion of relatively instant communication with far away places seemed like wizardry. But quickly, Morse’s invention changed society, becoming the Victorian equivalent of the Internet. During the Civil War, telegrams allowed Americans to learn about battles while the smoke still cleared.
The United States was transformed by the completion of the transcontinental telegraph in Oct. 24, 1861. Before that day, the fastest message service west of the Mississippi River was the Pony Express. Horseback riders took 10 days to deliver mail 1,966 miles from St. Joseph, Mo., to Sacramento. The electric signals transmitted at light speed over telegraph lines were a safer and cheaper means of communication than this arduous relay race.
The telegraph shaped the West, including the South Valley. Morse’s amazing technology connected the pioneer folks out here to East Coast happenings. Nothing could be compared to it until the 1960s when the Telstar satellite allowed people to witness news and sporting events “live” on television.
Many people in the South Valley still remember the hey days of telegrams. Morgan Hill’s Jean Koehn recalls that when the Western Union messenger knocked at the front door holding a yellow envelope in hand, people considered him as frightening as a black-robed Death figure.
“In the old days, a telegram meant someone died,” she said. “It was just a horrible thing.”
One time during World War II while Koehn’s brother Edward served overseas in the Navy, her mother felt too afraid to open a just-delivered telegram. The War Department at that time sent death notices via Western Union.
Koehn’s family, however, had nothing to fear. “It was some good news that my brother was coming stateside, and he wanted us to know,” she said.
In the early 1940s, my dad received a telegram notifying him of his own father’s death in Los Angeles. He told me that when he read the sad news, he felt an electric shock pass through his body. The gears in the pocketwatch he was wearing froze at that moment, and the timepiece never ran again. A telegram message literally made time stop.
During World War II in Berlin, my mother learned how to operate a telegraph key. As a teenage telegraph operator in Germany’s capital city, her job was to send and receive telegram messages. I’m sure she saw more than her share of death notices.
When I was a kid, mom tried to teach me Morse Code, the dots and dashes representing alphabet letters that operators send along the electric wires. Without much need for it in these days of cheap phone calls and the Internet, I long ago forgot what I’d learned of that magic code.
The height of the telegraph era came in the 1920s and 1930s when telegrams were cheaper than long-distance phone calls. Watching old movies from that era, I always sense a suspenseful moment with the arrival of a message.
The doorbell rings. A uniformed boy announces “Telegram!” as he hands over the envelope and receives some pocket change. The message the courier brings always sends the plot spinning in some new direction.
Who can guess what new directions our own modern communication technology will spin? Maybe not far in the future, people will have tiny microchips implanted in their heads that connect their brains wirelessly to the vast storehouse of Internet information. We could instantly download facts and figures and video images directly into our minds. Or it’s conceivable this high-tech brain-wire might give us virtually telepathic communication with everyone else on the planet.
Does it all sound like science fiction? Well, compared to the telegraph, today’s high-tech communication gadgets seem much more far-fetched. What hath God wrought, indeed, Mr. Morse might wonder.
