Telegrams

In this volume, there are several telegraphic exchanges that have been assembled into single documents. Although the editors have treated telegrams as letters in earlier volumes, the increasing number of included telegrams and the existence of these exchanges warrants some explicit discussion. As documents, telegrams have a peculiar status. Unlike a common letter, a telegram is not one physical document transmitted from writer to reader. In normal commercial practice, a customer wrote a message (or dictated it to a clerk or sending operator); the sending operator read and transmitted the message; another operator received and transcribed the message back to paper; and that transcription was delivered. One might argue that the customer’s written words are just a draft, that the electrical transmission is the real message, and that the words transcribed at the receiving end are just a copy. Indeed, in cases where only one message survives, we must first be willing to posit that what the operator sent was identical to what was written on the message form and that the receiving operator heard the message correctly. Such epistemological concerns are duly noted, but they are of little help to documentary editors. More concretely, if the messages written by the customer and the receiving operator both survive but are not identical, which is the “real” message? In suchPage xxxviii a case differences have to be noted in editorial apparatus, and primacy assigned according to editorial assessment of the relative importance of the sender’s intent and the reader’s reception of the information. But there are other issues as well. For example, messages written for sending often contain emendations. In reproducing ordinary correspondence, documentary editors transcribe (or note) interlineations and overwritten or canceled letters or words. Such changes are understood to have been seen and interpreted by the letter’s recipient, who mentally assembled the clear text. The editors are treating telegraphic messages as written by the sender just as they treat letters, and emendations will appear with the understanding—as is the case with correspondence—that the message is the clear text. This is especially true given that one end of the communication was often at Menlo Park, where Stockton Griffin, Edison, or another laboratory staff member was operating the telegraph and participating in the exchange.

Several documents in this volume comprise multiple telegrams exchanged between two parties on the same day which essentially constitute conversations. The decision to create these documents recognizes a historical circumstance that might argue otherwise; namely, that mail in the late nineteenth century was delivered several times a day in many places. Two or even more letters could be sent and received on the same day. However, the editors have not treated such postal exchanges as single documents for two principal reasons: the nature” of telegraphic practice produced a dialogue in these exchanges that was terser and more focused than correspondence; and, in general and in the selected instances, the telegraph exchanges were more rapid than correspondence.

Administrative matters recorded on the telegram—cost, the initials of the sending or receiving operators, addresses, word count—are omitted unless they are deemed significant, in which case they will appear in endnotes.

Transcription principles

Stockton Griffin, who was a notary public, embossed certain laboratory notebook entries from September and October 1878 with his seal. He marked many others with a stamp that said, “Personally appeared before me this day of 18 , the said Thos. A. Edison, Chas. Batchelor, John Kreusi, and Martin Force, and acknowledged the above to be their signatures. Notary Public.” He signed very few of the stamped pages and never filled in thePage xxxix blanks. Neither the stamp nor the seal have been noted in the textnotes.

Also during the fall of 1878, William Carman copied certain experimental records into the Experimental Researches volumes (Cats. 994-98). When he did so he noted somewhere on the document the page number copied to and the date. Carman’s words are not copied into the textnote, but the location of his transcription is.