THE SPEED OF TRAVEL was not the only thing accelerating in the early nineteenth century. So was the speed of communications.
It is hard to imagine today, when satellites and undersea cables keep every part of the globe in instant communication with every other part, just how slowly news spread in the eighteenth century. The battles of Lexington and Concord, the opening events of the American Revolution, occurred on Wednesday, April 19, 1775. But news of the events reached New York only on Sunday, April 23, and Philadelphia on April 24. It was late at night on April 28 when an express rider finally brought the news to Williamsburg, Virginia. And it was on May 28, fully five and a half weeks later, that the British cabinet in London learned, to its horror, that the long-smoldering crisis in America had flashed into open war.
To be sure, there were ways to spread news more quickly than by horse. But they were impractical for general use. Queen Elizabeth I had ordered bonfires readied along the south coast of England to be used to signal that the Spanish armada had been sighted. At the end of the eighteenth century the Frenchman Claude Chappe erected a series of large semaphore stations across the French landscape with arms that were raised and lowered by pulleys. They signaled one another by using flags—much like Boy Scouts wigwagging—and could send messages in hours that would take days by horseback.
The French used this system (for which Chappe coined the word telegraph—to write at a distance) extensively, but it was seldom used in the new United States. One was installed between Martha’s Vineyard and Boston in 1800. But for the most part, the distances were too great and the available capital too small.
The need for faster communications was just as great as Europe’s, however, and cheaper variations were used. In the 1830s a man, every business day, would climb to the top of the dome of the Merchant’s Exchange on Wall Street, where the New York Stock and Exchange Board then held its auctions. There he would signal the opening prices to a man in Jersey City, across the Hudson. That man would signal them in turn to a man at the next steeple or hill, and the prices could reach Philadelphia in about thirty minutes. It was clumsy at best (and, of course, didn’t work at all in bad weather).
As Wall Street’s importance as a financial market grew and the thirst for the news of its prices became more intense, every expedient was tried. Even on Wall Street itself there was unremitting pressure to get the news instantly. That’s why messengers on Wall Street are called runners. In the early days young boys were employed to constantly dash back and forth between the brokers’ and customers’ offices, and the exchange, with orders and the latest prices. (Today the few messengers left are still called runners, but they are mostly elderly, semiretired men who only amble along.)
The solution to the communications problem was already in the air. It had been known since the early eighteenth century that an electric current could be transmitted long distances down a wire, and if a means could be devised to vary that current in a regular way, information could be conveyed by it.
Numerous attempts were made to utilize this fact. In 1774 a system was devised in Geneva, Switzerland, using one wire for each letter of the alphabet. The electricity flowing through the wire would charge a pith ball attracting a bell and ringing it. This alphabetical carillon worked as a parlor demonstration but was hardly a practical system.
Only when much more efficient batteries and electromagnets were developed in the early nineteenth century and wire became much cheaper, thanks to new wire-making machinery, did the search for the electric telegraph get going in earnest. While William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone in England developed a working system that was put into commercial use, it is the American Samuel F. B. Morse who came up with the system that was finally adopted around the world.
Morse, the son of Jedidiah Morse, a distinguished New England minister and author, trained as an artist. But while he had a minor genius for portraiture, he was more interested in painting large, “important” pictures for which he had only a pedestrian talent at best.
With much time on his hands, thanks to a lack of commissions, he began to think about electricity after a shipboard encounter with Charles Thomas Jackson, who had been doing research in the subject in Europe. On the spot, Morse conceived the telegraph. “If the presence of electricity can be made visible in any part of the circuit,” he said, “I see no reason why intelligence may not be transmitted instantaneously by electricity.”
Morse, ignorant of the technology involved and the literature regarding it, appears to have thought that the idea was original with him, not more than eighty years old already. In fact, the only part of the Morse telegraph system that was wholly original was his marvelously efficient code, which assigns dots and dashes according to the frequency with which the letters occur in English (E is simply ·, while X is -·· -).
With the help of one of America’s most distinguished scientists, Joseph Henry, a professor at Princeton (and later the first director of the Smithsonian Institution), Morse built a working model in one of the rooms of New York University, consisting of batteries and seventeen hundred feet of wire coiled around a room, connected to electromagnets and telegraph keys at each end. When the key at one end was depressed, it closed the circuit, allowing electricity to flow down the wire, activating the magnet at the other end and causing that key to click down in turn.
