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The Telegraph in Nineteenth-Century America: Technology and Monopoly

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Richard B. Du Boff
Richard B. Du Boff
Affiliation:
Bryn Mawr College
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Extract

In the United States, the technological optimism that accompanied the birth and diffusion of the magnetic telegraph between 1844 and 1880 had few predecessors-if any. Commercial telegraphy was barely a year old in 1847 when the telegraph was seen as “facilitating Human Intercourse and producing Harmony among Men and Nations\….[I]t may be regarded as an important element in Moral Progress.” “The telegraph system is invaluable,” a business journalist declared twenty years later, “and when the missing links shall have been completed of the great chain that will bring all civilized nations into instantaneous communication with each other, it will also be found to be the most potent of all the means of civilization, and the most effective in breaking down the barriers of evil prejudice and custom that interfere with the universal exchange of commodities.”

Type
Culture, Technology, and Power
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 26 , Issue 4 , October 1984 , pp. 571 - 586
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1984

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