What Can We Learn from a 110-Year-Old Telegram Sent Around the World?
On Aug. 20, 1911, the New York Times dispatched a news item via telegram, asking that the message be relayed around the world and back to the newspaper. The text was simple: “This message sent around the world.”
The Times received the return telegram in just 16 minutes and 30 seconds — record speed for the commercial telegraph system.
This event is barely a footnote in the history of technology, but it was one of my many building blocks leading to the global communication technology we know today. Before that telegram could circle the earth, a number of factors — both technological and human — had to be in place.
Testing a New System
The New York Times may have set a record, but it wasn’t the first time a telegram went around the world, nor was it the fastest. Eight years earlier, President Teddy Roosevelt and Charles H. Mackey, president of the Commercial Pacific Cable Co., sent a message around the world in just 9 minutes, 30 seconds.
This feat was significant for its time. In January 1903, Pacific Cable completed laying the 6,912 miles of telegraph cable below the Pacific Ocean from San Francisco to Manila. In July, to test the system, Roosevelt sent a message wishing American territories and properties a happy Independence Day.
The event was planned and carefully orchestrated. All stations along the way had been alerted to look for the message and relay it as quickly as possible to the next station. As reported in a news article from the New York Times dated Aug. 21, 1911: “Every one [ sic]had been warned to stand by his post to give the dispatch a royal right of way. The operators along the route were fully aware of what it meant to them if there was any delay.”
In other words, Roosevelt and Pacific Cable had arranged all three factors needed for the round-the-world message to succeed: infrastructure, people, and international cooperation.
Infrastructure, People, and International Cooperation
Telegraphy was already widely in use by 1911. Even trans-Atlantic communication was commonplace; a successful cable across the Atlantic had first been tried in 1858, and an improved version installed in 1865.
Conquering the Pacific was a much bigger challenge for a number of reasons. The longer distances required more equipment, more expense, and more personnel. And, since the company sought to serve American interests, the station employees had to speak English. The locations that Pacific Cable chose for their transmission points — Honolulu, the Midway Atoll, Guam, and Manila — were already politically associated in some way with the United States. American workers, employees of Pacific Cable, relocated to the islands to construct and operate the stations.[1]
Eight years after Roosevelt and Mackey’s message, the Times was able to rely on the telegraphic network that already existed and in fact, had expanded considerably.
Function vs. Reliability
In the development of technology, there is often a lag between functionality and commercial viability. The 1903 dispatch demonstrated that the telegraph system worked. The 1911 telegram sent by the Times showed the system was fast and reliable for business and commercial use.
Unlike Roosevelt and Mackey, the Times did not prepare the relay stations for their telegram.
The newspaper in Rochester, New York, the Democrat summarized it like this:
No especial arrangements were made in advance, the message being filed in the telegraph office in a purely commercial way, with the ordinary press request: “Please rush.”
By 1911, additional infrastructure had been added to extend the network, so that the Times telegram traveled from San Francisco through Manila, Honolulu, Midway Island, Hong Kong, Saigon, Singapore, Madras, Bombay, Aden, Suez, Alexandria, Malta, Gibraltar, Lisbon, and the Azores before being transmitted back to New York across the Atlantic.
In all, the message was relayed 16 times and traveled a total distance of 21,397 nautical miles (equivalent to 24, 963 land miles). In addition, the transmission was transmitted over land from New York to San Francisco (3,000 miles) and from Madras to Bombay, India (650 miles).
The article in the Times describes the journey from Madras to Bombay in dramatic form that expresses the colonialism and racism of the era:
This line traverses the domains of the Nizam of Hyderabad, the most powerful Prince in India, from the Coromandel to the Malabar coast, crossing the Indian Peninsula and passing through great forests inhabited by man-eating tigers, panthers, boa constrictors, and pythons, and singing its way past the lonely residence of the American missionary, whose only gleam of civilization is the buzzing on the telegraph wires near his bungalow.
Obviously, it’s unlikely that the electromagnetic dots and dashes pulsing through the telegraph wires would interest the jungle creatures at all.
Global Communication
The Times telegram was a milestone in global communication, but it would soon be replaced by even more advanced technology. The wireless telegraph, or radiotelegraphy, was already in use, and in fact, Guglielmo Marconi made his famous overseas transmission from Cornwall, England, to Newfoundland, Canada in 1901. Voice radio followed, though telegraphs remained common through the 1950s.
Now, 110 years later, we don’t give a second thought to instantaneous global communication nor what it took to lay the foundations for it.
[1] It must be noted that the construction of the Pacific telegraph cables and their stations caused political, economic, and ecological impacts on the local cultures. These impacts are too complex to discuss here. Many scholars have analyzed them. For an example, see: John Tully, “A Victorian Ecological Disaster: Imperialism, the Telegraph, and Gutta-Percha,” Journal of World History, 20, №4 (2009: 559–579).