Morse spent endless energy trying to devise a recording device to make the electricity “visible,” only to discover that his code was so simple that it was easily interpreted by ear, and the letters could be simply written down by hand by a trained telegrapher.
Morse took on partners—Leonard Gale, a professor at NYU, and Alfred Vail, a gifted mechanic whose father owned a prosperous ironworks in New Jersey—to help refine his system. They applied to the government for funds to build a system large enough to demonstrate the technology’s capability. But the government, typically, could not see the potential, and for six years they got nowhere. Only when they took on another partner, F. O. J. Smith (known to his friends as Fog), did they make progress. And that was because Smith was not only a member of Congress, but chairman of the House Committee on Commerce.
In 1843 Smith finally pried an appropriation of $30,000 out of Congress by inserting it into a bill in the frantic final minutes of a session. He then awarded himself the construction contract to build a telegraph line from Washington to Baltimore and wasted most of the money buying shoddy wire and trying to bury the line. The project started over, with the wire stretched on poles, and on May 24, 1844, Samuel Morse, in the Capitol Building, tapped out the code for “What hath God wrought!” and Alfred Vail in Baltimore repeated the signal accurately.
Once the practicality of the telegraph was demonstrated, it spread with astonishing swiftness. By the end of the 1840s nearly all major American cities were connected by telegraph, and a line reached San Francisco in 1861. The telegraph spanned the continent less than two decades after Morse sent his famous message. In 1866 Cyrus Field finally succeeded in laying a cable across the Atlantic Ocean, connecting Europe and America with instant communication. The long isolation of America from the center of the Western world was over after more than 250 years.
By the time Morse died in 1872, rich in honors as well as money, it was possible to send a message from San Francisco to India in a few hours. In 1844 it would have taken perhaps half a year.
One of the reasons that the telegraph was able to spread so quickly was that it could use the pathways being made by the nearly equally fast-spreading railroads. And the telegraph in turn greatly contributed to the efficiency of the railroad. Most of the early lines were single tracked. That meant that if an oncoming train was expected, the train without the right of way had to wait on a siding until it passed. If enough time went by without the other train’s appearance (breakdowns were commonplace in the early days of railroading, as were accidents), a conductor would walk several hundred yards in front of the train with a lantern to make sure there was no collision. That, of course, slowed the train to the speed of the conductor.
In 1851 an engineer on the Erie Railway, frustrated with waiting for an oncoming train, suddenly noticed the telegraph line that ran along the track and put two and two together. News of delayed trains and accidents could be telegraphed ahead, to minimize delays for other trains on the line. Within a few years an elaborate signaling system had been devised, allowing railroads to greatly speed up schedules and improve safety.
But no part of the developing American economy benefited more from the telegraph than did Wall Street. Because a market can never be larger than the area within which communication is effectively instant, the exchanges in Philadelphia and elsewhere continued to be important as securities markets. The telegraph quickly reduced them to insignificance.
Once the telegraph made instant communication possible, traders in Philadelphia and elsewhere could operate in the New York market just as easily as they could in their local one, and they immediately began to do so for the simple reason that the best prices, for both buyers and sellers, are always to be had in the largest market.
The reason was well understood at the time. “Money,” James K. Medbery wrote in 1870, “always has a tendency to concentrate itself, and stocks, bonds, gold, rapidly accumulate at those points where the most considerable financial activity prevails. The greater the volume of floating wealth, the more conspicuous this peculiarity. It resulted from this law that New York City became to the United States what London is to the world. Eminent before, this chief metropolis of the seaboard now assumed an absolute financial supremacy. Its alternations of buoyancy and depression produced corresponding perturbations in every state, city, and village in the land.”
THE TELEGRAPH ALSO PROFOUNDLY AFFECTED another means of communications that was in its infancy in the middle third of the nineteenth century: the modern newspaper.
There had been newspapers in the American colonies as early as 1690, when a Londoner named Benjamin Harris, who had fled England after being jailed for publishing sedition, published the first issue of a newspaper with the less-than-snappy title of Publick Occurrences Both Foreign and Domestick on September 25, 1690, in Boston. Harris promised that his newspaper would be “furnished once a moneth [sic] (or if any Glut of occurrences happen, oftener).” The first issue, however, was also the last, because the governor and council of Massachusetts promptly suppressed it. But newspapers soon appeared again both in Boston and elsewhere, and by the time of the Revolution were being published in all major colonial cities.
