Vintage Chicago Tribune: 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 need for fire engines could be known seconds after a telegrapher sent short and long bursts of electricity across a wire, which his counterpart at the other end would read as SOS.

Offers of material assistance for the fire-stricken city were received over the same wire.

“Thomas Whitney, of New York, telegraphs that a large lightening train has left that city for Chicago via the Erie Road, containing bedding, clothing, etc.,” the Tribune reported. “Edward P. Bond, of Boston, telegraphs that the New England shoe and cotton interest is preparing to make a large collection of money.”

Chicago’s tragedy would have been immeasurably worse if not for those telegrams. Survivors would have been hungry and homeless for far longer if it wasn’t for the telegraphers who sent and received those dispatches.

Since first coming to Chicago, the telegraph played a role in shaping the city, starting with its skyline. In the mid-1800s, various companies wanted to be the new medium’s titan. Each strung a wire to subscribers and gathering at the top of a pole those wires collectively resembled a bird’s nest.

Getting a message to a recipient in another city through the array of wires linking every city, town and crossroads village in the country could be complicated. Once sent from a telegraph office in one location, the dots and dashes traveled through a wire strung to another telegraph office down the line and then, often, several more, in relay fashion. Thus by fits and starts the customer’s message reached its intended destination.

As cumbersome as that seems, the telegraph enabled Chicago to fully reap the benefits of its Midwestern location: between the agricultural potential of vast stretches of prairies and plains to the west, and the bustling cities to the east and the ocean beyond that, across which was a continent increasingly short of the resources needed to feed its inhabitants.

“The deficiencies in Europe between the supply and demand has been variously estimated as 235,000 and 254,000 bushels,” the Tribune reported in April 1879. “The vast transactions of this country in wheat and the importance of this cereal as an article of commerce is indicated by the enormous volume of exports.”

In 1848, Chicago established the Board of Trade, which pioneered the purchase and sale of commodities long before they were ready to go to market. Futures trading, as it is known, enabled farmers to lock in the price they’d get for wheat and other crops before they were harvested. Bakers would know what flour would cost before the wheat was ground. Both parties were ensured against market fluctuations.

“The Chicago Board of Trade has seen but sixteen summers yet in that short period of time it has carved out a noble name for itself, has achieved a proud position, and while bound up with the prosperity of our city, scarcely less so with that of the country at large,” the Tribune wrote in 1864.

Yet without the speedy communication offered by the telegraph, it would have been a stunted venture.

New York was the traditional 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 accidently 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.

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