Communications

By 1870 most American communities were in instant touch with each other by telegraph, and as railroads expanded during the Gilded Age people and products could move from one corner of the nation to another in days. A generation earlier—prior to the revolution in communications—

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Months were required to send messages, goods, or travel across the nation. The economic effects of cheap and fast communication were profound. Local and regional markets gave way to a national market (indeed, a world market for growers of wheat). Manufacturers secured their raw materials from far and wide and, if anything, distributed their less bulky and more valuable products even further. Orders could be placed instantly, delivered speedily, and paid for promptly, thus providing a quicker return on capital invested than in times past. The social effects of the communications revolution echoed the economic effects. It made possible the two great population shifts in the Gilded Age: the settlement of the West and the growth of huge cities. It also helped reduce provincialism in America by binding its regions closer together with wire and rails.

The growth of a nationwide rail network was the key factor in the rapid movement of goods and people. In 1870 there were 53,000 miles of railroad track (the transcontinental railroad had been completed the year before), and by 1900 trackage had almost multiplied four times to 193,000 miles. Railroads also made possible the vast improvement in mail service in two ways. They not only moved the mail much more quickly than in the past, but also gave rise in the 1860s to the railway post office: mail cars on passenger trains, where the mail was sorted while moving down the track. Montgomery Blair, Lincoln’s postmaster general, not only authorized the first railway post office but also home delivery in cities and a money-order system. In addition, in 1879 Congress aided rural Americans and mail-order houses when it provided that packages of up to four pounds could be mailed throughout the country at the flat rate of one cent an ounce. These innovations all had their greatest impact in the Gilded Age. The 468 million postage stamps sold in 1870 increased to almost 4 billion in 1900, indicating a dramatic increase in personal and business letters, which exerted a powerful cultural, social, and economic centripetal force.

The first practical telegraph line (from Washington to Baltimore) that went into operation in 1844 was owned by the federal government, but by 1847 the government had decided not to provide telegraph service as it did mail service and sold the line to private interests. Initially the telegraph industry was chaotic with numerous companies, but by 1870 the Western Union Telegraph Company consolidated over 90 percent of the business into one system that it continued to expand. In 1870 it had 3,972 offices and 112,000 miles of wire; by 1900 these had grown to 22,000 offices and 933,000 miles of wire. The telegraph was of importance to business in general, especially after the invention of the stock ticker in 1866, and of great value to newspapers. It led to the establishment of the New York Associated Press, which transmitted news items to subscribers throughout the country over the Western Union wires. At times during the Gilded Age, Western Union’s position as the sole transmitter of business and general news caused alarm and led to calls for a postal telegraph system as an alternative to the Western Union monopoly. Postmaster Generals John A. J. Creswell in the 1870s and John Wanamaker in the 1890s advocated the postal telegraph, but nothing came of their efforts.

Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone made a great impression when demonstrated at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876, but its significant impact awaited the widespread distribution of telephones in operation. Although in 1878 President Ruthereord B. Hayes had a telephone in the White House that connected with one in the Treasury Department, the White House’s nerve center was not a switchboard but its telegraph office, and it would remain so until the 20th century. Telephones, however, did proliferate until there were 1.4 million in 1900 (one for every 54 Americans), making 7.7 million local calls but only 193,000 toll calls daily. Long-distance calls were limited in the Gilded Age. Service between New York and Chicago was instituted in 1892, but transcontinental service between New York and San Francisco was not available until 1915. Among businesses, newspapers were quick to utilize the telephone. The telephone was on its way to becoming the “nervous system” of the 20th-century metropolis—the conqueror of time, space, and solitude, and an instrument used to bring the human family into closer touch.

Further reading: Robert V. Bruce, Bell: Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973); Wayne E. Fuller, The American Mail: Enlarger of the Common Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972); Paul Israel, From Machine Shop to Industrial Laboratory: Telegraphy and the Changing Context of American Invention, 1830-1920 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).