These early newspapers did not much resemble later ones. For one thing, the news was gathered at the same slow pace at which it traveled in the eighteenth century, with little sense of urgency about any but the most important stories. For another, they were very expensive. The flatbed press familiar to Benjamin Franklin (or Gutenberg, for that matter) could print only a very limited number of copies in a timely manner, and these went by subscription mostly to coffeehouses and libraries.
The biggest difference between the newspapers of the preindustrial world and those of today was politics. Most general-interest newspapers were the instruments of political factions, praising one party and excoriating all others. They were, in reality, little more than an editorial page wrapped in some highly tendentious news.
A Scots immigrant to New York, James Gordon Bennett, changed all that. Born in 1795 into one of Scotland’s few Catholic families, Bennett was always a man apart, which can be an asset for a journalist. He was also remarkably ugly, with severely crossed eyes. When a young journalist interviewed him in the 1850s at his office across from New York’s City Hall, he reported that Bennett “looked at me with one eye, [while] he looked out at the City Hall with the other.”
Well educated in Aberdeen, he wrote his first piece of journalism about the Battle of Waterloo, when he was twenty, and four years later, sensing greater opportunity, immigrated to the United States. He worked at a series of newspapers from Boston to Charleston before settling in New York where, three times, he tried to found a newspaper that would expound Jacksonian principles. Each attempt was a failure.
Steam, however, was changing the newspaper business as it was changing everything else by the 1830s. The new rotary presses, powered by steam, could turn out thousands of copies of a newspaper a night and at a much lower price than had been possible before. Bennett decided to try something new. On May 6, 1835, with $500 in capital, an office in a dank cellar, and himself as the only employee, Bennett began publishing the New York Herald.
Bennett made the Herald nonpartisan in its news articles, sought always to be the first with the news, and sold it to a mass audience by having it hawked on the street at a penny a copy by the armies of newsboys that would quickly become a feature of the American urban scene for more than a hundred years. None of these ideas was original with Bennett. But it was he who put them all together for the first time. He also introduced a dazzling array of other journalistic innovations. He was the first to print a weather report and to cover sports regularly. He was the first to cover business news and stock prices in a general-interest newspaper. And while “respectable” papers weren’t supposed to notice such things, when a beautiful prostitute was murdered in one of New York’s more fashionable brothels, Bennett played the story for all it was worth.
The Herald’s circulation soared, and other papers were forced to follow suit as the city, and then the country, became transfixed with the story. Within a few years the Herald was among the city’s most successful papers. Bennett traveled to Europe, where he signed up correspondents in London, Rome, and Paris to supply the Herald with exclusive copy, the world’s first foreign correspondents. He fought Congress to establish the principle that out-of-town newspapers had as much right to the congressional press galleries as the local papers, the beginning of the Washington press corps. He even coined the use of the word leak, to refer to the stories slipped to reporters by politicians for their own purposes.
As the telegraph began to spread across the country, Bennett exploited it to the hilt. When the Mexican War broke out, only two years after Morse’s successful demonstration, Bennett organized a consortium of newspapers to fund a pony express from New Orleans to Charleston, which was connected to New York by telegraph. The reports the New York papers published were often days ahead of the official reports arriving in Washington.
By the time of the Civil War the Herald was, by far, the largest and most influential newspaper in the country, and all other major papers had followed its model, profoundly transforming the newspaper business. Its daily circulation during the war reached as high as four hundred thousand, many times the total circulation of all American newspapers combined fifty years earlier.
Millions now counted on the newspapers to keep them informed of their ever-expanding world. “The daily newspaper,” wrote the North American Review in 1866, only three decades after Bennett had founded the Herald, “is one of those things which are rooted in the necessities of modern civilization. The steam engine is not more essential to us. The newspaper is that which connects each individual with the general life of mankind.”
By no means the least of the newspapers’ influence was in advertising. In the preindustrial era, retail operations had, perforce, been very small, usually selling locally made merchandise. The railroads, telegraph, and newspapers made larger operations possible, and urban merchants quickly began to exploit the new opportunities. In 1846 A. T. Stewart, a Scots-Irish immigrant, opened the “Marble Palace” at 280 Broadway in New York City. Located just north of City Hall, it was the first commercial building to have a marble facade and featured a domed atrium and lavish appointments.
