Homestead mailing list

[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

This is a woeful condensation of a much longer piece I wrote for another 
forum but it has to do with many of the economic things we are talking about 
so I 
will take a shot at conveying the gist of it here:

This was a Christmas fable I fabricated about stopping at one of the few 
lunch counters that still serve up hot tea and a man in white starched shirt, 
sleeve protectors, and green eyeshade sits down next to me and we 
commensurate 
about the state of economy.

He tells me that he's out of work, has been out of work for some very long 
time, and is biding his time until the economy turns around and he can 
continue 
in his profession ..... as a telegraph operator.

Of course I had some interest in this since I was a ham radio devotee back in 
the bad old days when proficiency in Morse Code was its pride and joy.  I had 
worked up to a certificate of 35 wpm.  My companion said he was rated at 55 
words per minute and I believed him, in the days of the old brass sounders 
this 
was not uncommon.

He removed the eyeshade and rubbed his temples and related how the dearth in 
jobs for Morse Code men had meant that he had to delay the purchase of 
something he'd worked for for a long time ... his own carriage and pair.

I was lost for a moment in the romance of it all.  Morse code!  Not Morse's 
at all, of course, it had been invented by his assistant, Alfred Vail.  It is 
properly Vail's code. The thoroughly impractical Morse wanted a code that 
translated only into numbers and the operator would then look up in a code 
book the 
words which corresponded to the numbers.  Vail came up with the code, only 
slightly different than what was used by radio men for decades afterwards, 
and 
he also invented the electro-magnet relay without which Morse's telegraph had 
a 
maximum distance of about 45 feet.

The first telegraphs used a paper ribbon that the receiving device incised 
dots and dashes in by means of a needle.  But operators found that they 
became 
accustomed to characteristic clack-clackity-clack noise of the receiver and 
could decipher the message even without looking at the ribbon.  The receiver 
was 
modified so that it made a 'ding' and a 'gong' sound by means of brass bars 
and the message came across as a melodic di-di-ding di-go-go-gong' sort of 
song. 
 Anyone from any walk of life could develop a knack for this and so many 
became well paid professional telegraph men.  Well, that's a misnomer too, 
since 
about a quarter of them were women AND their skills were so highly though of, 
they were paid the same as men.

But this was a very long time ago.  I turned to my tea time companion to 
comment on how he was looking for a job in a field of work that long gone 
never to 
return, and he wanted that work to buy something that was equally gone.  Ah, 
yes, his seat was empty and he too was gone.  That sort of thing happens 
around Christmas, I suppose.

We've all seen the western movies and TV shows where the sheriff or other 
protagonist wanders into the Western Union office to send the message to 
Sacramento.  The (always) elderly and diminutive fellow who sends the message 
is 
dressed in white starched shirt with sleeve protectors and wears a green 
eyeshade. 
The impression is given that this, say 60 year old, telegraph operator has 
been there at the job since his early twenties if not before and has had 
years of 
experience in the trade.  But the western (typically taking place in 1875 or 
so) was only some twenty years from when the telegraph was first used 
commercially in 1856 and the brass sounder requiring a skilled operator only 
came into 
common use after the War for Southern Independence.  More likely the 
telegraph clerk would have been 25 years old.  And how long did the 
profession exist?  
 From its inception to its peak in the late 1870's was no more than fifteen 
years.   After that various duplexing and multiplexing devices made the 
skilled 
operator obsolete.

Nor is this our only example.  In spite of all the movies, pulp novels, and 
general lore about the cowboy, the era of the western cattle drives lasted 
all 
of eight years.  The railroad make them infeasible.  Likewise a standby icon 
of that time is the Pony Express rider.  The Pony Express system was in 
business for a total of fourteen months until the transcontinental telegraph 
made it 
useless.

In our own time examples abound.  Think back on the promising career of key 
puch operation.  How long did that last in total?  It wasn't fifteen years.  
I 
myself worked long ago as a bench technician in electronics, a skill and body 
of knowledge that is utterly and completely done away with in the era of 
disposable electronics.

Even broader areas of endeavor have amazingly brief life spans.  Industry and 
lifestyle mainly fueled by petroleum is not as old as the older members of 
this list and does not have a promising future.  I am older that the Green 
Revolution and agribusiness.

I spin this fable to point out one of two major things going on right now 
that will define our times and dictate our prospects.  People have become 
invested in a lifestyle not yet a score of years old.  This lifestyle centers 
around 
credit, allows if not encourages people to live in far flung exburbs, and 
gives them the imagining that they can all earn a living sitting on their 
arses 
and shuffling bits of information around while they produce nothing.

Most of the blather I hear and read are peoples plans and prospects for 
weathering the current "downturn."  If one has become engrossed and 
solidified in 
the notion that flipping houses, trading stocks, exchanging currencies, 
supervising this and coordinating that, is the way of things, I suppose it 
makes 
sense to make plans for the next two to five years and hope that they can 
tide 
themselves over with a few gold coins and some other such preparations until 
things get back to "normal".  But ‘normal’ as we view it now of days is 
scarcely 
a decade old.  



Like the telegraph operator it isn’t coming back.  We are passing out of a 
brief era of life by credit score and "wealth" accumulated by leveraging and 
margins.  It’s over and it’s not coming back.



So to the modern day displaced telegraph operator, the elimination of easy, 
unlimited credit and the end of the ability to accumulate (phantom) wealth by 
trading this, leveraging that, holding margins on the other would indeed seem 
like apocalyptic times.  I expect many of them to pine away and perish 
waiting 
for history to come back, which it never will.  But to those who see such 
changes as inevitable and make provisions for them, the times don’t look all 
that 
hard at all.  In fact it is a time of wonderful opportunity.

Likewise the same as our telegraphic friend would feign have bought a 
carriage and pair if he could have secured a new position, those emerging 
from the 
past decade or so of pseudo wealth have their minds on large houses, vacation 
houses, new cars to drive on the never-ending roads to go to all sorts of 
destinations make especially for the motorist.  Those things too are passing 
away.

Now sad and pitiful to find so many people waiting anxiously to get back to a 
previous time where they can earn money to buy things that belong to a 
passing age.

I looked again and where the old telegraph man had been sitting was someone 
who would not have looked out of place at all had one not had one eye on the 
future.  He picked up the newspaper lying there and gestured toward the 
headlines of 2008 being the worst economic year in history.  "Who could have 
seen this 
coming!  Well, let’s hope it gets turned around this year and things can get 
back to normal."



I wonder if I can still do the 35 wpm?  They say it’s like riding a bicycle, 
you never actually forget. Ah, well, even if I could, I think I will continue 
using the internet.   I don’t want to end up as someone else’s ghostly 
visitor at tea.





James