I just read that, 100 years ago, in 1915, Alexander Graham Bell made his first long-distance telephone call. Although no one knew it at the time, it would be the beginning of the death of Western Union telegraphs.
Western Union, which sent its first telegraph message in the late 1850s, was seen as the equivalent of Microsoft, IBM or Apple at the time. Its written messages were regarded as a miracle. Even in 1915, when AT&T carried Bell’s first phone conversation across the continental U.S., the telegraph was still used to carry important communications, like births, deaths, notifications, comings and goings. This, folks thought, would go on and on, but AT&T was installing poles and copper wires like crazy.
In fact, that first phone call between New York City and San Francisco took 130,000 telephone poles and 2,500 tons of copper wire. The installation connected New York to Pittsburgh, to Chicago, to Omaha, to Denver, to Salt Lake City and, finally, to San Francisco.
In fact, the “Telegraph” part of American Telephone and Telegraph was still considered important. But, little did they know, not for long. The Ford Model T would never replace a horse and carriage, they said. Electric lighting would never replace oil lamps, they said. Refrigerators would never replace ice boxes, they said. Airplanes would never replace trains, they said. The “they saids” could go on forever, couldn’t they?
I went to work for Western Union in 1964 as an electronics technician, fresh out of tech school. My first job with them was removing old telegraph depots, which used to exist in almost every small town in the Midwest. It was two days here, three days there, all over Minnesota, Iowa and Wisconsin. I saw a lot of small towns in less than a year. Then, I was back in school to postpone getting drafted.
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Back then, Western Union placed its bet on the Telex, which meant that you could send the information for a letter from one place to another. It would be typed out and someone would have a hard copy, for verification purposes, I suppose. The fax had not been invented. It would be shortly, and that would be it for Western Union, although they still exist for financial transfer stuff.
I still remember disconnecting and reconnecting 50-pair wires, which I did for 10 or 12 hours a day. Monotonous! Ugh. I also remember working in the bottom floor of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. There was a room full of Telex typewriter machines, all clacking, clicking and spewing out letters and numbers and stuff. There were only a few people running around gathering this output. We were there to add some more lines, and in the process had to reconnect some 240-volt AC junction boxes.
“I used to work for an electrician,” I told my foreman during a discussion about how much hell would be raised if we shut all these Telex machines down to make the connection. In fact, all I did was pull wires through stud walls on weekends in new or old construction and remodeling. Nonetheless, I had two years of electronics training. How hard could this be, really?
Anyway, I talked him into letting me do it, and I crawled down into a large conduit filled with wires. Of course, you know what happened. There was a large burst of sparks and I took out the main breaker somewhere. I was unharmed, but it sure got dark down there.
The thing I remember most was that all of those clicking and clacking Telex typewriters suddenly went silent. I could hear my foreman getting excited, but it was nothing compared to how he got when the typewriters all took off again and each of the more than 100 of them wanted to know, “Who did this? And who was in charge?”
Not much later, the fax was invented and Western Union began to fade away.
It’s fun to try and figure out what’s next, but the fact is, it’s almost impossible. As fast as things change, heck, maybe I’m gone already, and just don’t know it.