A. T. Stewart’s store offered low markups, set prices, and “sales” that were advertised in the papers. It also featured what was called “free entrance,” where customers were invited to browse rather than be attended by a clerk at all times. With its luxurious atmosphere and freedom to move about the store, Stewart’s, for the first time, made shopping a pleasant pastime for those with the money and leisure to indulge in it rather than merely a necessity. The ready-made attributes of a middle-class lifestyle—furniture, draperies, carpeting, china, and prints—were offered at these new department stores, and the new middle class bought them in vast quantities to decorate their houses in the dense, cluttered, high Victorian style that reached the zenith of its popularity at mid-century.
By the 1860s, when Stewart opened his “Iron Palace”—one of the largest cast-iron structures in the world—a mile uptown at Broadway and Ninth Street, he was the largest single payer of customs duties in the country, thanks to a very considerable wholesale business to other merchants around the country.
Even in rural areas that were still beyond the reach of the railroad, new merchandising techniques opened up new markets. Peddlers increasingly took advantage of the improved roads to sell such newly available manufactured goods as pails and tubs, cloth, tools, and “Yankee notions” to housewives along their routes, lessening the loneliness that pervaded so much of rural America in the nineteenth century.
The new merchants also helped popularize Christmas as a secular holiday in this country. Most American Protestants (other than Anglicans) had not celebrated Christmas in colonial days. But as the new mobility brought these Protestant families into contact with those who did celebrate Christmas, many began to do so, often pushed by their children. Writers, such as the New Yorker Clement Clarke Moore (“A Visit from St. Nicholas”—by no coincidence New York City’s patron saint—first published in 1823) and Charles Dickens, began to celebrate the nonreligious aspects of Christmas. The new merchants began decorating their stores for Christmas (the Christmas tree, brought to the English-speaking world by Prince Albert, became popular at this time), and, naturally, merchants emphasized the ancient custom of giving presents at this time of year.
By mid-century Christmas had become the major secular holiday it is today and would grow into the most important engine of the retail business.
IT WAS IN THE YEARS BEFORE the Civil War as well that the Industrial Revolution began to give to daily life a recognizably modern form. Besides far more rapid transportation, thanks to railroads and steamboats, and communication, thanks to the telegraph and the newspapers, the domestic comforts of home also increased markedly.
Before the Industrial Revolution, the last major improvement in domestic technology had been the chimney, which came into use in prosperous households in the high Middle Ages. As late as the 1820s houses were still heated by fireplaces and lit by candles at night. Water was hauled by bucket from a well, spring, or cistern. Cooking was done on the open hearth.
In the 1790s a Briton named William Murdock discovered that coal, when heated, gave off a gas that would burn with a bright yellow flame. Gaslight was demonstrated in Philadelphia as early as 1796. Baltimore passed an ordinance in 1816 encouraging the use of gaslight for street lighting, and the idea spread rapidly to other American cities. By the 1830s the main avenues and streets of American cities were lit, thanks to a network of pipes laid underground that fed the gas from a local gasworks. With the dangerous gloom that had enveloped the urban landscape until then abating, after-dark activity increased markedly in the cities.
But while people welcomed the new light source for the streets, they were much more wary of allowing it into their homes for fear of asphyxiation and explosion. Their fears were by no means unfounded, but the advantages of gaslight over candles overcame them, and by the 1850s its faint hiss and odd, dank smell filled the homes of the urban middle and upper classes. “Gas is now considered almost indispensable in the city,” a New Yorker reported in 1851. “So much so, that scarcely a respectable dwelling house is now built without gas fixtures.”
For the first time in history, interior illumination was cheap, so that it could be used in abundance, and people began to stay up later and read far more than previously. Books, magazines, and newspapers all increased sales markedly at this time, as did sheet music.
