The Telegraph in America, 1832-1920 by David Hochfelder (review)

David Hochfelder, who is an assistant professor at the University at Albany, SUNY, completed his dissertation on telegraph history in 1999, and evidently his passion never waned. Judging from the endnotes, he appears to have read every significant historical work on the technology, and the bibliographic essay is a veritable roadmap for future scholars and graduate students. Drawing on this prior scholarship and a significant amount of archival research, Hochfelder reveals how the telegraph interacted with different aspects of American society. Contrary to the time frame indicated in the title, the book glosses over the first thirty years of the telegraph and begins in earnest with the Civil War. The narrative likewise does not conclude in the 1920s, as we also learn about the slow decline of telegraphy over the course of the twentieth century.

While much has been written about the telegraph, Hochfelder brings many new, or at least overlooked, facts to light. The chapter on the Civil War is particularly strong, as is the one on financial markets, which discusses the spread of stock ticker machines and the so-called bucket shops, which allowed individuals to wager small sums on stock fluctuations—not legitimate investing, but rather a shadowy black market operating alongside the stock market. When too many people had predicted that a particular stock would rise, bucket shop owners were known to pool their money and drive down the actual stock price.

Another strong chapter focuses on journalism and the interplay between language and coded telegrams. In contrast to the claim that the telegraph encouraged an abbreviated writing style, with Hemingway's prose the supposed proof, Hochfelder notes that most Americans sent only one or two telegrams per year, if that. And, when newspapers received brutally condensed telegrams, copyeditors unpacked them in such a way that twelve words might yield a forty- or fifty-word story. For these reasons, Hochfelder downplays the effect of the telegraph on writing styles, claiming instead that its real effect on journalism was to encourage the mentality that news needed to be truly "new," since events anywhere in the world could be reported almost instantly.

Two of the chapters are less impressive, however, as they cover the same terrain dealt with elsewhere, most recently in Richard John's Network Nation (2010). Hochfelder devotes one chapter, for example, to the "postal telegraph movement"—the long-standing campaign to have the federal government operate a telegraph network. This idea, which was Samuel Morse's original concept, was fused with the anti-monopoly campaign against the behemoth of Western Union. Hochfelder's bibliographic essay notes that John's work covers this aspect of telegraph history "completely" (p. 237). It is not clear what new insight this work offers. In the final chapter, Hochfelder discusses the decline of Western Union and the rise of the telephone industry. Business historians have characterized Western Union's decision not to buy Bell's telephone patent in the 1860s as a colossal mistake, although Hochfelder reveals that the situation was not so clear-cut. As with the chapter on the postal telegraph movement, this one also overlaps considerably with Network Nation.

The biggest issue with the book, however, at least for readers of T&C, is the thin theoretical framework that surrounds the aforementioned chapters. A brief introduction tells us that the telegraph was a revolutionary technology that "forever liberated communication from transportation" and had profound effects on American society (p. 3). There is more than a hint of determinism here, and Hochfelder returns to the perspective in an equally brief conclusion. In the concluding paragraphs he defends technological determinism, which is an odd choice. Given the vast number of words that have been devoted to attacking, defending, and clarifying this concept, this argument should have been introduced much sooner, and articulated in more detail, to be effective. There is certainly much value in this work and it will undoubtedly find a home on the shelves of many personal and university libraries. One...