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  • From: Clansgian AT wmconnect.com
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Homestead] The telegraph operator
  • Date: Mon, 29 Dec 2008 11:52:43 EST

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




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