Nighttime activity was further encouraged by the spread of central heating. Falling prices for piping and ducting made it affordable, and hot air systems began to appear in houses in the 1830s. By the 1860s steam radiators were rapidly replacing the primitive hot air furnaces, and the American love affair with central heating was on in earnest. Foreign visitors were often appalled. “The method of heating in many of the best houses is a terrible grievance to persons not accustomed to it,” wrote Thomas Golley Grattan, who had been British consul in Boston, “and a fatal misfortune to those who are…. An enormous furnace sends up, day and night, streams of hot air through apertures and pipes…. It meets you the moment the street door is opened to let you in, and it rushes after you when you emerge again, half-stewed and parboiled, into the welcome air.”
The cast-iron cookstove as well proved a great improvement over the hearth, making the lives of women much easier, and became widespread.
Despite all these improvements, running a household was still a great deal of work, and large ones required large numbers of servants to function efficiently. There had been a “servant problem” early in the century as the number of households seeking to employ them increased far faster than the supply. But as young women began to move off the family farm and into the cities, and foreign immigration increased, especially in the 1840s, the price of servants’ wages began to fall sharply. Even modest households could afford to have someone to help the wife.
By mid-century a typical upper-middle-class household employed a cook, a waiter (who did much of the heavy work, such as shoveling coal, as well as waiting on the table at mealtimes), and a maid to clean the house. The more affluent would also have an upstairs maid, a laundress, a houseman (who did the heavy work), a coachman, and a governess for the children. A skilled domestic, such as a good cook, could earn as much as $6 or $7 a week as well as room and board, very good wages for women at that time.
In many households, favorite servants were an integral part of the family, greatly loved and valued. Under these circumstances, domestic service, particularly for an unmarried woman, could be a pleasant life, especially compared with the alternative: a job in one of the new factories and a room, or part of a room, in the teeming, noisome slums that were spreading quickly in all northern cities at this time. And despite the vast growth of industry in the later nineteenth century, in 1900 the largest single category of employment tracked by the U.S. Census would still be domestic service.
As the cities grew in size by leaps and bounds in the first decades of the nineteenth century, the problem of supplying the inhabitants with water and disposing of sewage increased apace. In the early years of the century the affluent had rain barrels or cisterns, fed from their rooftops, but the rest had to haul water from the nearest well. This water was often grossly contaminated from the sewage from privies and the chamber pots that were emptied into the streets. Although not understood at the time, this was the source of the frequent epidemics of such diseases as yellow fever and cholera that ravaged American cities at this time.
Philadelphia was the first city to build a modern water supply that could be piped into houses and allow waste to be disposed of through sewers. In 1832 the first houses in America to be built with bathrooms were supplied by this system. New York, surrounded by salt water, had a far more difficult technological problem to deal with. Nonetheless, after building a forty-five-mile-long aqueduct to bring water in from the Croton River in Westchester County, New York opened the “Croton System” on July 4, 1842.
Philip Hone was agog. Months later he wrote in his diary that “nothing is talked of or thought of in New York but Croton water…. Fountains, aqueducts, hydrants, and hose attract our attention and impede our progress through the streets…. Water! Water! Is the universal note which is sounded through every part of the city, and infuses joy and exultation into the masses.”
George Templeton Strong was positively giddy when his father installed Croton water in his house on Greenwich Street in 1843. Taking a bath no longer involved heating water on the stove and pouring it into a hip bath dragged into the kitchen for the purpose. “I’ve led a rather amphibious life for the last week,” he wrote happily in his diary, “paddling in the bathing tub every night and constantly making new discoveries in the art and mystery of ablution. Taking a shower bath upside down is the last novelty.”
Boston, ever vigilant against the possibility that people might be enjoying themselves on the Sabbath, banned bathing on Sundays.
BEFORE THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY; even among the notoriously peripatetic population of the United States, people seldom ventured more than fifty miles from where they had been born, or, if they did, never saw their birthplace again. Now, in less than a lifetime, it had become possible to travel a hundred miles in a day, receive instant word from someone a thousand miles away, and read of events that were taking place, right then, halfway around the world. It was possible to have hot water run out of a tap, be warm on the coldest night, read a book at night without eyestrain.
These miracles of daily life that piled one upon the other in the first decades of the nineteenth century—railroads, telegraph, newspapers, heating, lighting, running water—induced a mood of optimism and a belief in progress that had not been known before. The sense that anything was possible pervaded what would come to be called the Victorian age, throughout the Western world. But in the United States, still only half formed and growing economically more quickly than any other major country in the world, that mood was palpable.
We have never completely lost it, even in the worst of times that were to come.